Executive Summary
Ico is a game I had heard nothing but good things about, being one of the "must-play" games of the PS2 (alongside Team Ico's subsequent game, Shadow of the Colossus, which is usually held up as the better game), so how does it hold up? Well, there are certain things that can be forgiven for its age and platform, but it still has some glaring issues that would still have worked on the PS1, where the game started development. The main problem is that these are all issues in gameplay which take you out of the experience, and since the game is so focused on having the player lose themselves in the experience (such as in a dramatic movie), being reminded that it is a game kind of ruins that illusion.

Despite those faults, I'd still say Ico is a game worth playing. It has a lot of things going for it, and it uses its gameplay in a masterful way, invoking feelings in the player by mechanics alone. I'd call it a flawed masterpiece of its time.

Basic Explanation
Instead of writing paragraphs of information, I'll go over some basic positives and negatives of the game.

Positives:

• Expertly crafted ludonarrative
• Great opening level
• Rebindable keys even on PS2
• Impressive atmosphere
• Minimalistic interface
• Puzzle platforming reminiscent of Legend of Zelda
• Brilliant sound design

Negatives:

• Sketchy AI at times
• Horrible tutorial
• Horrendous camera controls
• Immersion-breaking save points
• Some touchy context-specific inputs
• More overly-precise jumps than needed
• Lack of direction

In-Depth Overview
The best way to tackle the above points is to talk about each positive in relation to a negative. Most of them exist in a 1:1 ratio, such as the minimalistic interface being brought down by some touchy inputs, but some tie together more intricately than that, while a few I may have to talk about individually.

Point the first: Ico has an expertly crafted ludonarrative. I use the term "ludonarrative" here to vaguely refer to two concepts at once which I am aware of it using: first, that it directly uses the mechanics to pass to the player the feelings it's trying to make them feel and make the player understand the story without cutscenes or dialogue; and the second that it uses the sensations of playing a game to its advantage, like properly timed vibrations. I've heard Ico called a "cinematic" game, but I put Ico much closer to Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons (a game which I need to write my review for as well) as an example of what video games are capable of being as a unique medium — like Brothers, Ico would not work the same way if it was anything other than a game. It's a simple story about a boy and a girl holding hands, and through it is only through its gameplay that Ico can properly make the player feel that connection. You as the player feel the same protectiveness the boy feels over the girl; you as the player feel the need to escape the oppressive castle you're trapped in; and you as the player feel the need to grip tightly and not let go.

I want to distinguish here the difference between making the player feel small and trapped based on the environment and atmosphere, and making the player feel for the girl whom they're trapped with (or are freeing, as the case may be), and what the gameplay is trying to make the player feel. They complement each other, but they aren't one in the same. The gameplay is designed to make the player both feel for the girl whom they are travelling with and communicate to the player the basic story, which as stated is simply that you are escaping the castle that you're both trapped in. The atmosphere – which comes from various sources but mostly from the more static elements such as the environment and sound design – is designed to provide backdrop and instill different feelings, such as the oppressive nature of the enclosure or the relief of being outside.


Counterpoint the first: The AI behaves strangely at times. As the player takes control of the boy apparently named Ico (though this isn't made apparent until the credits), the girl named Yorda is mostly controlled by an AI. Most of the game sees you leading Yorda around by the hand, but part of that mechanic is lending a helping hand up high ledges, catching her across large gaps, or simply calling her up a ladder. Already, some people may take that as a chore, having to babysit a secondary character while solving puzzles or protecting her from mysterious shadow-beasts. The worst part, though, is that there are some holes in the programming of the AI. The worst part of it is that if you call her up or down some of the game's longer ladders, you have to hold down the call/hold button or she'll glitch out on the way and go back the way she came. Normally, you can just call her once and the she will find the path to you, including up/down ladders or up short ledges, but there are a few spots like that where the AI trips up. Weirder still is that, while in the early game I had to call her and help her up and across every obstacle, later on I noticed the AI actively following me short distances, including up higher ledges that the game had conditioned me to expect she couldn't make without help. She did have her own animation for doing it alone, but it was odd when I was already in the position holding my hand out and she just climbed up beside me instead.

