Reviews
‘The Fall’ Review: Dystopian Horror
Written by T. Blake Braddy, @blakebraddy
The Fall is, at its core, science fiction. Combining narrative aspects of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, this genre-bending 2D action-platformer asks players to stalk the corridors of a rusted, broken, darkly beautiful environment to solve a variety of challenging puzzles. It is primarily a point-and-click adventure game with occasional combat to fill out this very tightly-written, well-conceived experience.
However, even though it exists largely by standing on the shoulders of various science fiction tropes – future dystopia, robot laws – it also feels distinctly horrific. The ghastly imagery is more reminiscent of, say, Dead Space or Alien than something more traditionally sci-fi. Alien creatures explode into gooey messes when shot, human corpses get ripped to pieces, and the accumulated garbage of a world long forgotten is perpetually visible.
The Fall does not condescend to the audience, nor does it pretend to be anything it is not. What it is is a beautiful, puzzle-driven sci-fi experience, using its relatively small size in order to tell a story with a surprising amount of restraint and subtlety. The puzzles can be overly tough, at times, but the reward for playing is well worth the strained brain cells you’ll have to use to get through it.
As such, players must work their way through several levels as A.R.I.D., an artificially intelligent combat suit. She must find medical attention for the injured, comatose human inside her before he perishes, which isn’t so easy, considering the only remnants of humanity appear to be dilapidated buildings, malfunctioning computers, and other robots. To exacerbate the problem, humans treated robots like slaves when they were around, so to be able to save “her human,” she must find increasingly clever ways to subvert the protocol to keep robots in line and under strict obeisance.
At the risk of spoiling puzzles, I won’t reveal anything too specific, but A.R.I.D.’s mission takes her through abandoned facilities, dank corridors, and surreal future towns. Players will explore small areas, using specific clues to solve puzzles and unlock new levels. The game’s main mechanic requires players to use a flashlight to find clues and use, combine, or change them in a variety of ways. It’s Monkey Island meets Dead Space.
And speaking of Dead Space, it must be mentioned that parts of the The Fall bear striking resemblances to other games. A.R.I.D. is a space suit with a glowing face a la Isaac Clarke’s very own suit, though comparisons to Dead Space end there. The surroundings make me recall Limbo, down to the stark dark / light contrast between foreground and background. A.R.I.D.’s voice is reminiscent of GLaDOS’s, though only in its mechanized tonality, and another distinct section gives off a very Fallout 3 kind of vibe.
And yet, The Fall never once invites the criticism of creative laziness. It is a game with an overall aesthetic its own, despite faint homages, and the story and environment reveal depth that makes the world feel thoroughly fleshed out. Similarly, the writing never telegraphs too much, allowing players to mentally fill narrative gaps through exploration.
Visually, The Fall looks fantastic. The character models are well-designed and distinct but also simple in a beneficial way. It seems as though the devs managed to find visual as well as narrative ways to keep everything lean and understated, and it works to the game’s benefit.
The control scheme takes some getting used to, but it is an interesting and different approach. Players use the right thumbstick to activate a flashlight to search for clues, which appear in the form of a magnifying glass prompt. That feels somewhat cumbersome, but eventually it becomes like second nature, not entirely unlike its more traditional point-and-click counterparts.
On the path through the game, A.R.I.D. doesn’t only have to rely on her flashlight and wits to game the system-in-shambles. At the outset, A.R.I.D.’s “Operating Parameters” (abilities) are all damaged and non-functioning, and players unlock them over the course of the journey, which adds mechanical depth to what could have become a tedious experience, if left untouched. Had the game been mere puzzle solving or item combining to unlock new areas, it would have been uninspiring, indeed.
Ninety percent of the player’s time will be spent tracking and backtracking to solve puzzles, so despite the ominous tone and bleak surroundings, The Fall is not combat-heavy. You won’t be mowing down countless scores of humans or robots, so be prepared for the quiet, contemplative satire this game puts forth. The puzzles themselves are subtle (read: difficult), and solving them will require some pretty nonlinear thinking.
It isn’t so much a flaw – the puzzles are internally consistent – as it is a sticking point. The game is best when the puzzle’s answers kind of come freely to the player, and though exploration is one of the most alluring features of The Fall, traipsing back and forth over the same few screens can get frustrating over time. If, like me, you’re not versed in how to solve these kinds of puzzles, then you’ll probably end up spending way more time trekking back and forth than is absolutely necessary.
Other than that, any real problems with the game might come from misinterpreting the sometimes confusing syntax or diction of the clues. For example, one of the actions players can choose is so underutilized that I nearly couldn’t solve a puzzle for overlooking it. I happened to misread a very specific word in one of the clues, which caused me to search for a computer terminal that didn’t exist. That sort of thing can be frustrating, but so long as you’re ready for it, I suppose it’s not really problematic.
Over the Moon Games paints a fairly bleak picture of the future, but one that shines with the confident simplicity of its execution. There is not an ounce of wasted fat in The Fall, and the story arcs tightly over the course of its 4-5 hour playtime, satisfying without being intentionally sparse. Some backstory is layered into minor journal entries, and the world itself – even though it is dark – casts a meaningful light onto the universe players enter upon booting up the game.
