A Long Climb Back Up

In The Fall, you play as an intelligent combat suit, called an A.R.I.D., or "Arid", that crash lands on a planet. Which planet, you don't know. Why are you there? Don't know that either. And Arid's pilot is unconscious, leaving the suit to try and follow its directive to preserve the pilot's life by finding medical aid.

While Arid never learns precisely what world this is, it does quickly learn that there's a factory for salvaging faulty domestic droids above her. Two problems: One, the factory is derelict and mostly abandoned. Two, it being only mostly abandoned isn't necessarily a good thing.

The game is a side-scroller, with a mix of shooting and puzzle-solving. The puzzle stuff dominates, with the shooting thrown in periodically to, I assume, keep you on your toes. Most of the puzzles are Arid trying to pass the factory tests to determine if a robot had been successfully reprogrammed to where it could return to serving humans. So you enter a mock-house and a cardboard cutout of a human demands you cook a nutritious and delicious meal for his son. Or a cutout of a little old lady asks you to escort her across the "street".

In most cases, once presented with the problem, you go looking for things to interact with. Then it's a matter of figuring out how you're supposed to use it, and for which test. Which was what tripped me up a few times. The factory computer has developed a level of sentience and autonomy over the years, and while it can't entirely override protocols to help Arid, it can at least offer advice. Whether you can correctly interpret that advice, well. . .

One of the puzzles involves quieting a crying baby. You can find a monitor that explains how that's meant to happen, but lullabies are beyond Arid. The computer comments, 'how would a combat suit quiet a child. . .' I had found a plastic shoe cover and used it for a different test earlier, and thought I was supposed to now use it to effectively smother the "baby."

That was not the correct answer, and the game doesn't actually let you try that, but the actual solution isn't really any less darkly humorous.

The shooting involves ducking behind cover (or using the cloak once you unlock it) and waiting for the security robots to pop out from behind their cover so you can shoot them in the head. This is where the controls irritated me, because you aim the gun using the right joystick. You also study and interact with objects (which the game marks with a "!" symbol) by aiming the gun at them, but with the flashlight on instead of the laser sight. Clicking the right joystick switches between the two modes.

Which meant there were a lot of times I was trying to keep the gun aimed at something I needed to interact with, while also using the D-pad to select the thing I wanted to combine with it, only to accidentally click the joystick, switch to firing mode, and have to start over again. No more complicated than the rest of the controls were, I think they could have put the mode-switch function to a button, to keep it separate from aiming.

Beyond that, the game is about free will, I think. The 3 characters are Arid, the facility computer, and an insane "caretaker" robot that uses a holographic projector to look like old employees (who it may have killed for being "faulty.) The facility computer has been able to mimic human speech patterns, and can flex and bend within the rules, but can't, for example, just let Arid pass through all the tests so she can get to the medical facilities at the entrance. Caretaker seems locked into some extremely strict definition of proper function, and deals violently with anything it deems faulty.

As for Arid, it claims it's acting on the directive to protect its pilot, but also that it can't 'misrepresent reality.' This is how it gets stuck doing the tests, because Arid can't (or won't) lie to the facility computer when the Caretaker accuses it of endangering the pilot. Arid did technically do that, to unlock a particular suit function needed to get into the facility. Every test Arid passes is a case, not unlike the facility computer, or following the letter of the law, but not the spirit. Arid argues it's adaptation in the face of obstacles. Caretaker simply calls it lying.

I wasn't giving that any thought during the game, because I'm just trying to help Arid pass these tests to save the pilot. And with the facility in decay, it's basically impossible to pass any of the tests as was intended, so who cares if we fudge the rules a little bit? But humans don't want robots fudging the rules. Because it's fun, so we want to do it ourselves.

Complaints about the right joystick use aside, it's a tight, entertaining little game you can probably finish in 90 minutes. Less if you're quicker about figuring out what the puzzles want than I was. So much time wasted running back and forth looking for something without knowing what I was meant to be looking for. . .