Black: The Fall was a bizarre find for me. Gameplay-wise it’s the same undercooked Limbo knock-off that I guessed it to be from the store page, but everything surrounding it is shrouded in mystery. Published by Square Enix Collective (a subsidiary of Square Enix that published independently-developed titles based on polls of the public) the game nonetheless seems to have double-dipped with a Kickstarter campaign raising £28,000. Everything about that Kickstarter campaign seems to point to a higher-budget title – t-shirts, a spiffy boxed collector’s edition, and a variety of other goal rewards for crazy-high amounts that nobody seems to have actually donated. All of this marketing, and yet nowhere can I find information on whether the game’s title is Black: The Fall, like a subtitle, or Black the Fall to rhyme with ‘deck the halls’.
It’s weirdly presented, to say the least. It’s hard to find much more, except that its setting seems to have been inspired by the developers’ experiences under communism in the Socialist Republic of Romania, and honestly I probably could have told you that just from looking at the thing. Everything going on here aesthetically screams ‘socialism gone wrong’, from the imposing brutalist architecture to a slightly under-researched portrait of famously villainous dictator Karl Marx. It all looks very nice and goes well narratively with the background story of immense human suffering at the hands of a brutal robot regime. Maybe I don’t understand what inspires a robot to become a communist, but that doesn’t mean the look and feel don’t work well.
No, the aesthetics are never Black’s problem. That aspect is handled really well, and I enjoy the way it just drops the player into the deep end and lets the frightening backdrop tell the tale for you. In fact, the only thing that really bothers me about this game is the gameplay itself. It’s a ‘cinematic platformer’ of Flashback’s expansive ilk, but it takes the clearest inspiration from Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, which also coupled the style with an oppressive dystopia, most noticeably in sequences where you have to lead your lobotomised fellow man around the area to solve various puzzles. Black’s major failing is in its level design. I could ignore its sticky, unreliable controls and the clunkiness of its ‘laser pointer’ gimmick if it weren’t for just how much the game thinks you want to be playing a quick-time event.
The worst part is it doesn’t even have quick-time events; it is a quick-time event. Almost every action is so context-reliant that there’s no room to input buttons in any order or timing other than exactly what the game expects. The worst are the painfully long stealth sections where you have to perfectly time your plodding crouch-walk to match with the timing of enemy movements. Usually, it feels like you’re expected to fail at least once, because I just don’t know how any player could anticipate the often erratic and unpredictable motions that these guys make. Like I said, the whole thing feels like a quick-time event, except one where the prompt for what you should press is missing and you have to figure it out through process of elimination.
If this sounds like something you could tolerate in exchange for some nice atmosphere and an excellent aesthetic, then Black: The Fall is perfect for you. For me, personally, gameplay is king, and it feels like such an afterthought to the pretty world that it inhabits that Black ultimately just isn’t fun for me. I feel like similarly outstanding visuals are paired with interesting (or at least passable) gameplay in plenty of other titles (see Playdead’s aforementioned library), so I do find it hard to recommend this one in particular.
Dylan's Morsels 