The Fall Trilogy: Chapter 1 - Separation

The Fall Trilogy: Chapter 1 - Separation is the first entry in a trilogy of adventure games with easy puzzles made for the casual market by the veteran developers at Kheops Studios. The basic engine and general design ideas are recycled from the company's earlier titles, with the addition of hidden object challenges aimed at the target public.

As in most first-person adventure games, the player assumes the role of the protagonist, an unnamed man that falls inside a deep hole and wakes up with amnesia in a complex of ancient Asian ruins. The player interacts with the scenery directly, collecting useful items and manipulating mechanisms to solve puzzles. The camera can be rotated to show all the extension from certain positions, or nodes, of the location. Optionally, a slide-show presentation can be turned on for players more used to that form of navigation.

The inventory at the bottom of the screen has a series of slots to hold all the collected objects, from where they can be dragged and dropped on appropriate portions of the scenery to accomplish some goal or perform an action. The hint button is an iris at bottom-right, showing the position of one of the required items when activated, but taking some time to recharge after use. The task list shows all the pending objectives, and has a ?+ symbol at the top that can be clicked to give a clue about one of the entries.

On certain points, the player has to collect several pieces or instances of an object before resuming the adventure. These items are usually stored afterwards inside the inventory, along with any other object found while exploring the place. Certain puzzles take place on a separate screen, where the player has to manipulate a mechanism to create bridges and open new paths. Some of them are implementations of old concepts, like a memory games with pairs of flowers and related symbols, a jigsaw puzzle with broken pieces of a bas-relief, a weights puzzle with stones and a statuette, a rotating gears puzzle, and other similar challenges. They can be skipped after a few minutes, adding a time penalty to the final score.