The Fog Fall

Review

Not 100% sure how I ended up on the website to find this game, but it is available for free at Arcade Town (you can also download it there, but it auto-detects your OS and throws a fit if you have Linux. You'll have to trick it into thinking you have Windows or a Mac. And, once you use the executable file, it mostly just generates a flash file that you play in your browswer anyhow. That is an overly complicated middle man.

The game intro hints at Nuclear war and ends with the phrase "I checked the Cellar". You start in "the cellar", which is apparently a somewhat advanced fall out shelter. Despite a couple of images hinting at others being around, it seems that you are alone for the time being. A newspaper laying on the floor mentions the Cuba Missle Crisis, and some of the imagery suggests the 1960s, but there is little else besides to give a true timeframe. As you explore, you find radiation suits, a well-stocked pantry, a homebuilt generator. Typical nuclear paranoia imagery, slightly transformed by an interesting art style. Ambient music noise plays in the background, beeps and clicks and and slight, unidentifiable, sounds.

Playing the game is "point-and-click". Only the left mouse button is used. If you click after it turns into a pointy hand, you interact with the environment or get close to the object, or go down a hallway. If you find an object that you can pick up, it stays in your inventory until you use it. You then click on it again to select it, and put it on whatever environmental object that you want to combine it with. For instance, you find a reel of tape which click and then drop on a tape player. If you want to go backwards, or back away from an object, you click towards the bottom of the screen after it says "go back".

Puzzles are almost universally bring an object to a point and drop it off. In a couple of cases, it requires two objects to be brought to some location in a particular order. One of which is easy to guess. The other being kind of goofy (and the second most frustrating puzzle in the game). The exceptions to the "bring thing here" puzzle are the two keypad puzzles. There are a few spots in the game where numbers show up. Keypad puzzles are pretty much just figuring out how to get those numbers into the various keypads. This is mostly no problem except that one of the keypad puzzles requires you to make a few guesses as to intent (the radiation suit puzzle being possibly the most frustrating puzzle in the game, though I figured it out kind of quick).

There are a couple of red herring objects, that add to the background flavor and somewhat help to obfuscate the real puzzles, most of which can be brute-force attacked with the whole "click everything everywhere" method.

The end result is a quick game (10 minutes?) that is visually and aurally rewarding, though somewhat a little too straightfaced in its game aspect. A few puzzles requiring longer chains would have been nice. At the same time, some of the puzzles that are there require strange guesswork. If there is any real complaint about the game, it could have used more descriptions. Clicking on an object should have given you a little more background information. Things like "The chair where I do my calculations" would have been nice.

The game is Good and I am interested in playing more by this team.

Final Scores

Interactive: Eh

Fiction: Good

Reviewer's Tilt: Good

Final Average: Good

Breakdown

• Length: Short
• Difficulty: Medium (with some leaps of faith required to win)
• Genre: um, I don't know...Man in a Box?
• Content Notes: Nuclear paranoia imagery, but clean
• Pros:
• Interesting setting
• Quick to finish
• Strong audio and visual
• Cons:
• A couple of "Guess the Click!" issues
• A few places where the layout of objects sort of jarred the game's mood. Who would write down a portion of a passkey in a place like that? (for instance)

How I Did

Beat it. I don't think there is anyway to not do everything before the end, except I guess skip playing the tape.

Hints, Suggestions and Mild Spoilers (for what they are worth

Items are based on the "one use" policy. You can't get into an unwinnable state. Click away.

The second most frustrating puzzle is probably how to get into the locked cabinet in the hallway. It requires two chemicals that must be mixed. I don't know if order matters.

The most frustrating puzzle is probably the radiation suit puzzle. To get through it, you will need a 4-digit pass code. You will find the four digits spread over two clues, neither of which are identified as digits for the passcode's use. There is a good strong clue as to which comes first, mind you.