2021 Game of the Year: Fallow
Fallow is an incredibly difficult game to pin down. I could describe all of its mechanics, its presentation, and its story and I still don’t think I could get across the kind of experience it brings. But hey, I have to start somewhere.
The game follows the main character, Isabelline, as each morning she awakes after sleepwalking and walks back home. It snakes through her life, waking and dreaming, recalling memories, thinking of her sisters. The way it tells this story is incredibly abstract, and the border between these dreams, memories, and her waking present, are left blurred. This type of storytelling is incredibly hard to do, especially when balancing it with the more surreal complexities found across the narrative, but the game does incredibly well with this. You may feel lost, but always within the game and its world, not without it, almost like you’re swimming in the dark. I’m getting into more abstract analogies myself, but this game and the way it feeds you emotions so directly requires it. For as indirect and abstract as it may be with its storytelling, it’s incredibly emotional and evocative. This is supported beautifully by its art and music. I wish I knew enough about music to find a way to get across just how much its soundtrack does for it, and as for the art, as familiar as pixelated indie games are at this point, it still manages to regularly inspire surprise and awe.
But as fantastic as its art and music are, it’s like I said: I could go on about each aspect of the game for a long time and still fail to get across the picture that they come together to create. Games are always more than the sum of their mechanics, art, and narrative, but Fallow even more than any game I can think of. They all come together to create a wholly unique experience.
When recommending games to people, I usually try to provide comparisons to give them some sort of sense of whether or not the game would be for them, but I struggle to find one that fits for Fallow. I think the closest experience in terms of the raw, direct emotion would be the first Anodyne game, but even that is a far different experience. And I think the lack of an effective comparison might just be the highest praise I can give in recommending it. One of the reasons that I think indie games are so important is that it’s here that creators are pushing the medium forward. The future of games is not in AAA studios pushing out what they know will be profitable, but in small, unique and personal experiences like Fallow. Play this game; there is nothing else like it.
I think one of the really cool things about this game is that, because it’s so emotional and abstract, different people will get vastly different things from it, and that each of those things will be equally strong and meaningful. Really big games like Breath of the Wild get praised for having so many options that everyone will go through them differently, but the resulting experience and meaning you get out of it is still likely very similar; there are many paths, but one destination. Fallow, in the way it condenses and communicates its narratives and feelings, leaves you with the opposite: there is one path through, but it will always take you somewhere different. Narratively, it feels like a dream, or maybe a memory, replayed over in the light of where you’re at in the present. I already know that I’ll come back to play this again, because as much as I got out of it now, I’m already curious to see what I’ll find in it in a year, in two years, or even further. What will that version of me see in this that I couldn’t see now?