Point the second: Ico has a great opening level. One of the things I'm always looking at when I play a game is how a game handles teaching its mechanics, especially in the opening level(s). Some games opt for true "tutorial levels", where the player is given all or some of their abilities and told exactly how they work before being given a non-threatening challenge designed to test them. Other games might put the player in mock-threatening situations to give a feel of gameplay. The worst ones will wrest complete control from the player while telling them how their abilities work. Ico, however, falls into one of the greatest categories: teaching without teaching. After a couple of short introductory cutscenes with maybe four lines of dialogue between them, the player is given control of the boy in a very large and spacious room with no threats (neither enemies nor environmental hazards) in which to play around with their movement, camera, and other things. This right here is great; it's what Super Mario 64 did most famously, and it allows the player to get familiar with their basic controls without any immediate pressure, as the player can stay in this first room for as long as they wish until they themselves are ready to move on. Once they are ready to move on, there are no text prompts or hints to proceed, only the slow introduction of most of the game's puzzle and platforming mechanics one at a time to ensure the player understands how to proceed through the rest of the game's various puzzles. It isn't until the player frees Yorda at the end of this area that enemies even show up, though since the shadow-creatures themselves can't kill you (they can send you into pits, though), it isn't quite as important as it would be in other games.

Counterpoint the second: Ico has a horrible tutorial, or lack thereof. As mentioned, there are no text prompts or hints on how to proceed once control is given to the player. This in itself isn't a bad thing. However, the problem comes from not telling the player what buttons lead to what outcomes in what amounts to a fairly complicated platformer. 3D platformers are inherently more complicated than 2D platformers such as Super Mario, Shovel Knight, Mega Man, and a myriad others which let the player dive straight into their first levels without instruction, and as such may need some actual explanation of their basic mechanics and controls. Ico especially has a lot of context-specific controls and puzzles, with several types of levers, ropes and chains, buttons, moveable boxes, along with the usual assortment of platforming skills. There's even a zoom button which I might not have known had I not gone into the options menu to look at the controls. While the game does an admirable job in its first level making sure the player understands most of the mechanics before they are allowed to proceed, it would have been much better had it let the player know what inputs led to what outcomes beforehand.

Point the third: There are rebindable keys even on the PS2. This is something not every game does, even nowadays on PC, but it is something which should be done far more often than it is. Considering this was a PS2-era game, and one very early in the console's lifetime, makes it even better in my opinion. Any game with rebindable keys immediately makes me look at it more highly, and since Ico started with a strange control scheme probably borrowed from the Japanese common control schemes (as an example, something I changed was that jump was set to triangle instead of X by default), it was a pre-emptive godsend to allow me to change the controls.

Counterpoint the third: Ico has horrendous camera controls. I cannot understate how bad the camera is for the gameplay. The camera is semi-scripted, by which I mean the camera isn't completely one-view-per-area like Resident Evil and the like had, but neither is it a free camera that come with most platformers. The camera moves between specific angles designed to showcase the environment: the spacious but dark interiors, the open and bright exteriors, the narrow walkways over deep gaps, the other areas of the castle above or below you that you have visited or will visit, et cetera. It subtly points in the way you need to go, because despite all the puzzles there is generally only one way to proceed, but the camera often actively gets in the way, especially when it transitions from one angle to another, where pressing in one direction before the transition may send you dangerously close to the edge of a platform after the transition.

Moving the camera is even worse. You can look around the area using the right analog stick, but it only moves like you're moving your head around, only moving a certain amount away from its assigned angle and snapping back to its "resting position" when you let go. That means, firstly, that you have to hold in the direction you want to look, and that you have to move your character around if you want a good look around the entire area. However, it goes one step further: the sensitivity of the camera is way too high. Barely tilting the stick moves the camera half-way to its total movement and barely letting go takes it all the way back, meaning you need to be super-precise with the camera stick if you want to look around an area before moving through it, and even then you might not be looking where you really want to. Of course, none of this is editable in the controls options.

But it gets even worse. Combat especially showcases the lousy camera because of how much you're moving around during combat. Simply to start with, you're going to be moving around trying to hit the enemies, and half the time the camera would stick in a way that would actively obscure the enemies by not moving in the direction I was moving, which of course was where the enemies were. The camera won't move unless you move your character in the proper direction for it to change angles, and even then the transition may mess you up. Then there's the tricky platforming section like jumping over a pit to grab a chain, which requires guessing and praying because you're acting in opposition to the camera.

