About This Game There is nothing Joe wouldn't do for his wife. But as they try to save their marriage with a romantic getaway, things go from bad to worse, and from worse... to insanity. In this tale of love, madness and murder - Joe will prove what kind of man he is. But what kind of man is he exactly? A loving husband? A cold realist? A bitter skeptic? That is something YOU will decide, as you join him on his journey for redemption...From the creator of The Cat Lady, a dark & atmospheric horror adventure with full English voice acting (starring Jesse Gunn, Isa And & David Firth) with an original soundtrack by micAmic and many featured artists.+ Simple controls, autosave & quicksave, achievements, trading cards & secrets+ The original Downfall 2009 point & click adventure included (English only)*+ The developers stress this game is not recommended for players under 18.You may also be interested in other games from this series:https://store.steampowered.com/app/253110/The_Cat_Lady/https://store.steampowered.com/app/593960/Lorelai/* Now freeware, sorry we do not offer technical support for the 2009 version 7aa9394dea Title: DownfallGenre: Adventure, IndieDeveloper:Harvester GamesPublisher:Screen 7Release Date: 15 Feb, 2016 Downfall Activation Code [Xforce] I am not a fan of remakes. I am in general convinced that a bad game should be allowed to rest in peace, since it's impossible to fix the most glaring flaws of a game. Downfall changed my mind on this.The original version had an unoriginal story, very annoying puzzles and shoddy ending. It had promise, but the promise was unfulfilled. Because of that I did not plan to buy the remake, but high praise from my friends made me reconsider. Remastered Downfall has the same plot and roughly the same characters, but the changes are nevertheless stunning. I enjoyed the graphics in Cat Lady (another game of this developer), but Downfall got an upgrade both in visuals and animations. Don't be deceived by the screens: the game is very visually rich and the developer does not shy away from experimenting with backgrounds and setting a whole new standard for adventure games. Overly convoluted puzzles had been simplified and are now wonderfully coherent. You no longer need to carry around ten items to solve a problem and the interface had been cleaned up. Some sections will require some thought, but in the end everyone should be able to guess what needs to be done next.The story depicts a mentally ill wife with depression and anorexia. While in the original mental illness was used mostly for shock value, the remastered version offers a far more compassionate and nuanced take on this character. The husband, protagonist of the game can be either the person who leads her on the path to self-destruction or gives her the support she needs. This does not mean that you will see heavy-handed mental illness talk, but instead you get a variety of dialogue choices and visit fascinating nightmare locations mirroring your wife's problems. Beware: if you dislike gore and horror, this game is not for you. If you enjoy a little bit campiness in your horror, you will love it.. A messy and highly disturbed horror game that tells the story of Joe and his troubled wife. The subject of the story can be considered to be an important and interesting one but in this case badly executed and therefore quite messy. It's not bad but it is not good.__________________________________________ No Not Play this game if:- You expect the same great story as was the "Cat Lady"- You want a story and an ending(s) that make full sensePlay this game if:- You are looking for something gory and disturbed (I almost threw up at the "smoothie" part *urk*)- You want to play a game with strange graphics and animations that makes you feel constantly uneasy and frightened (part of the horror experience)Verdict: 5\/10. This was a really wonderful game to play, but it did not have the same atmosphere I had come to expect from The Cat Lady. The dialogue felt painfully dragged out, Joe is not an interesting protagonist (though that may be my personal bias as I came in vaguely familiar with his character by playing through CL first), and the game gives me no reason to care for Ivy. Initially, I felt that they did not do a good job in addressing disordered eating and body dysmorphia, but upon my second and third playthroughs the message of what Ivy has been suffering through become more clear for me. Ivy is a hard character to love, but we are playing through the lens of Joe, who is unable to turn away from his wife even if she is difficult to support. Joe will never truly empathize with what his wife is going through \u2013 but he can sympathize and support her in her recovery through player choice. Joe chooses his loyalty for his wife over any temptation \u2013 I think that is part of what makes this game so charming if you\u2019re trying for the Golden Ending. Getting all of the skulls is difficult, which makes the game feel very real in representing what it is like being in a relationship where one or both parties are suffering mental illness. Again, I wish the game were longer because I felt there was a lot left to explore, such as the Doctor and learning more about Agnes and why Joe fell so deeply in love with Ivy, but I was not left unsatisfied. I just wish that more information was given. The gameplay as always was enjoyable, and the achievements were not too difficult to achieve. It was nice to spend a day trying to collect them all while I collected my final thoughts on the game for this review.. I absolutely adored The Cat Lady for its atmosphere, art style, game mechanics, characters, and thematic elements, and it's become one of those games that resides in my heart as a personal favorite as a result. The Cat Lady, for all its flaws, really hit me with its ability to tackle a heavy subject and twist it with dark magical realism, horror, and metaphor within a