Image credit: vladkudas

It is said that to name a wild thing is to tame it, to delimit and temper it, to defuse its menace. The giant, vaporous spider in Fallgrade is called Karl. Know any Karls? Are you a Karl? I wonder if it's Karl as in Karl Marx. Perhaps it's a reference to arachnid imagery in anti-Communist propaganda, though arachnid imagery isn't the exclusive preserve of anti-Communists.

Myself, I tend to associate the name "Karl" with paperweights, for reasons my brain refuses to explain to me. And yet, for all these steadying associations, Karl the spider still gives me the willies. Nothing tame about that thing at all.

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Fallgrade's world is plenty creepy enough without Karl. The happiest thing about it, so far, is the music. The first area is "an analog concrete nightmare" of city blocks and pylons and immaculate black orbs. Your job is to collect the orbs, without being collected by Karl. Your chief advantage is that you can flip gravity, turning walls into floors and the pale, blooming sky into a bottomless chasm. Going by the Steam page blurb, it doesn't look like you can make Karl fall into the sky. I'd call it a Gravity Rush homage were it not for the total absence of anime girls and colour.

Worse may be instore. Beyond the rotatable city, there's a forest. In the forest, you can control the position of the sun. I assume moving the sun is how you'll get rid of that awful, unblinking shadow figure. It doesn't appear that Karl will accompany you to the forest, at least.

Fallgrade's developer vladkudas is currently working on a demo. They've been doing the rounds on various subreddits, pitching the trailer and fielding predictable concerns about the game's thick, choking grain filter. I hope vladkudas doesn't get rid of the filter, because I really like the fizzy and desolate Game Boy camera vibe. Release date? To follow.