But wait, there's more. The shadow-creatures you fight emerge from a shadow-portal and all they actually do is knock you down (remember, you have no health bar) and pick up Yorda to take back to their shadow-portal. If they do pick her up and take her away, you have to follow and either knock her out of their hands or pull Yorda back out before she's sucked completely through. So, unless you are already nearby the shadow-portal when she gets picked up, you have to follow wherever Yorda gets taken, often off-camera, to wherever the shadow-creatures take her, again against the camera. This is especially bad when you start encountering the flying enemies, which often fly right out of sight when they pick her up, leaving you to guess where you're supposed to be going to save Yorda.

But wait, there's more. One of the things you can do when the shadow-creatures grab Yorda is hold the call/hold button to make the camera focus on her. The problem is this is treated as any other camera transition, meaning that your directions are changed for it even while you can't see yourself, and the action doesn't pause so you can still be hit and move around even though you cannot see yourself or which way you're going. The one reason to do this is if you don't know where the shadow-creatures are taking Yorda, but unfortunately that happens fairly frequently, especially once the flying enemies get introduced.

But wait, there's more. If they succeed in taking Yorda up to their shadow-portal, the camera will automatically focus on her for 3-4 seconds while still having all of the problems I just listed. As I said, I cannot understate how bad the camera is, and it alone is why I cannot give this game a hearty recommendation for being too unwieldy.

Point the fourth: The atmosphere in Ico is impressive. It's hard for me to call Ico "beautiful" because so much of the atmosphere is devoted to making you feel, for lack of a better word, overwhelmed. From the very first area, you're thrust into this huge, dark, crumbling castle, with no music and no ambient noise other than the sound of burning lanterns and your own echoing footsteps. Before you meet Yorda, it is a very lonely experience. The outside areas are filled with wind and singing birds in contrast to the inside of the castle, but are still dominated by the castle visually and kind of just reinforce the fact that you're trapped on this island and the castle. About the only music included in the game is an understated piece that plays during combat, everything else being ambient noise. I personally think this is great, because it put me more in-the-moment during play to just listen to what was happening, and never stopped to just listen to the music or anything.

Something worth noting is the weather, because that helps a lot for the atmosphere. Most of the game is spent with it being a sunny, clear day (or at least I assume clear, since I never got a good look at the sky). However, near the end you are thrust out of the castle under harsh circumstances and the weather is suddenly dark and raining, and the darker-than-normal surroundings continue as you make your way back through the underbelly of the island and into the castle again. Thematically this is perfect, as this is also when you get separated from Yorda, making it the darkest point in the game (fittingly the end of the game as well).

Counterpoint the fourth: The save points break your immersion. For some reason, the save points are these sofas of light, usually placed in really odd places. It's kind of interesting that, to save, you have to take Yorda and both you and her have to sit down on the sofa in order to save, and when you load a game you are waking from sleeping on the sofa, but it feels so out-of-place that it took me out of the experience to actually save. For one thing, it is the only place where it gives you a user interface of any real kind, with the screen going out-of-focus and the word "Save?" popping up. I could understand if the sofas were designed to give you a scenic view – and here I'll mention Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons again, because it had numerous benches where you could sit down and it would give you a scenic view of the area which you could look at – but most of the time it actually zooms in on the sofas, giving you no real view to look at while you're there. I think the save system would have been a lot better if it was just an auto-save system, and I know those have existed on PS1 games, so there really isn't a reason for it to not have them.

Point the fifth: Ico has a very minimalistic interface. I mentioned already that there is no HUD. There's no health bar, no minimap/radar, no status; feedback is given to the player by character animation, sounds, and just a smidge of camera direction. This, again I feel, lends itself to the atmosphere, as there is nothing that gets in the way of the player's experience as they play. I feel it was done extremely well, especially with the minimal sound design and camera work. It makes Ico feel like what I call an "artsy-fartsy" game, by which I mean a game designed to be less of a video game and more a statement of art. A good word to use would probably be "pretentious" but Ico doesn't feel like overly obtuse. The skill floor (the required skill to play the game without any significant barriers) for Ico is really low, and the opening level teaching the player most of their abilities really helps players to understand what is expected of them.

