Day 287 - The Fall
Sam is just reviewing a different game, pee pee fart, Shitpost ·
Skeeter’s Take:
The Fall sucks my balls. This game can tilt its head back, gargle salt water, and go play in traffic. How are you going to name the game “The Fall”, explicitly advertise a man falling on the title card (see header), and then decide to have the player slide slowly down the stairs? There is so much wasted potential; potential the dev themselves set up. There are stairs that are begging for you to fall down them. There are giant gaps that yell “fall down me and avoid the stairs”. Instead, the player is punished each time they try to do anything remotely fun. Try to fall through the gaps in the stairs, or trying to roll down the stairs with any momentum results in the game just killing you and restarting you at the top, forcing you to play it the only way it wants you to play - sliding inch by inch down the stairs extremely slowly. Even then, I died a crazy amount of times from a strange force of momentum that seemingly came from nowhere. I’m almost convinced there is some bug with the death trigger because I refuse to believe someone made a conscious decision to swerve fun this hard.
Recommend: Falling Down
Replay Percentage Chance: The Fall of the House of Usher
Time Played: The Climb - Miley Cyrus
Sam’s Take:
I recently watched the 4K remaster of The Fall at a theatre here in Portland, and I think the film holds up extremely well. All of the “story within a story” bits are filmed on location all over the world, and so when combined with the artistic freedom in costume and camera work granted by the removed narrative, every shot is stunning. It’s a great contrast to how messy and illogical the story within a story is, because even though we can see it makes no sense, we can also see how beautiful it is in the eyes of our child protagonist.
Speaking of which, Lee Pace’s ability to improvise with a child in this movie is incredible, but what’s even more incredible is Catinca Untaru’s ability to keep up. There’s a small language barrier, along with kids being hard to understand, and the director (Tarsem Singh) obviously wanted to emphasize this rather than gloss over it. Because of this, both lead actors have to behave honestly when the other slurs their words, or mumbles a little too much, leading to wonderful scenes of backtracking and trying to restate. It helps ground the real world, and its blatant imperfections compared to the world within the story.
I read some reviews from back when the film came out in 2006, and people called it style over substance, or even pretentious, and I honestly can’t imagine anyone feeling that way now. In a world where Birdman, or Everything Everywhere All At Once were successful theatrical releases, it’s hard to imagine The Fall being considered in such an alienating way. If you have a chance to see the remaster of The Fall, I recommend seeing it on the biggest screen you possibly can, it is one of the best looking movies I’ve seen in quite some time.
Recommend: Absolutely
Replay Percentage Chance: Uhh what
Time Played: Oh shit my bad
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