Black The Fall

Black The Fall

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Primo Levi writes in The Drowned And The Saved of how Nazi concentration camp overseers secured the cooperation of certain inmates against their comrades, exposing a “gray zone” between oppressor and victim. In Levi’s view, the horror of a system such as National Socialism is that it doesn’t merely destroy people but “makes them resemble itself”, turning the subjugated into their own exploiters. This is an idea crucial to Sand Sailor’s cinematic platformer Black The Fall, a dystopian fantasy loosely modelled on first hand experience of the Soviet occupation of Romania, in which the mechanisms of escape are also the mechanisms of tyranny. Among the game’s key puzzle props is a laser pointer, obtained from one of the flabby bullies in welding visors who stomp around the game’s cyclopean factories directing sentry turret fire with a guttural roar. As a fugitive machinist heading for the border, you’ll use it both to trigger objects such as elevators and to command other workers, stooped and shrunken souls pierced by radio antennae – ushering them toward switches you can’t reach with managerial brusqueness.

At other times, you’ll treat your fellow downtrodden merely as camouflage, pedalling away on an Orwellian parody of an exercise bike alongside hundreds of fellow proles as you wait for the syrupy glare of a motion sensor to pass by. Later on, you’ll serially mistreat a canine robot after freeing it from a cage, ordering the friendly little creature into grinding cogwork to stall a piston, or even using it as a projectile to stave in a door. In the process, you’ll walk a troubled line between struggling with the game’s apparatus of brutalisation and benefitting from it, a highwire act that links Black to Inside and the venerable PS1 Oddworld titles.