Console Corner: Review of Black the Fall

There is a lot to like about Limbo, Inside, Little Nightmares, Far: Lone Sails, and other such bite-sized puzzle games. They exercise the brain without overloading it, offering tantalizing glimpses to imaginative places and worlds along the way. Recently Black: The Fall, another such puzzle game, fell on my radar. This time around, however, it's difficult to say what there is to like.

Black: The Fall is precisely in the vein of the games mentioned above. A 2.5D side-scroller, players are tasked with guiding a character, in this case a robot-esque man, through a series of traps and environmental puzzles. Jumping, dashing, activating buttons, and an arm-mounted laser are the tools at your disposal. Die, and you respawn where you left off, the puzzle still in front of you.

The motif of Black: The Fall is a dark, dystopian future where humans and robots slave for a system which the player gets only peaks and glimpses of. The Soviet hammer and sickle feature sporadically, and the color palette is entirely black and shades of gray, with splashes of yellow, red, and occasionally white or silver. Men waste away in the shadows while heavy industry pumps away around them, belching smoke into the air. It looks good.

But it doesn't play as good. Controls are a bit jerky—not what a person could consider fluid or reactive. Running and jumping are sometimes exercises in futility. Precision is something that the player would like to see have a little more consistency; there are moments that things need to be on a particular pixel or two, and others that anywhere in the general vicinity works. And lastly, unlike Limbo, Inside, etc., the path forward is not always clear, and by that I mean the options for puzzle-solving. Often the player spends as much time figuring out what is possible with each puzzle, as they do figuring out the puzzle itself.

But there is a more damning aspect to this latter point. Black: The Fall is, unfortunately, one of those puzzle games where the player too often finds themselves in that gray area between: am I too stupid to figure out this puzzle, or is the game glitching? On two occasions (which is two too many) I found myself at wits end after 20+ minutes of solving one puzzle. I went to Uncle Youtube, checked the solution, and lo and behold I was doing things correctly. It was a bug* in the game which was preventing me from truly solving the puzzle. FRUSTRATING.

I feel bad rendering my judgment of Black: The Fall based only on a partial playthrough. I feel bad because I believe there is a good game beneath the grime. A little spit and polish in the gameplay, tightening up the puzzles to be consistent, and fixing the bugs would render a soild game—perhaps a game people speak about in the same tones as Inside or Little Nightmares. Alas, I was unable to see it through. Not wanting to waste more time on puzzles I'd solved but the game said I didn't, I did not finish I don't want to have to second guess every difficult puzzle: is it me or the game?

*For the game devs, the glitched puzzle which made me stop playing was the two-room puzzle wherein you put your laser pointer into a machine to open a door. In the next room, you need to re-position a laser near the top of the screen and avoid a moving wall of deadly laser beams. The re-positioned laser is supposed to keep the left door open, but every time I went back into the first room to re-attach my laser pointer to my arm, the door between rooms closed. Naturally, this rendered the puzzle unsolvable. No fun. I was playing on a Playstation 4 (standard).