Counterpoint the fifth: There are some touchy context-specific inputs. This broke immersion for me, because there were several moments where I apparently wasn't facing just the right way to activate a lever or light a fire and would have to push the button (on the controller) multiple times. Much like working against the camera while making tricky jumps, the momentary frustration reminded me again that it was a game and take me out of the experience. This ties in to my earlier point about having a horrible tutorial: since the game doesn't tell you exactly where you need to be for the inputs, you might spend a moment fishing about for the location before it finally accepts your input.

Point the Sixth: There are puzzle-platforming gameplay reminiscent of Legend of Zelda games. While Ico is rather linear and there aren't, strictly speaking, unlockable items, the mechanics available to you and the puzzles it presents reminded me of Zelda games. The frequent system is that to unlock the big door, you have to pull a lever; but to pull that lever, you have to open the path; and to open the path, you have to find a bomb, or cut a rope, or drop a box, or something like that. It's a progression of puzzles in each level where the ultimate solution requires working through several puzzles that require solving each one in order to progress to the next. Lighting fires to open doors and using bombs to lower bridges also appear as solutions, though those are purely aesthetic similarities.

Counterpoint the sixth: There are more overly-precise jumps in the game than are needed. Put bluntly, I died too many times. While the skill floor is really low, there are moments that require either careful timing on your jumps or proper direction (which is often obfuscated by the poor camera) which lead to your falling to your death. There was one section where I died possibly up to 10 times due to a combination of poor camera, bad jumps, and being pushed off of edges by enemies. The problem here is mostly that I never felt the death was my own fault. At the same time, though, Ico is mostly about the story of escaping the castle, even if there is almost no dialogue, and dying is something that the player has to ignore as a "non-canonical ending" and ended up taking me out of the experience as well.

Point the last: Ico has brilliant sound design. I mention that there is nearly no music in the game, but the ambient noise is prolific. Just the footsteps alone never get grating, since there's multiple sounds used for the footsteps just walking regularly, and then more added in for turns and slips and such. The boy will grunt whenever he does something strenuous and exclaim when he has a close call (like nearly falling off a ledge), and he has different calls for Yorda depending on how far away she is. Yorda will exclaim if you swing your weapon too close to her, or if she gets grabbed, or if she's forced into something like pulled too hard or making a large jump. The ambient noise alone is fantastic to listen to, as with it being uncluttered by music it makes it feel more like experiencing the story rather than a video game.

Counterpoint the last: There's a lack of direction in the game. While not the worst part of the game or the one that took me out of the experience the most, I was forced to refer to a walkthrough three times in the game. Since the game has no user interface to speak of and no HUD, there were often times where I was actively lost, having no idea what the game wanted from me. Again, with 3D platformers having an inherent complexity to them, it could have done more to explain to me what I should have been doing. In a game where you're supposed to be experiencing the story directly, needing to refer to a walkthough ruins that illusion.



A few final points I should address:

I should make a small point about the end of the game doing a lot to make the supposedly-simplistic story of Ico into something a bit deeper. While I won't spoil anything, the penultimate fight in the game takes something you had been doing the entire game and throws it into a new light. It will likely make you question what it is you are doing (not as a player but as the boy whom you are controlling) as you continue to fight.

Another point I should address are the technical innovations. Ico was supposedly one of the first games to use bloom lighting effects, and also one of the first to use inverse kinematics (the effect which makes characters place their feet correctly while walking up stairs and ramps). I feel I can't really speak one way or another about it, but overall I think they really help sell the game as an experience instead of just another video game. The effect from the light outside kind of fits with the already oppressive atmosphere of the game, and not having characters clipping through stairs or standing on air over ledges definitely helps immersion.

I haven't really said anything about the story because I feel to do so would rob a lot of the impact of the story for the player. The experience is somewhere between 6-8 hours long, so if you can find it I would suggest playing it because it is worth at least one playthrough, both for the good and the bad. If you'd like to know more about the game (and see how much I borrowed from other people), I'd suggest checking out this video by Matthewmatosis on the game.

Delusional Quickie: Orchids to Dusk

I decided the other day to dive into itch.io again, and a game that popped out to me to try out because of how small it was and the price of admission (completely free) was worth giving a try at least. This game was called Orchids to Dusk.



Orchids to Dusk is summarized officially as "A short networked wandering experience about an astronaut stranded on an alien planet, with only a few minutes left to live." That about wraps it up in one neat little box, but it doesn't really capture the beauty of the game.

