I've enjoyed a number of mystery games, even at their slowest, because of that amazing payoff. Maybe it's figuring out how the killer did it. Maybe it's working out who the killer is. Maybe it's when you THINK you knew what had happened, but a twist of fate and a late revelation actually shows it was the least expected thing. In some games, you already know who and how, but the climactic challenge is *proving* it. 99% of Obra Dinn's challenge and time spent is working out what is normally the very first piece of information in other mystery games: The identity of the victim. I think what made me realize how terrible this was, was when I got another notification that I had guessed (yes, guessed) 3 crew identities/deaths correctly, and kind of just breathed a sigh of exhausted relief; while cursing the fact that the 3 somehow hadn't involved someone whose identity I was absolutely certain of, and who had simply died in a nondescript way to a beast. These moments are supposed to be the thrilling payoff of a mystery, when it all adds up together, but just like Papers Please, it really does feel like you're just a man filling in paperwork. There's a little payoff soon after the discovery of a set of bodies where you learn what was generally happening in that chapter, and sometimes the surprise of that can be "mildly interesting" but that's the highest emotional swell this game gets. I will credit the game for its art style, and its unique design to mystery mechanics. I don't know of other games that work this way in either case, and it would certainly have been a risk setting out that way. An unfortunate glitch of fullscreen mode that prevents the mouse from working in other windows is particularly gruesome here given that lots of your inferences are meant to be made based on real-world information, like which languages are spoken in certain other 18th-century countries, and I would have liked checking Wikipedia in many cases.
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.
