CHENNAI: You find yourself in a world of floating rooms, scattered wooden boxes, benches and trains — all hovering amongst clouds. Welcome to “Human: Fall Flat”, an abstract dreamscape where you control a blob that is vaguely human-shaped. The goal is to navigate this blob across several obstacles in each level.
Don’t be fooled by this seemingly innocent atmosphere. After a few frustrating hours of playing this game on an iPad, I am convinced that the game was created by an evil game developer with a twisted sense of physics, in collaboration with a toddler given the freedom to choose their favourite objects and decorate a bare room. The result is a game that appears visually simplistic yet offers a challenging experience that leaves you feeling incensed.
Human: Fall Flat” has the cunning disguise of seeming straightforward from a viewer’s perspective. Let me describe a typical level to give you a better idea. You start in a room that has a locked door at one end. To open it, you need to find a carton and place it on a button located on the floor in front of you.
Locating the carton is not a difficult task, as it is easily visible within your line of sight. However, it does require you to make a small hop to reach it. Only when you play the game would you realise that the blob-human has the grace of a drunk jellyfish. This makes this small task seem like a monstrous challenge, leaving you questioning your own coordination skills. Once you gain the manual dexterity of a puppet master and have it all under control, a tiny misstep sets you back a full five minutes.
To me, with my infinite lack of patience, the entire game feels like playing out the docking scene in Interstellar with the dramatic music, but none of the satisfaction. The game has been around since 2016 and has been released across multiple platforms – including the Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Android and iOS. While initially a much smaller game, the current version of the game now out also available on the Apple Arcade, has over 23 levels with an 8-player online mode.
For a smoother experience, I highly suggest playing “Human: Fall Flat” on a PC with a trusty keyboard and mouse. But if you’re looking for some comic relief, gift the Android/iOS version to your friends and watch them painfully stumble through the game on their phones.