skeleton of the frightening and drudging world of mental illness. As such, I jumped on the chance to play Downfall as soon as I learned that it was from the same group.Downfall puts you in the middle of the story as Joe, a man who's dragged his wife to some hotel in the middle of nowhere in the hopes of fixing his marriage from falling apart. Much like The Cat Lady, you are not granted the knowledge of what the characters' backstories are immediately, and it is only through your way of progressing through the game and through your dialogue choices that you both learn and craft what their pasts really are. It's not like Telltale where it claims that your choice of dialogue matters a lot, but like in the Cat Lady, it makes you forget whether you're playing the game as yourself with the main character as an avatar (and thus crafting the character's responses and thoughts as you would for yourself) or if you're playing the game as the character and trying to get them to the end of the story relatively intact. I personally find myself combining both tactics in order to play these sorts of games, and they've worked well for me so far.There are several endings that can be acquired, quite a few secret achievements, and a story that slowly begins to take shape just as everything else becomes fuzzier and fuzzier in regards to what is reality and what is hallucination. This is a game where your choices do matter in the long run, and I played my first time with that in mind and got a bittersweet ending as a result. In regards to the story as a whole, it's very intriguing, dark, and chock full of those elements that made Silent Hill so good. I would not call this game a rip-off, just like I wouldn't a show like CSI a rip-off of Law and Order: The two operate on similar grounds and approach things in a similar way, but they are their own shows. The same goes for Silent Hill and The Cat Lady/Downfall: Both series make the player take the role of a character who, depending on their subsequent actions in the game, help you personally color what kind of person they are in reaction to, and in spite of, the mistakes they made that led them to experiencing the events in said game. Psychological horror, body horror, metaphors for what lurks in the minds of those haunted by themselves, a story in the past that unfolds as it does in the present, and the confrontation of real-life nightmares are what can be found in The Cat Lady/Downfall as much as Silent Hill. The animation is much more fluid than The Cat Lady. While in The Cat Lady the characters moved a bit like paper cutouts (which is a nice stylistic choice, I thought), in Downfall it's Flash (I believe) and the movements are fully animated. They are shaded as three-dimensional, their chests visibly rise when they breathe in their idle state, and the head bobbing that came with the dialogue of some characters in The Cat Lady is gone. Glaringly, though, dialogue still does not quite match up with the lip movements, and this is even harder to ignore because Downfall has more scenes where there are closeups of peoples' faces when speaking, whereas in Cat Lady you stood a good 15 feet away at almost all times. The design and art is a mixture of depressing, macabre photo realism, surreal imagery, and detailed animation. The game tries to use as limited and muted palette as possible - pretty much everything is a dour gray, black, and white except for the blood and some other accents. Agnes looks gorgeous and walks gorgeously in her wedding dress; the dilapidated areas of the hotel are well designed and reminiscent of Silent Hill 2 if they had been rendered in this art style and made by this company. The thick lines, detail, and subject matter reminds me of a combination of Archer, Adult Swim, and film noir. As for voice acting... I feel like it was much stronger in The Cat Lady. Voices are monotonous in Downfall, almost painfully so, except for the Queen of Maggots and Agnes. I just can't ignore the lack of *oomph* in the voices when the subtitles clearly show that emphasis is supposed to be given to certain words a la ALL CAPS. Characters maintain an even, conversational tone (perhaps slightly inflected with a tiny bit of emotion) when the choice you made, subtitles, and situation obviously calls for the volume of one's voice to be kicked up a few notches. Honestly, it's like watching someone play Guitar Hero and miss half the notes on Normal mode - Dude, just stick to easy mode if you suck that much. For all of the missed cues to get emotional, the voices for Joe and Ava are decent enough: Joe (if you play him right) seems just as depressed as his surroundings but has a very soothing, if droopy hound dog kind of voice. Agnes has enough range of emotions to her voice that it almost makes up for the fact that everyone else seems to be stuck in 1st gear when it comes to emoting. Come on guys, you're not on camera so you have to put your feelings INTO your voice, like Agnes is! If you loved the Cat Lady, consider this a phenomenal spiritual successor that must be played.. quot;Just do it" part and realization of what was really going on was f*cking electric and it made me cry like a little bi*ch again, really. (The Cat Lady did it to me too at some point)If you liked "The Cat Lady" you'll love this one for sure.. Delightful!I just finished this and I enjoyed it as much as The Cat Lady, a bit short but still very fulfilling >:DDark and gruesome, bloody and twisted, if you liked TCL you'll love this too, it has the same wicked streak and feelings of insanity mixed with depression in the characters, definitely one not to miss, and I do hope that Harvester throw more titles at us in the future :D. Amazing! I enjoyed this so much \ud83d\udc96I had no idea the stories twisted together (been awhile since I've opened Cat Lady) It's such a nice surprise to see Susan again.. very nice game
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