Playdead’s side-scrolling puzzler Inside turned out to be an indie gem with hundreds of critics praising the game, including ours. Dom said in his review that it leaves an impression after playing, and I absolutely agree. So when I saw Black: The Fall and heard it was very much like Inside, I had to dive in.
Like Inside, Black: The Fall doesn’t give you cutscenes or hefty text walls telling you what’s going on, instead you’re injected into an unknown world, rationing out what is happening with every move you make. The visuals and gameplay may feel similar to Inside, but the plot is relatively bleak in comparison, or from what I could make of it. You are an unnamed person trapped in a prison cell with other captives in an unnamed prison who makes his escape across different monolithic environments, such as drain pipes, wastelands and a multitude of factories and industry. It’s very monochrome as patches of red pierce the black and grey tunnels and landscapes, with your only enemy being your patience and cunning. Guards become living obstacles, and automatons can eviscerate you with a single burst of fire if you’re spotted. Black: The Fall is essentially a puzzler as you proceed by solving the many mind-benders you encounter which hardly strain you. It’s not a hard game once you fathom out the solution to go forth, a lot of it is down to timing, waiting for the perfect moment to sprint past a distracted guard or hide behind pillars waiting for a turret to reload before moving on in a deadly game of Frogger.
At its core, Black: The Fall simply requires you to traverse from left to right in a 2.5D plane which never diverts to explore anything different. Your red-beret guy has no fighting moves at his disposal despite his admirable great escape, instead you must only use his agility to run, jump and crawl through the 6-8 hour campaign. Items that can be interacted with flash red and yellow and mostly involve the environment, so overlooking something is pretty much impossible; however, on the Nintendo Switch’s small screen, a zoomed out camera can mean you can miss a speck that would be perfectly visible in its docked mode. Black: The Fall did hold me from start to finish, just to say I had done it, but the whole experience was ultimately forgettable. By the end, I still had no clue what I was escaping that prison for or even why I was put there in the first place. The other guys were dressed just like me. Maybe it was some sort of culling or holocaust in a monochromic dystopia, who knows? But I did get the sense of accomplishment when I saw the end.
As dull as the game is, the graphics are no better. Screenshots are very appealing as Black: The Fall looks very much in the same style as Inside, which was a great looking game with realistic animations. That was a big part of Inside’s appeal, but Black: The Fall doesn’t come anywhere near it, unfortunately. The game looks rough on the Switch’s small screen and only slightly better when docked.
Black: The Fall is an intriguing game at the start, but when you reach its climax, you’re still asking yourself the same questions with no answers. It’s a bleak, forgettable title that tries hard to match the fantastic Inside but falls short in many ways. As good as it looks in the screenshots, playing the game is very much anticlimactic.
Developer: Sand Sailor Studio
Publisher: Sand Sailor Studio
Platforms: PS4, Switch, Xbox One, PC
Release Date: 14th December 2017