We
adventure game fans may not see the latest releases from our beloved
genre flooding the media, nor should you expect Broadway Avenue to
feature ads for Gray
Matter as it did for Valve’s Left
4 Dead. But we do have the benefits of having a
striving indie scene that lets you follow the development of a game
from its very beginning to its release. And that was the case with
Downfall, which has claimed my attention since its
first production thread hit the AGS
(Adventure Game Studio) forums.

Those of you who are in
the habit of checking these forums sure remember Downfall´s
first appearance. The first screenshots gave the impression that it
would be the goriest game ever made with this engine, or at least
that it would give Prodigal
a run for its money. Dismembered bodies, blood everywhere and adult
themes tossed here and there backed up this idea. The final build
of the game, the first ever installment coming from Harvester
Games, does not disappoint in this area (see screenshots 1 and
3), and sensitive players should be aware of the violence, gore and
mature issues touched by the game. This having been said, Downfall
is not a gorefest and, sure enough, the visual material is there for
the purpose of creating a depressing, bleak game world and moving
the story forward. The game begins with the main character, Joe Davis,
and his girlfriend, Ivy, looking for a place stay in a dark night.
They stumble upon a small hotel, a kind of bead and breakfast close
to a backwater town.

It’s
late, it’s rainy, Ivy’s speech makes no sense and, you are told,
a physician could be somewhere in the town. From the player´s
point of view Ivy may be high on drugs, may be undergoing a nervous
breakdown or could just be fooling around with you. Hard to know,
yet from these very early screens you can connect with Joe and his
devotion to Ivy. Joe speaks with Ivy, tries to get her back into reality,
and they talk back and forth for awhile. There is a lot of exposition
in the first 10-15 min, yet this is a high note of the game. The writer
attempts to put flesh and bones into the game’s characters.
You are not just another Roger Wilco sprite looking for an artifact
that has been split in four parts. Your character is a desperate,
deeply-in-love young adult who’s trying to keep his relationship
afloat. To be honest, the game does rely on cliché storytelling
devices and cannot avoid the commonplace (e.g., madness is used to
provide motivation for behaviors that otherwise would have gone unexplained;
some mysterious characters are introduced just for the sake of explaining
and filling gaps in the story, yet there is no appropriate backdrop
for these characters) but it also has this deep emotional layer that
you can connect with.

As enjoyable as the opening
is, it is way too short. Perhaps my main criticism is that after the
opening there is an abrupt, sudden change towards the full-flesh horror
gore style. One moment you are discussing your relationship, the next
the complete hotel goes into “nightmare mode” (much alike
the hotel in Yahtzee’s Trilby’s
Notes, another AGS blockbuster) and unknown horrors
roam the place. Dear, beautiful Ivy is nowhere to be found and you
are put up to the task of killing four instances of a given entity
to have access to the other side of a mirror, where your girlfriend
hopefully awaits. Later on the writing shines again, though, particularly
when some jokes are put forward for the sake of comic relief.

The
game does not disappoint in the area of puzzles. You have to roam
from room to room, fetch objects for shady characters who have motives
of their own and so on. True classic adventure game fare, yet it is
pretty entertaining and the puzzles well-crafted and logical. Most
of the puzzles require combining inventory items with hotspots or
interacting with the environment. At a given point you can give orders
to a second character, which adds some variety to the gameplay. I
would classify the difficulty as average to easy, which is a good
decision since Downfall is undoubtedly a
game in which moving the story forward and feeling its emotional impact
are the most important elements.

And the story does move
forward a lot. There are twists everywhere and although it never becomes
fully chaotic, it has to be said that there are too many loose ends
and characters that walk in, do their part and walk out leaving behind
way more questions than needed. A “director’s comment”
feature would have been a nice addition. Some areas, notably the theatre
and museum, are hardly used and some objects’ descriptions suggest
that big areas of the game had to be taken out or were not completed.
There are a couple of times when you are given choices by having to
click on one of two cartoon panels depicting icons. The device works
particularly well and provides some reliability value. Depending in
your choices three slightly different endings await you.

The hand-drawn graphs
are just breathtaking. They ooze not only professionalism but creativity
and artistic sensitivity. The artist mixes styles, colors, shadows
and lights without hesitation. You move from one room to the other
and the style may change abruptly, yet you still feel a sense of continuity
and there’s an almost perfect match between the mood of the
ongoing story and the style of the graphs. An obvious weakness of
the game in this department, albeit shared by many indie 2D games,
is that the character’s sprites do not blend very well with
the backgrounds.

The
music score is no less grandiose than the visual style and its contribution
is greatly appreciated. The game runs fine on desktops, laptops and
also in a netbook, under Vista, Windows 7 and XP. A rather small bug
in the inventory popped up in certain occasions and apparently can
happen in some systems, but the workaround (which is explained in
the manual) is so easy and unobtrusive that I am just mentioning it
for the sake of full disclosure.

If it hasn’t been
clear from my description so far, I have to stress that the game’s
adult issues and abundance of blood and implicit or explicit violence
make it not suitable for anyone under 18.

To sum it up, Downfall
is a great game that explores areas that not many games venture into.
It has outstanding visuals, amazing musical score and delivers traditional
puzzles in a fast-paced gameplay. It even features innovative gameplay
elements such as the choice system and (SPOILER) a boss fight with
a life bar. It has a decent baggage of mistakes, but this can be easily
forgiven and by no means ruins the whole experience. I am eagerly
looking forward to the Harvester Games next production, The
Cat Lady. Downfall gets a solid
“B” and is recommended for every adventure gamer out there.

Download Minimum
System Requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista (32-bit)
  Operating System
• DirectX compatible
  Video Card
• Intel Pentium 600
  Mhz or higher processor
• 1 GB of available
  system memory
• 400 MB of available
  hard drive space
• DirectX compatible
  Sound Card
• Keyboard, Mouse