Freedom Fall

Ah, Freedom fall, the game where you are a prisoner in a tower, and your goal is to escape. Sounds simple, right? Not quite so.
Freedom fall is a simple, 2D game where you play as a young man, waking up in his prison cell, trying to escape the clutches of an evil princess. This trope turning has its value, but honestly, after about half of this short game, I found it to be uninspiring. Throughout the game, you’ll find messages from the princess scribbled on walls. Often you’ll see two ways you can proceed – and the easier one will be labeled as “for cowards”. But I did not care for the princess or her remarks – I play games to have fun, not be provoked by teenage wall writings.
The graphics are simple and likable. Whenever you die, whether by impalement on spikes or cut by spinning blades, you leave a blood mark on the item of your demise, which is a nice touch. The colorful palette is used in a manner pleasing to the eye, and the backgrounds change, which is always a good thing in games such as these.
The gameplay is fast pacing and fun. Your character can run and jump, which is useful, since the only way in this game is down. You can also press space for longer to jump higher, which is a tactic I really don’t like in games, but what can you do.
During the game, you might find gliders and wings that will help you reach unreachable places. In order to get them, you need to collect gears, the currency in this game. So, you collect gears to buy or rather build equipment, so that you can reach more gears, so that you can build/buy better equipment and so on.
At certain points, it can be quite frustrating, but not to a rage quitting level. The level where you try to outswim a shark gave me the most grief, mostly because the character wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. It could also be that my reflexes are terrible, so take this with a grain of salt. You might find it too easy, especially if you are used to these kinds of games.
Save checkpoints are strewn all around, so you don’t have to worry about going back to the beginning of the stage upon death. The respawn is imminent, which is another plus for this little game. At the end, there is another hidden level, but I didn’t care enough for the story to play it through.
The story itself is ok. It has a few twists and turns, and even though they might be unexpected, I was so consumed with finishing the level and getting the hard-to-find gears, that I ignored most of it.
Overall, it is fun, quite frustrating at times, but at least it’s short. If you like arcade platform jumping games that require quick thinking and good reflexes, play Freedom fall, and become the prisoner who saved himself from the mean princess.

The fact that this game only has 156 reviews at the time I'm writing this feels criminal to me. Somehow this game has been out for over 9 years (at time of writing) but flown completely under the radar.

It's just a really solid platformer that oozes charm at every turn, courtesy of the text left everywhere for you by the princess.

It's quite short, my two hours of playtime are two complete runs (I think, I'm currently revisiting it for what I think is a third playthrough, but I've owned the game for ages), but I find myself enjoying every minute of it. Checkpoints are normally pretty generously spaced so you don't need to repeat too much if you hit a rough section.

Unless you're particularly hard up for cash and need to get maximum playtime per dollar (rather than maximum fun per playtime) I'd recommend the game to anyone.

Very short, very easy and very hard to look at. Something about the framerate and the art style makes it painful to look at,

I beat this game in under an hour without using any of the powerups. If you're considering this game, go play Super Meat Boy instead.

relatively short, quirky platforming game.

story is a bit.. eh? because its all told in writing on the walls - sometimes not making logical sense... like, you do something and then 2 seconds later her reaction is written on a wall lol but thats really nitpicky and not something anybody really cares about

Its not worth 9 euro's tho. wait till its like, reduced...by like 90%. at best.

soooo amazed by the quality and how enjoyable this game ended up to be! wasn't expecting too much coming in but it was a BLAST from start to finish! thank you again for creating such excellent platformer to all of us to play through and through ;) wouldn't mind seeing a sequel of this game in the near future..!

Picked this game up during the Oz day sale, figured it would help to support the Aussie game industry.
This is an absolute gem of a game.
It has some of the best humour in a game I have played recently but it is subtle in how it is done, basically just writing in the background telling the story.
Gameplay wise it is quite simple, get down the tower to the bottom of the level. # challenge points on the way, speed, deaths and collecting. par time and leaderboards for those who like that style of competition. It controls well and I don't think I ever felt like I died due to control issues.

TIme wise it look me around 2 hours to complete all the levels on my first playthrough. Will get a chunk more as I go for par times on the different levels. Also there seems to be multiple ending and difficulty levels so will try that out as well.

Indie down-scrolling platformer with a delightfully deviant sense of humor. Worth it just for the princess' dark wit.

The game is fairly short and suits casual players (normal difficulty) and more experienced gamers (hard mode) especially if you try for the Freerunner achievement without buying the glider, wings or hoverboard.

There is some replayability with more than one ending, a Par for each level in number of deaths, time taken, and currency collected, and the Steam achievements. It's also fun to play through it again just to re-read the princess' messages; you might find a couple that you overlooked the first time.

