Pitching its ragged tent in the no man’s land between Stranded: Alien Dawn and State of Decay, Survive the Fall is a new post-apocalyptic tactical adventure that sees you guiding a bunch of beleaguered survivors through a dying world, one scavenged supply cache at a time. Developed by Angry Bull, it’s a survival game that doesn’t, for once, take place in the ruined husks of forgotten towns or endless canvas shanty camps, but out in the wilderness of middle America. As such, it has a weirdly meditative atmosphere that feels almost laid back – even when you’re fighting for your life.
It casts you as an entire group of survivalists, in much the same way as the games mentioned above. There are fewer procedurally-generated personality clashes than in the former, which itself borrowed heavily from RimWorld, but the viewpoint and emphasis on base building and development feel heavily influenced by it. And as in the latter, you’ll often have to make your foragers work together to explore, build, or gather supplies.
The world is locked in a kind of forever Autumn caused by the fallout of a meteor strike, known as “Stasis”. A terrible disease has spread since the strike, corrupting or killing every living thing it touches, giving Survive the Fall a little zombie apocalypse flavour on the side. That said, there are many more threats closer to home, as you deal with bandits and looters out in the open world.
Stealth plays a major part in the action, as you can crouch to hide in long grass or behind cover, leading a trio of survivors together or splitting them up. With a simple control scheme you can take direct control or order your party members to complete tasks from gathering mushrooms to slitting throats, and an early encounter with a bunch of cultists gives a first-hand look at how brutal and unforgiving you’ll need to be to stay alive.
Once you reunite with the few survivors of a raid on your home, you’ll need to rebuild. This requires gathering materials and assigning jobs to everyone. As in Stranded, different characters have different abilities at which they excel, ranging from cooking and first aid to building or crafting. Everyone can have a go at everything but you’ll get better results by playing to strengths. Buildings spring up in no time at all, as you can accelerate the clock if everyone is working at the same time, but it doesn’t distract from the grittiness of everything.
This is a world where humanity is scattered and battered, pitching together in tight-knit communes like animals huddled together for warmth, often falling prey to ruthless predators and incurable diseases. Teamwork is the only way to progress, as a lone survivor will be easily overcome in the wild and won’t be able to do everything they need to on their own.
Survive the Fall is easy to control and surprisingly fluid to play, with click to move and simple melee combat combined with satisfying gunplay using the right trigger to aim and the left to shoot. We’re not butting up against chance-to-hit mechanics or turn-based combat here, and thinking and acting quickly are essential. Perhaps refreshingly, a lot of time can pass between combat encounters if you’re lucky, and you’ll often spend plenty of time picking your way through ruins while feeling an ever-present tension. It’s more effective than if the game just kept attacking you like State of Decay does. That being true, it does borrow a few mechanics from Xbox’s zombie classic, including the way your make more noise if you search or gather quickly.
Building is incredibly involving, too, with thirty-odd structures to build from warehouses and an infirmary to a workshop and mess. Once you begin to develop a community you will need to manage it, too, keeping an eye on morale and supply levels to stave off starvation or, worse, dissent and mutiny. The game follows a very simple loop of building and developing at night while exploring the world and scavenging supplies in the daytime. Most story elements happen at base, with constant communication via radio keeping you appraised of what’s going on and continuing the narrative when you return.
You’ll often be faced with choices, some of them tough, that will decide the fate of individual characters but, by extension, the whole community. Seeing someone taken by the bandits early on immediately instilled in me the urge to go rescue them, despite not spending more than a few minutes with them beforehand and being woefully underprepared for the task. Knowing full well that any excursion into the world at that point would bring with it a multitude of choices and the potential to lose more characters during my desperate attempt at heroism just heightened my investment.
By the time you start to lose people, you will almost certainly have become attached – even to the more abrasive characters. They have distinct personalities and roles to play, and watching them develop together and as individuals makes it tough when the world or, more often, your choices start to cost lives. But every failure or poor choice is a chance to learn and grow, and as you experiment and try new combinations of explorers or develop new research, you’ll get a real sense of accomplishment.
There’s also something that feels really rewarding about exploring the world here. You can’t walk two steps without finding something to loot or gather, and while there is action to be found regularly, the real appeal is in the visual storytelling and the awesome sense of place the game-world creates. It currently has a few performance hiccups but presents well enough to get me really invested in the universe and my burgeoning commune. It’s not the prettiest of games and the cutscenes in particular are a little ropey, but there’s enough detail in the environment to allow you to overlook that for the most part.
These days it’s hard to predict what will sell and what won’t, what will permeate the current zeitgeist and what will burst uselessly on its outer shell like a fly on a windscreen, but I hope Survive the Fall can find an audience. It’s a more cerebral affair than many of the games it shares DNA with, and combines some of the best bits of two of my favourite group survival games of the last ten years to impressive effect.
