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Urthman

The hilarious Human: Fall Flat

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Human: Fall Flat has been out for over a year but is suddenly at the top of the Steam charts. It's been sitting there for a month now and nobody knows why.

 

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/01/29/steam-charts-end-of-january-2018/

 

I have been playing it split-screen coop with my (adult) daughter who is not great with a controller.  And the sight of this character dressed as a knight in armor running in drunken-approximations of a straight line with her hands raised above her head (needed to pull yourself up onto ledges) lunging at a chest-high wall...and missing -- is the funniest damn thing I have ever seen in a video game.  (She also thinks it's hilarious rather than frustrating.)

 

One of my favorite parts was playing a level with a bunch of industrial-type stuff (pipes, switches, wrecking balls) and I'm dressed as a handyman with a ball cap and a toolbelt and I'm a lot less clumsy than she is, so you have this scene of a blue collar dude pulling levers and hauling blocks and getting shit done while this bozo cosplayer Sir Leaps-Alot is bouncing around, pulling rubble down onto her head, and falling off of things.  (When you fall off the level, you fall for a bit and then land (splat!) right about where you fell off.)  My character has no face, but I can totally see his eyes rolling. 

 

I know why this game *deserves* to be at the top of the Steam charts.

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I remember the Giant Bomb QL of this being hilarious but also looking like it would not be super fun to actually play. I may need to give it a look. I know it's on Switch. Does anyone have any experience with that (or another console) version?

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I played through it solo a few months back and yesterday I finished it again in co-op with a couple friends.

 

It's a wonderful game and I'm glad it's finally getting the attention it deserves. On the surface it might just look like just yet another physics hassle game, but there's actually a lot of thought and ingenuity put into the puzzles and levels.

 

4 hours ago, miffy495 said:

 Does anyone have any experience with that (or another console) version?

 

Nope, but I can say that on PC I felt it controlled better with M+KB than gamepad.

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Agreed - picked it up as a 4 game package with Dear Esther, Manual Samuel and another one. This one was great and I am so happy that there has been a resurgence of YouTubers pushing this game because it was genuinely fun.

 

 

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I played this with my younger brother a few weeks ago, and had a great time. The difficulty kind of ramps up pretty quickly. Early on, the weird laggy controls are difficult to get a handle on, but eventually things make more sense, and generally the puzzles are clever. It's mostly that the game is really funny, as is the way with wacky physics simulators. Here's a video of what happens when I tried to prop a door open with a chunk of concrete:

 

https://clips.twitch.tv/GoldenVast*********AllenHuhu

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I got annoyed by the fiddly controls and clashed with the puzzle design. It felt like the puzzles required the one perfect solution designed for them, i was hoping for something where you could sort of hilariously stumble to success

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Plenty of the puzzles allow for different solutions! There's quite a few I've done one way then seen youtubers do it another way and go "ooooooh was that the correct solution?"

 

Here's me and a couple buddies doing the Aztec level.

 

 

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Overall it was quite fun and educational, in terms of how many things you can build with simple physics-based mechanics. Here's what I said in the Recently Completed Games thread:

 

"I think the game slightly errs on the side of not respecting the player's time occasionally, since the drunken GIRP-like feel to it means you will mess up a lot. Maybe you'll mess up with a controller more than a mouse and keyboard, at least I did. You could also be stuck attempting some amazing feats of GIRPness, but the solution is something else. Thankfully this didn't happen to me a lot, but it did a few times. Anyway, most of the time it's not bad - the entire game took me 7 hours to complete and I missed some optional stuff. I think generally each level is about an hour, with the earlier levels taking less than that and the later ones more."

 

I remember looking at a walkthrough for an achievement, don't remember if I had to use it to beat the game. But I definitely remember a few things that I was bummed out by, where it just seemed impossible to proceed in a normal way, like the boat with oar. But overall it's just amazing, I wish GIRPing up a wall was easier, though. It's always very frustrating when you know that something is possible but it just won't happen because you have to do some weirdly precise movement that is very difficult to pull off.

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12 hours ago, Erkki said:

I wish GIRPing up a wall was easier, though.

 

Naah I think it's well-balanced. It's viable enough to be possible if you absolutely can't do the puzzle the proper way, but if it was any easier to just bypass any puzzle the whole thing would start to feel a bit meaningless.

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Hmm... actually you are right, it was a while since I played it and I forgot how easily that would allow bypassing things.

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