Black The Fall was nominated for “Best Indie” at the end of Gamescom 2016 and received the award for best game design conference BIC indie developers in Korea. And then I can only support – level design and puzzles in the game is really exemplary.
Many of today’s puzzle-platformer rely more on the visual design of locations and storyline, pushing puzzles and jumps to the background. But Black The Fall built just around the gameplay, so that it is the procedure – the complexity and diversity of the occasion.
For me the whole game seems to not come across any similar tasks, even for similar formulation of the problem “go around the giant robot” or “sneak past the turrets” each time solved in different ways, based on the peculiarities of the environment.
Periodically come across really complex situation in which the accounts include the brain and come up with solutions, after which you experience that same feeling of “ah, how I have done up to this every guess!”. And it is a leading indicator of a good balance.
The levels do not follow the same formula and throw up all the time for something new.
There has to be forwarded through a huge puddle on the raft without a motor or sails, then – to blend in with the crowd of faceless workers, and here – their way along the dangerous corridor in total darkness, guided by the sound.
More standard adventure too short, but they are well made.
In addition to the standard set of movements in the arsenal we have indestructible robot dog and a special laser pointer.
Electronic companion can cling to the special panel, float and folded into a comfortable stool, and the Pointer allows you to manage not only to them, but weak-willed slaves to the local operation, it is perfectly played out in a couple of places.
And the levels themselves are relatively small, do not have time to tire despite the fact that in general the game boasts a palette of all shades of gray and brown, about devastation, totalitarianism and post-apocalypse.
And this is the main problem of Black The Fall. Romania communism – a sore subject, and Black The Fall revealed all the pain and fear of the Romanian people.
When Nikolae Chaushesku the country has suffered from a socialist totalitarianism, but at the same time the USSR was considered almost the main external enemy.
In the end it turned out that in the modern Romanian culture is woven double hatred of the hammer and sickle. The entire game – a grim, exaggerated sketch on the theme of what it would be, surviving communist rule of the 20th century.
It would seem that a great setting, but the enormous enthusiasm with which Black The Fall presents future Communists, looks wildly and strained even taking into account the historical context, he just does not believe and feel.
We’re playing for a skinny worker, who, along with hundreds of other such emaciated goners, days pedaling in the factory under the supervision of an automatic turret and pot-bellied mushers cyborgs. And all this under the fluttering red flags, of course.
Having escaped from the concentration camp-factory, we set off to explore the area, and it turns out that all the rest of the population does not live better around the ruin and the swamp, people very often skinny, scared and lifeless, on the streets of turrets more than lampposts.
Well, at least in the future Romania bad bleed the heavy industry.
The game tries to shock, frighten grim picture of melancholy and cruel totalitarian future. Only now it turns out some stupid tacky, like a schoolboy reading fan fiction inspired by Bradbury and Orwell.