The Final Word: The Fall is well worth its price tag. It is well-paced, subtly written, and visually appealing, not to mention the fact that the game has two episodes left in its three act structure, so there’s more to come. It doesn’t seem to be chasing any particular trend, and it is confident in the story it is trying to tell. Even though the Steam Summer Sale has ended, players could do way worse than picking up The Fall, available for Mac, PC, and Linux.
You’re Dead to Me, the new Gen-Z horror film from director Juan Pablo Arias Munoz, bills itself as a love letter to ’90s horror classics, and it launches into that vibe immediately with an opening sequence clearly modeled on the opening of Wes Craven‘s Scream. It’s either gutsy or foolhardy, but right away, you get a sense of the film’s ambitions.
The problem is that when you come at something like Scream, you better not miss, and for all its well-cultivated ’90s horror vibes and its efforts to become something singular along the way, there’s a lot about You’re Dead to Me that misses. This is a movie that wants to be at least half a dozen things at the same time, and while it’s got solid visuals, a game cast, and lots of bravado, it’s simply spread too thin to make any of its ideas satisfying.
Indy (Siena Agudong) and Brynn (Jessica Belkin) are best friends, bonded by their shared struggles with loss (Brynn’s mother is gone, as is one of Indy’s sisters) and the feeling that they’re the only people in their high school who truly understand one another. When we meet them, they’ve opted to stay away from the traditional high school celebrations and host a “Too Pretty for Prom” party at a secluded mansion owned by Brynn’s absent father. It’s a chance to grow closer and celebrate their way, even if the only other guest is their mutual friend Jordan (Conor Husting) and everyone else seems to have opted for prom.
But the vibes are soon squashed. While Indy and Jordan try to work up the courage to give Brynn some bad news about their post-high school plans, a classmate turns up dead, reigniting speculation that a serial killer is operating in town. Throw in a deranged neighbor (Denise Richards) who won’t take no for an answer, and it feels like the walls are closing in on the trio, particularly as Indy starts to have visions she can’t explain tied to her sister, Brynn’s mother, and a room she’s never seen before.
A slasher and weird visions? Yes, and here’s where You’re Dead to Me starts to play with its true tribute to ’90s horror, helped along by co-writer and producer Terry Castle, daughter of William Castle, who helped get those Dark Castle remakes off the ground at the turn of the Millennium.
This is a movie that isn’t satisfied to simply be a slasher, playing within the firmly established bounds of that subgenre. It wants to be a slasher and a psychological drama and a possibly supernatural piece of Gothic horror, with notes on internalized misogyny and conformity sprinkled in along the way. There are classic slasher sequences with lots of suspense, but there are also wild dream sequences full of quick cuts, jittery frame rates, and jump scares, all eventually centering around Indy and the transitional phase of her life where the film begins.
She’s on the cusp of college, of a new life full of possibilities, but she feels beholden to the people who got her there, to the support system she’s leaving behind, and, of course, to her best friend. Her mental state is reflected in the often chaotic nature of the film, and when You’re Dead to Me is playing within these bounds, helped along with dreamy visuals and genuine tension, it’s working.
But somewhere along the way, that sense of chaos starts to grate against the audience, and You’re Dead to Me starts to drag under the weight of its own ambitions. It’s clear that the hybrid subgenre mash-up of the story is meant to render it unconventional in both the slasher space and the psychological horror space, but that can only take you so far before the film needs a narrative around which it can coalesce. The core has to stay strong, and for all the style points it racks up along the way, the movie just can’t hold on to that emotional tether that keeps us hooked to the end, in part because it wants so badly to keep us guessing that we lose all sense of direction.
I’ll give you an example: At one point, a teenage boy in the year 2025 answers a phone call from another teenage boy who simply says that he’s sending a link. A phone call just to say “I’m sending you a link.” Why? Because the film has established, in the proud Scream tradition, that when the phone rings, a killer might be calling, so the phone needs to ring to keep up suspense. In another scene, a character sits up and swears she hears something, and as we in the audience hear a very audible human scream, she says she hears “footsteps.”
Characters who come and go may as well have “Red Herring” stamped on their foreheads, and the film spends so much time building up lore and backstory that it barely leaves room for slasher chases and spectral nightmares. Then, when the spectral nightmares do come, we’re left unsure what’s real anymore, until the third act finally, sort of, explains why it all feels so disjointed. It’s a movie that aims at deliberate obfuscation and misdirection, but just ends up confusing.
Which is a shame, because there’s a lot of talent on display here, and I don’t just mean with the visuals. The young cast is earnest and exciting, the premise is interesting, there are flashes of really solid storytelling in the script, and the kills, when we get them, actually work.
If this film had picked a lane, or even two lanes, and tightened up its thematic concerns along the way, it might be something much more satisfying. As it is, it’s an overstuffed mess, but at least it’s an interesting one.
You’re Dead to Me is available on Digital and VOD on July 7.
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