(I was writing this for my school's paper and I thought that it was good enough to put on this website, so why not?)
The Fall: What is your Objective?
The Fall is an indie game that is an interesting hybrid of a side scroller shooter and a point and click adventure game. It follows ARID, a program in a military combat suit who finds herself stranded on an unknown desolate planet. Her suit is piloted by a human who is in critical condition, and ARID?s main objective throughout the game is to find a way to save her pilot?s life. This takes her throughout the ruins of the planet, finding traces civilization, but very little that helps her and much that wishes her harm.
The Fall does have shooting mechanics and ARID acquires a gun very early on, but the combat is not the main focus of the game. The main gameplay surrounds navigating obstacles through solving puzzles in the way of point and click adventure games. Most of these puzzles are logically sound, such as getting a wild animal to come out of hiding by using food as bait, but some of them are unfairly difficult and bizarre. Thankfully these harder puzzles only take up 5% of the puzzles, but they do slow the game down
The game is heavily story focused and seems highly inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov. ARID is designed with three main protocols, not to misrepresent reality, to be obedient, and to protect her pilot. However, as Asimov explored in his stories, intelligent life cannot be so easily programed and ARID regularly encounters situations where her protocols contradict each other. The majority of the suit?s functions are under lock down and can only be activated if the pilot?s life is in danger, leading to one situation early on where ARID was forced to put the pilot in danger in order to continue on her mission to save his life. This resulted in her directly violating her third protocol in order to follow it.
The story is filled with this kind of thinking, with ARID?s directives and abilities directly tying into gameplay. The suit has a myriad of abilities that can be viewed from the very start, but cannot be activated until appropriate spots in the narrative are reached. ARID?s character focuses around her need to follow protocols directly conflicting with her mission to save her pilot?s life, leading to a very unique character arc and a plot with several well executed twists. Set against the empty and hostile world she is trapped on, ARID is without help on her mission and this forces who she is to come out in a brilliantly written matter. Her good aspects, and her bad ones.
The Fall is sadly a very short game. Some have beaten it in as little as four hours, and while well written, it ends on a cliffhanger, as the developers plan to make it into a trilogy. However, for what little there is the game is very much worth your time and will leave you hungry for more.
The fall is available for PC, Mac and Linux
The Fall: What is your Objective?
The Fall is an indie game that is an interesting hybrid of a side scroller shooter and a point and click adventure game. It follows ARID, a program in a military combat suit who finds herself stranded on an unknown desolate planet. Her suit is piloted by a human who is in critical condition, and ARID?s main objective throughout the game is to find a way to save her pilot?s life. This takes her throughout the ruins of the planet, finding traces civilization, but very little that helps her and much that wishes her harm.
The Fall does have shooting mechanics and ARID acquires a gun very early on, but the combat is not the main focus of the game. The main gameplay surrounds navigating obstacles through solving puzzles in the way of point and click adventure games. Most of these puzzles are logically sound, such as getting a wild animal to come out of hiding by using food as bait, but some of them are unfairly difficult and bizarre. Thankfully these harder puzzles only take up 5% of the puzzles, but they do slow the game down
The game is heavily story focused and seems highly inspired by the works of Isaac Asimov. ARID is designed with three main protocols, not to misrepresent reality, to be obedient, and to protect her pilot. However, as Asimov explored in his stories, intelligent life cannot be so easily programed and ARID regularly encounters situations where her protocols contradict each other. The majority of the suit?s functions are under lock down and can only be activated if the pilot?s life is in danger, leading to one situation early on where ARID was forced to put the pilot in danger in order to continue on her mission to save his life. This resulted in her directly violating her third protocol in order to follow it.
The story is filled with this kind of thinking, with ARID?s directives and abilities directly tying into gameplay. The suit has a myriad of abilities that can be viewed from the very start, but cannot be activated until appropriate spots in the narrative are reached. ARID?s character focuses around her need to follow protocols directly conflicting with her mission to save her pilot?s life, leading to a very unique character arc and a plot with several well executed twists. Set against the empty and hostile world she is trapped on, ARID is without help on her mission and this forces who she is to come out in a brilliantly written matter. Her good aspects, and her bad ones.
The Fall is sadly a very short game. Some have beaten it in as little as four hours, and while well written, it ends on a cliffhanger, as the developers plan to make it into a trilogy. However, for what little there is the game is very much worth your time and will leave you hungry for more.
The fall is available for PC, Mac and Linux