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.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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