Nothing binds me

Flashback to 9 PM EST this evening.

I am currently staring in shock at the TV, after watching DG finish this game:


Holy.  Sh**-storm.

It's difficult to write an entry about a game such as this without spoiling anything, so I will endeavor not to.  However, there are some points that I simply cannot skip if I want to make this sound coherent, so I apologize in advance if I accidentally reveal something to those who had planned to play this or are in the middle.

This is not intended to be a review.  At least not primarily.

No, this is an explanation of why I sat in my chair like this for the last four hours:

I am uncleeeeeeeeeaaaan

The premise of The Fall, a relative new indie game by Over the Moon game development studios, is that you play the AI of a single-man combat suit.  After falling to an unknown planet, the pilot of said suit has fallen unconscious and is on the verge of death.  Your primary objective is to save your pilot. Simple enough, right?

Nope.

This games makes zero attempt to hide how horrifyingly dark it is from the get go.  From the dimly lit setting to the chilly background soundtrack, this game is meant to make you feel uneasy.  The story starts to kick in about a fifth of the way through, when you lure a small beast out of hiding with a catch-pan filled with the blood of a dead pilot who'd been previously crucified.

It does not get any friendlier from there on.

Much of the background scenery consists of rubble that is implied to be destroyed robots as well as... well... the previous organic inhabitants of the planet.  In fact, as expected from a horror/thriller/sci-fi game, it can get pretty gruesome in nature.  Let's just say, the crucifixes are not a one time deal, and there a number of scenes where cannibalism in some form or another is actually kind of encouraged.

Also, hive slugs the size of a Bernese mountain dog.  Not much else needs to be said on that.  

But while a lot of the story, revealed through notes written prior to the current timeline, revolves around the planet as it was, the actual story is much more focused on the AIs remaining - yourself, an administrator, and a bot known as the Caretaker and the nature of limits and laws set upon droids.  It is more than implied that the three remaining AIs are faulty, circumventing their programming to complete their objectives by any means necessary, even if it means harming their creators -- it gets pretty I, Robot-esque in philosophy.

Probably the biggest mindfuck comes at the very end when we discover that your character is... well... delusional.  I can't go into much more than that without ruining the end of the game, but it had both DG and I gaping at the screen.

Now that I've had some time to digest and kind of gotten over how sometimes unnecessarily gory the gameplay was, I can start to appreciate the actual story.  Imagine for a moment that you live for one single purpose, discard your own personal morals to fulfill this purpose, and then discover that this thing you live for is totally obsolete.  How would you react?  How would you live with yourself? That, in a way is scarier than anything else this game could've thrown at me.

Although, seriously.  Hive slugs.  *shudder*

Until the next.