Black the Fall
THE NIGHT IS DARK AND FULL OF TERRORS. $22.95 | PC, PS4, XO | www.blackthefall.com
SAND SAILOR’S CINEMATIC platformer Black The Fall is a dystopian fantasy loosely modelled on firsthand experience of the Soviet occupation of Romania, in which the mechanisms of escape are also the mechanisms of tyranny. As a fugitive machinist heading for the border, you’ll use a laser pointer both to trigger objects and to command other workers, stooped and shrunken souls pierced by radio antennae — ushering them toward switches you can’t reach with managerial brusqueness. At other times, you’ll treat your fellow downtrodden merely as camouflage.
Black inherits Limbo’s developer’s taste for trial and error, with pitfalls that leap out at you sadistically from pitch blackness, and stealth sections that punish detection with immediate death (thankfully, checkpointing is extremely generous). Nonetheless, this is both a sturdy genre piece and a poignant, adroit excavation of a torrid period, blending raw sci-fi theatrics with an array of delicate, naturalistic details.
Like Inside, Black the Fall pitches austere mechanics — running, jumping and climbing on a 2D plane — against a 3D backdrop of harrowing immensity and mystery, where each turn of the on-rails camera unearths another ominous artefact or prospect. Intriguingly, your robot-dog ally is able to forage in three dimensions, circling you attentively as you trot from left to right.
The puzzles don’t always enthral. There’s reasonable variety, but that, coupled with the modest four-hour runtime, also means that certain promising concepts are discarded before they’ve had a chance to mature.
While the pacing is elegant, there’s a detached quality to Black, a sense of hurrying through scenes of depravity and decay rather than catalysing a narrative. Players hoping for more of a psychological and literary trajectory might want to investigate Tarsier’s Little Nightmares. But you could make the case that this is more honest — a bleak meditation on the idea that the most one can do in such difficult times is to keep your head down, and keep moving.