The Fall

The atmosphere in this game is great. The story is good too. Unfortunately the length of the game is about what you would expect from a demo. It contains just about an hour of gameplay. Unfortunately the keyboard and mouse controls are very clumsy. The character is often automatically facing the wrong way and is hard to turn with the mouse, since it takes a lot of mouse movement to make the character react at all. Which is especially bad in the boss fight. Where the character insists on holstering the weapon and standing with the back to the enemy. Maybe the game would be better with a gamepad, but that wouldn't change the very low content. So basically, in summary, this game is a paid demo or introduction as teaser for The Fall 2.

The Fall is a short adventure game, with some combat scenes, and several grim moments. The lengths the characters, all of them robotic or artificial intelligences, go to fulfill their perceived mission are disquietingly similar to human behavior. These are all the premises for a great game. However, the result is no more than good, as it seems to have been left not only barebone, but also unpolished. For instance, actions that cannot be performed are only signaled by an uninformative "I cannot", more worthy of an amateurish one-man piece of interactive fiction than of a modern game developed by a team and funded on Kickstarter. In addition, controls are a bit flimsy: in particular, drawing the gun often has the character face away from its original direction! Finally, the story is definitely short, and notwithstanding the previously mentioned grim moments, a bit cliché. Summarizing: a good start, but we expect much more efforts from the next episodes.

In spite of only being "Episode One", The Fall is a very complete experience, and its ending left me reeling. Like a lot of indie games, The Fall has some elements it really isn't good at. The best that The Fall does is keep those elements - in this case the combat - very basic, easy, and one-dimensional. The rest is based around puzzles, including some adventure-game-esque ingenuity, and dialog trees with other robots. I wasn't expecting much of the writing, and ARID's initial task-oriented monotone voice set me up for disappointment, but this may have been the intention all along as it eventually gets very rewarding. I wouldn't want to spend a very long time with The Fall's systems, which makes it merciful that the game is pretty short. (Buy it to enjoy it, not to fill a void of time). I admit to getting stuck on puzzles at least once, and a guide may be an acceptable way past this - thankfully unlike classic adventure games, that isn't the whole reason to play. For a game that apparently intended to have further episodes, the game's themes and its ending really snuck up on me. It's complete with an antagonist that you do get to kill, and a very good resolution to the core story posed at the beginning, so I got everything that I asked for out of it.

The Fall has almost everything a good adventure game should offer. A gripping narrative, well-written dialogue, excellent visual…everything you enjoy in a story-driven game. The game is also fully voiced with top notch acting. I’m a big fan of thought-provoking short games and really wanted to love this game. Unfortunately, however, the actual gameplay constantly prevents me from immersing myself into the compelling story. As other reviewers have already said, this is a 2D scroller where you will spend most of your time solving point-and-click puzzles. To clarify what I am saying, I should quote the review on the Bloody-Disgusting.com (which is very favorable): “Ninety percent of the player’s time will be spent tracking and backtracking to solve puzzles” (http://bloody-disgusting.com/reviews/3302916/fall-review-dystopian-horror/). For me, the puzzles in this game feel more obtuse than difficult. Yes, it requires attention, but in a rather pointless manner. Instead of letting you ponder over clues, the game likely keeps you walking around the same area over and over to make sure you are not overlooking something. And while I don’t intend to spoil the story, I have to warn you that there is a section where you are thrown into puzzles…to solve puzzles. At that point, the game began to make me feel like I was just mindlessly solving puzzles rather than exploring a mysterious sci-fi world itself. The controls (mouse and keyboard) are somewhat clumsy and counter-intuitive (for example, you can’t push an elevator button with a single key), which makes both puzzles and combat slightly more frustrating. The unpolished auto-save feature also adds needless annoyance. As the first chapter of an episodic game, this game delivers an engaging, yet hardly satisfying ending. Overall, this is an ambitious game whose great potential is hampered by the tedious nature of the gameplay itself. Definitely worth checking, but not that much enjoyable.

Though the fall might only be the first chapter of a larger story, it feels complete and well executed in itself. Gorgeous graphics excellent mechanics and a genuinely compelling plot make for one of the best side-scrolling space-adventures since The Swapper to which comparisons will undoubtedly be drawn. Like that game the real-life consequences of abstract philosophical concepts drive the narrative, but with The Fall those abstract ideas never get in the way of good game-play. Excellent game and worth the asking price. I cannot wait to lay the next installment.