"Is that you Willy?"

overview

Forgotten Hill has been quite famous for their slightly creepy games that can be found online. Fall is the first one we played, and it's pretty fun. With some mild scares and a creepy environment, you won't be able to let yourself quit.

This is not a good place to have one's car break down. We're only a few miles away from the nearest town, but of course, there is no mobile phone signal here. I hope my girlfriend will be alright waiting in the car. It's such a dark evening that I can hardly see anything even with my flashlight on. I hope I'll be able to find some help at that house up ahead.

Fall starts unlike any other Forgotten Hill game in the fact that it's lit by flashlight. You move your mouse around to cast light on the room. True to its story, you start investigating an old creepy cabin for anything that could help you. What you uncover, however, puts you in a worse situation than when you started.

quick stats

estimated gameplay time: around 30 minutes

difficulty: 3/5

gameplay format: point-and-click online game (and yes, it is free!)

scares: 2 (Forgotten Hill games' scares classify as a very creepy moment in the game. However, they are not jumpscares, which are sudden appearances of something designed to catch you off guard and spook you.)

jumpscares: 2 (1 if you're careful)

characters (not including yourself): 1

overall scare level: 2/5

recommended team size: 1-2 players

link: https://www.forgotten-hill.com/game/forgotten-hill-fall/

scenery

Fall looked gorgeous... in one sense. The entire house was all run down, with spiders coming out of walls and old dusty doors standing menacingly in front of you.

Forgotten Hill chose to make Fall (and all their other games) very cartoony for a horror game, but it works oh so well. Somehow, it makes the old, (not so) abandoned house that much creepier.

Progressing through the house, players will find a dusty-looking library, a lab setup, a bathroom full of bugs, a stone cellar that may or may not have someone in it, and even nip back outside for a bit to pay respects to the ancestors of the house.

In total, there are about 10 rooms, in each of which you'll be solving puzzles and hoping whoever this house belongs to doesn't come back.

Forgotten Hill also chose to not include a timer for any of their games. Although this takes some of the fear away, we wish they would have elected to have one, so that you would be frantically running around the house as the time ticked down to your doom. Maybe even a little jumpscare when your time ran out?

puzzles

And now we're at the section where most online games fall apart: puzzles! Forgotten Hill, on the other hand, has a better idea of how puzzles should work in an online game.

That isn't to say Fall's puzzles are perfect, though. Many times, the game let us down - in some cases, so low that we needed to use a walkthrough to find the answer to a very broken puzzle.

Most of Fall's puzzles are great. Be prepared to feed a massive spider, watch the elk head on the wall move, hang dead animals on hooks, and light candlesticks to try to uncover secrets. One of the simplest puzzles is also one of the hardest puzzles, as you have to interact with Fall's one (and only) terrifying family member.

However, there are things to be improved. Fall let us down a bit from other Forgotten Hill games with its puzzles (even though Fall is the first in the Forgotten Hill series, we played some other of their games first). Surprisingly, all of the puzzles were logical. The fault just lay in the sight required to beat the game.

We're mostly talking about two bad apples here. One puzzle involved distinguishing colors that looked almost exactly the same in the flashlight's light. Another puzzle involves reading something off the spine of one book out of about a hundred on the shelf, and you don't get any zoom function for it. We needed to watch a walkthrough to see what it actually said.

For the most part, though, Fall was a fun and innovative game, and its beautiful scenery and mostly good puzzles made up for the few bad ones.

pros and cons

pro: amazing scenic design!

con: amazing sight required to beat the game without a walkthrough.

pro: mostly fun and engaging puzzles!

con: the one "jumpscare" in the game was not scary at all.

pro/con: no timer.

pro: creepy family history and characters to meet!

pro/con: you can actually die in Fall (in two different spots), something that no other Forgotten Hill games have. However, you do not lose the progress you made.

con: after the epic and terrifying character interaction, the character just goes away, and thus ends anything about the character in the rest of the game.

tip: be very careful about what you click in Fall. If you're not, you may not survive.

overall

Forgotten Hill: Fall was exciting and creepy. It was a good 30 minutes spent. With great (and creepy) scenery, puzzles that (really) make you think, and an epic (terrifying) character interaction, Fall never loses sight of its goal. Although there are definitely some better Forgotten Hill games, this is a pretty good introduction to the series. Since the game is free and online, we suggest you play it. Be careful though, you should be able to handle a few scary things if you play this game.

rating

7/10