As it says, it's a networked experience – you need to play it with an internet connection – but that's because it's not quite the single-player experience it first appears. The best way to convey this is to explain my first experience, which I have no reason to believe is any different than most people's first play.

After what felt like a long load, at least for a game around 50 MB in size, I was dropped in a barren portion of this alien planet with... something off in the distance, I didn't yet know what. On my left was a slowly-depleting oxygen meter and what seemed to be a small effort meter which I assumed determined how fast my oxygen was used up. The character model was extremely simple, the animation even moreso, but I was waiting to judge until I'd figured the game out more. After all, I lean more toward lower-res and simpler art assets in favor of a more vibrant art direction (and usually tighter gameplay).

So with nothing else in mind, I set off exploring. Not too far away, I found the dark-helmeted form of a dead astronaut. The first interaction with anyone outside myself was a dead body, and with that I wondered whether that was pre-scripted to give the illusion of an interconnected experience or whether whoever this body once belonged to had been wandering around not long before. I only had a few minutes of oxygen, so instead of wasting time lamenting the unknown dead, I set off for the hazy distance.



It was slow going, but not an unenjoyable walk. The world was colorful and the music soothing ambiance. As I walked, I realized I was heading toward trees, which slowly revealed themselves as small oases, with alien plants and strange halos of swirling... something or other. I was kind of fascinated with the simplistic art of these oases, and spent more time than I probably should have just looking at it.



I had less than half my oxygen left and had seen very little of the world. As I explored, I found more of those oases, but nothing else worth noting. After a few short minutes, I ran out of oxygen, dying among the roots and leaves of these alien plants.

I never saw anyone else except for that one lone body, and I had no reason to believe I ever would see anyone else. The ambient music and abstract art was beautiful in its own right, but other than that it wasn't anything great. Something maybe to pick up once and then forget about, I thought, and probably not something I'd recommend if it came to it. But, I had only had a single, five-minute playthrough, so I decided it was short enough to dive in again.

This time I did something a little different. I decided to see what else the game would do.

The first thing I noticed as different was my character model. The skin tone was considerably lighter than when I first played, and those polygons definitely suggested that I was now a woman, though I hadn't paid attention to my gender in my first playthrough. So far, so good, because it meant they put in some effort to randomize that rather than making a stock character.

So I spent a few minutes exploring, until I found what I though was a pretty picturesque scene. The game tells you how to take a screenshot along with all the other controls before you begin, after all. While I was looking for the button, however, my astronaut sat down. I decided to leave the controls alone for a little bit to see what would happen.

What happened was this: I had about 16% oxygen left, which by my estimation meant about 30 seconds or so, and a button prompt came up — "enter <┘: Take off helmet." So I decided to try it, since I din't have much time left to do anything else. What happened changed the way I looked at the game completely.



I became an oasis. Suddenly the world wasn't so barren anymore. All those little spots of life were records of what people did. I could see where someone had decided "I'm going to scale that mountain" and left a flag saying they'd been there. I could see where 10, maybe 20 people had all gravitated toward a lone spire of rock and decided as a collection of individuals to make a small forest. I even started noticing the half-hidden helmets in the grasses or limbs of trees.

I don't know if anything ever fades from this game world. I don't know if it's even possible to run into another live player while playing. What I do know is that it's quite a profound effect to have such a lonely experience suddenly become a warm and welcoming one, and it's moments like this that keep me coming back to all these free itch.io games.

Delusional Review: The Fall

Executive Summary

The Fall is, in essence, a point-and-click adventure game. It's story-heavy, with a dark atmosphere and aesthetic about an A.I. trying to justify her actions on her quest to save the injured human in the combat suit she's installed in (and escape the run-down facility she finds herself in). The story is actually intriguing and, dare I say, gripping, not least because of the full voice acting. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, though. While the basic puzzles tend to fit thematically (although they tend to follow the typical point-and-click unclear leaps in logic), there's elements of "video games" like cover shooting, a final boss, a metroidvania-style powerup system, and a tutorial area, none of which are implemented well. Overall, I felt this was a story that could have worked without being a video game or a game that could have been polished more than it was.

