Posted January 24, 2017
I admit, the day one catastrophe could have influenced me unduly. I mean, the gold master gave me a black screen as a full game. Then they started a shitty patch cascade which often made things worse. Then they redid voices, because the voices in the game must have been recorded in a tin can. If you ever tried squeezing more than a GB through a 56k modem... but, let's not get into that. It suffices to say that The Fall was THE German game that, along with Gothic 3, made developers rethink their stances on shitty release states.
Mechanics were a joke. Most of the time, you were running from A to B, usually serpentines from one corner of the map to the other, only to arrive at the wrong time of day for the quest you were trying to solve, and no you couldn't speed up time. They were trying to copy the mechanics of Knights of the old Republic, but forgot the opportunity for peaceful solutions. You were basically talking to someone and decided whether you attacked him or he attacked you. A dozen times in the full game. It was just... lazy.
Spoilers ahead.
And O-M-G the story. Granted: I was studying literature at the time, but I don't think my expectations were too elevated. Ramble incoming.
The setup is that you're trying to establish a new democracy that's threatened by some gray skinned monstrosities, but in the major turning point find out that the grayskins are the good guys and your president is a fuckwit. So far, so good. But the grayskins are practising gene manipulation experiments on humans in order to turn them into grayskins, which kills most of the humans, and the few who survive have their life expectancy cut in half. So they're literally the Mengele type of "good guy".
Aaand then they get the sister of the protagonist into their paws and forcefully turn her into a grayskin (she luckily survives) . So what's the sister going to do? Oh, easy. She joins the grayskins, 'cause those are her brothers and sisters now. She joins her gross abusers, and it's presented to the player as if that's the reasonable and in no way Stockholm syndrome kind of shit to pull off. But it becomes worse. Because the protagonist hears this and decides to join the grayskins too.
That turning point was extra hilarious for a variety of reasons. Not sure whether they've changed it in the reloaded version, but in the original, you're mowing down grayskins in their biggest camp, then the grayskin chief appears and tells you you've fallen for the President's propaganda and that "Grayskins have never killed humans" (evidently the Mengele stuff doesn't really count, and evidently the Gray Supremacists that you're killing in a cave an hour later also don't).
Then the human President himself appears alone on a rickety moped to tell you more lies. The protagonist tells him off, so the President shoots at the protagonist and escapes on his moped while dozens of grayskins, the sister and the heavily armed four headed team of the protagonist watch without a single shot fired.
I distinctly remember biting into my carpet out of frustration.
Can you relate... or do you even remember it differently?
Post edited January 25, 2017 by Vainamoinen