Basic Explanation

The basic gist of The Fall's story, as you are presented in the first minutes of the game, is that you play not as some intrepid astronaut of the future, but as the Artificial Intelligence (called A.R.I.D.) which is installed in this combat suit. Most of the puzzles in the game revolve around the fact that you play as an A.I. bound by a trio of Asimov Laws – cannot lie, cannot harm a human, and must obey orders – to show the growth of the A.I. beyond her initial parameters. And yes, I'm going to refer to Arid as a she because it's voiced by a woman (and her name becoming "Arid" instead of the full "A.R.I.D." is part of the story, so I'm calling her that, too).

You fall down through an unexplained planet's surface into this cave system and must find your way out. Turns out, the cave is connected to a derelict center for repurposing robots, so most of the game is spent either fixing the facility to advance, or interacting with other A.I.s to advance. Where the game really shines is in this story aspect, seeing Arid play off of other A.I.s who all sit at their own place on the scale between the cold calculation of machinery and the full emotion of humanity.

Most of the game is done with the appearance of a 2-D platformer, but the actual gameplay is much more like a point-and-click adventure. There are points of interest which you have to examine with your flashlight which you can interact with, later expanding into "rub X on Y" territory as you pick up inventory items, and only a single puzzle requires any platforming.

There's also cover shooting, though, and this is not the game's strong suit. Frequently you'll be beset by simple security robots who rarely pose any in-game threat and seem to mostly serve as a way to artificially add an element of danger. While it is possible to die, you're not likely to ever actually do so because of your regenerating shields and the fact that by the second fight you can take cover anywhere, rendering you effectively invulnerable. And aiming isn't actually a problem since the game is a 2-D sidescroller (although a good looker at that), allowing you to get headshots with no difficulty.

In-Depth Overview

The best way to tackle this is probably in roughly the order that the issues with the game (good and bad) crop up. Firstly, the opening menu and options. The opening menu is only navigable with the keyboard, not the mouse, but very much on purpose because the aesthetic of the main menu is that of a cracked monitor running an 80's-style DOS program, complete with ACII representation of the A.R.I.D. program and the words "Boot Loader v 2.3" above the actual menu. This is supposed to represent the A.I. coming online behind the combat suit's glass mask after it fell to the alien planet, and I for one appreciated that. Luckily you don't have to type anything to navigate the menu. Anyway, the settings are... kind of sparse. It does of course have window or fullscreen mode and a variety of resolution options, but I can't tell if the max resolution is bound to my own monitor size of 1366x768 or if that's simply the highest it goes. It also has rebindable keys, which are always welcome, and anti-aliasing, but nothing beyond that. The game does have brightness settings, but only once you start a file, and no mouse sensitivity, which will be important shortly.

The most apparent thing is the dark aesthetic supplemented by the full voice acting. When you first start a new file the game asks you to adjust the brightness setting to the proper level, precisely because the art is so dark and shadowy — it would be easy to miss details if the brightness was set too low. Considering you spend the entire game underground and in unlit corridors, it's not a bad choice, and the story fits in with that dark aesthetic, constantly reminding you that you're trying to save whomever is in your suit. The story is, as said, about Arid coming to grips with who/what she is and how far she is willing to push her programming before breaking the rules, and that kind of science fiction story fits right in with the dark and decrepit depot of dusty and depurposed automatons. So that's a plus.

Controls are... fairly simple. Keyboard and mouse are both used (I believe there are controller options but my impression was that the controller configuration was actually more complicated than keyboard and mouse, so I didn't bother with it); the mouse is basically your aim while the keyboard controls movement and interaction. Aiming isn't done fantastically well, though. Fistly, I kept wishing I could turn up the mouse sensitivity. Just aiming up and down feels sluggish at times, and as someone who normally turns sensitivity way up so that I can turn 200 degrees without picking my mouse up, it was difficult to deal with. Turning around was even more difficult, because it seemed as if the game operated on an entirely invisible mouse cursor, often requiring me to flick the mouse left or right several times before Arid herself would turn around. The mouse cursor issue pops up occasionally when just walking, too, as if your character is passing by said unseen cursor and she turns right around. This can especially be an issue during combat, turning you around while you're getting in position, opening you up to enemy fire.

Speaking of combat, one huge design problem this game has is that, despite having cover shooter mechanics, it utilizes those mechanics horribly. The first combat segment teaches you how to take cover, shoot from behind cover, and generally stay safe while in combat. Maybe five minutes later you unlock the stealth ability, allowing you to turn invisible and thus take cover literally anywhere, effectively rendering all future cover redundant at best and actively hindering at worst. Giving you this ability before your second combat segment also means learning the cover mechanics in the first place was completely pointless; as soon as you learn how to do it you are given a far superior version of it and never need to use it again.

The stealth ability is part of a series of seemingly metroidvania-style powerups listed in the in-game menu (along with the three laws that govern Arid's A.I.), alongside things like thrusters and a shield. The really neat thing is that they're all listed as capabilities of the combat suit you pilot but that Arid cannot activate without the direct order of her human pilot. That is... unless a higher law tells her she can. Most of the game is actually spent putting yourself in direct danger in order to justify activating one of the suits disable functions without your pilot's authorization, by using those functions to "keep your pilot from harm." It's really clever integration of the gameplay with the story, and it's kind of a clever story in my opinion.

I guess the combat is integrated into the story as well (or rather the story makes excuses for why there's combat), but it really doesn't feel like it is, honestly. Especially because it's not just combat but cover shooting, in a 2-D sidescrolling glorified point-and-click, the combat feels more like something the developers felt they had to include to justify it being a video game rather than, say, a movie or video series. Add to the fact that there aren't any platforming sections despite the platforming-like movement controls (complete with a jump that, come to think of it, is useless outside the tutorial cave) and metroidvania-looking abilities that you never get to use (I'll get to that in a bit), and it seems like maybe the developers weren't completely familiar or comfortable with making this kind of game. Personally, I think the combat is so poorly implemented – being more a temporary nuisance than impediment, having a poorly thought-out tutorial, not scaling smoothly, and a few other small things – that the game would have been better if it had no combat whatsoever.

The second-worst part of the combat is that there's a final boss for the game. An honest-to-goodness, full healthbar, multiple stage final boss. This game would be a perfectly serviceable point-and-click puzzle adventure if it didn't have the combat, and the final boss is kind of a joke. Despite the fact that defeating it is supposed to be a puzzle in itself (somewhat like a Legend of Zelda boss), you can simply continue fighting it indefinitely without actually taking any damage. I also personally found that the visual cues for actually defeating this final boss were almost nonexistent, to the point that I had to look up how I was supposed to do it after several minutes of fighting.

Now, let me be clear, the buildup to this final boss is fantastic. It's probably something most players would expect from just a few minutes into the game, but as the phrase goes, it's not the destination but the journey. Actually facing the final boss was a bit of a low point, but the integration with the story was what made it worth it. You're even given the option, a real option and not just one the game asks you to do, to put one final bullet into it and kill it after you've defeated it, which felt like enough payoff for the buildup.

Speaking of real options, I need to mention that at one point the game presents you with a "moral choice" of sorts. Spoilers for this paragraph, so skip if you want to experience the story clean. Arid, not the player, is given an ethical dilemma: to drain the power of a lot of her fellow A.I.s in the hopes of saving her pilot, or not and leave one human to perish. The player is given the illusion of choice by telling them how to progress, and then not allowing them to progress until they've actually pressed the button. I find this awful and would have preferred if it had just been a cutscene instead. Telling players they have to make an ethical choice and then not actually giving them that choice is awful design in my opinion.

I laid out the second-worst part of the combat, now let me explain the worst part. As said, all the enemies are other robots, so they all take cover like you can, taking a few shots before hiding, then repeating the cycle. So there's cover all over for enemies. The problem comes from the fact the stealth ability is bound to the same key as the cover, and unlike taking cover you can hold your stealth ability indefinitely. What this means is that cover is actively a hindrance after you pick up the stealth ability, because if you take cover when you expected to go stealth, you are vulnerable where you wouldn't be. This happens far more often than it should have, and it had me paying attention to cover in order to avoid it, which shouldn't happen.

The last thing I have to mention before wrapping up: this is not a self-contained story. Despite concluding in a reasonable way for the story, and something I would expect from a older, darker sci-fi story (like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or its film version Blade Runner), the story doesn't actually "end" at the end of the game. Alone, I'm pretty content with how the game ended, but I am also really eager to know how the whole thing is supposed to wrap up, especially because of the gameplay that I felt wasn't included in this first part of the story. As of the time of this writing, The Fall 2 is currently in early development, and I have no real idea when it's going to be out.

So to sum up, while I think The Fall is a good story, I feel the gameplay detracts from the game itself. Had it been more focused, either on its point-and-click elements or its platformer elements, I think it would have been a better game.