You should expect to die a lot at first, but this is part of the fun. "Make them like this" will be your motto.

Really good game.
I liked the fluid gameplay and platforming.
More upgrades would be fun, but not necessarry.
The notes on the wall are nice, and quickly become the main reason, you want to advance.

Short? Yes. Good story? yes. Worth the buy? Well. at the discounted price, yes. This is a nice little falling obsticle course. Basically you're trying to escape a tower prison built by a sadistic princess who has a hateful admiration of you. You learn all about her and her kind of sad life by reading the things she scribbles on the wall for you as you're well..trying not to die...again..and again..and again. You're immortal so it doesn't really matter, except for your score in that level of course. So good luck dealing with the sadistic princess with mother..and some father issues.

Let me start by saying that I've been avidly awaiting this game's release on Steam for quite some time, so I might be a bit biased about it.

Now onto the review itself.
Freedom Fall is fun and charming, if a little frustrating at parts. The music is about as unobtrusive as you can get, while still adding to the mood, and fits the levels very well. The art (my initial draw into this game as I follow the art director on a popular art site) is VERY well done and the animations are smooth and natural. Marsh is adorable, our dear little Highness the Princess is beautifully handled, and everything just has this almost childlike charm to it.
The design choice of telling the story through graffiti on the wall is excellent in ways I cannot describe.

But there is a reason I said that its frustrating. While the gameplay is smooth and the default controls are solid (though personally I would have had the three glider types set to A, S, and D rather than having to change between them in a loop with C) I keep hitting X when I mean to hit C and C when I mean to hit V and there are times where you only have a split second time frame or have to jump from a specific pixel in order to have the slightest chance of successfully completing the jump. Compared to the fluid ease of the rest of the game, these specific parts quickly become frustrating and irritating. This is made even worse by the large hitbox on obstacles in later levels (to a brutal extent in the bonus level).
Early on, these parts are a nice challenge, but in the later stages it it quickly becomes apparent why this game doesn't use lives.

However, even with those issues, Freedom Fall is a nice, short game that can be completed in an hour if you know what you're doing, and three tops if you don't. Its a fun game well worth picking up and more than worth the money.



Do be warned of some bugs that myself and my friends have encountered.
I'm using a MacBook Pro OSX:
-I have encountered random temporary "hiccups" in loading (all animation will cease for about half a second). These did not affect my gameplay but they are a thing.
-On my second play through I got caught in a Lightning trap and was returned to a redstone as expected, however Marsh was stuck in the electrocuted animation loop. I did not attempt to replicate this bug, I simply restarted the level.

My PC using friends:
-For one of my friends, Freedom Fall will fail to open. Steam will claim it is open, and Freedom Fall will claim its open, but it cannot be located. I'm unsure how he fixed this, if he did, but restarting Steam did not help.

-Another friend had the game crash in the middle of the fight against Madam Sharkie Twinkletooth the 3rd. We do not know what caused it to crash, and she could not replicate it.
-Around the "You weren't supposed to get this far" graffiti, the same friend's screen bugged out again, slowing down and moving Marsh to the side of the screen and going completely unresponsive. She had to close the game and reopen it to fix it, and we're not sure what was done to cause this.

In a similar sub-breed of platformer as Super house of dead ninjas, freedom fall is a vertical drop platformer. With a garnish of super meat boy style difficulty. However while the platformer is difficult in areas, the difficulty curve comes too late in the game and mostly in the bonus level that appears after the game. On death you respawn at the last check point you passed and getting to the end of the level can be broken down into simply brute forcing it with failures. Only during the bonus level and a few select time rewind based check points do you actually get denied progress if you do not successfully do well enough to beat the puzzle set. I felt this mechanic could have been utilised sooner and in a much broader way to give much further depth to the earlier levels. Instead the main game plays fairly quickly and the only real challenge is in earning the awards for beating the level under a par set for time completed, deaths and amount of items collected.

The game has a nice aesthetic with clean HD graphics and a cute story that plays out through writing on the wall narrative. A one sided conversation between the protagonist and antagonist. The antagonists personality however is a little disjointed with the way she writes and the way she acts at the end of the game.

Tentatively Recommended: A fun game that ends before it can realize it's potential.

Excilent game overall!
I just finished my first playthrough, and I've already started my speed runs and completionist playthroughs.

Pros - The levels are complex but simple at the same time. Some of them take some head scratching but they are enjoyably hard. The humor is also quite fun, I would recommend spending you're first play through reading the wall writings.
There are also multiple endings (I won't spoil the ones I've found, but there are many of them).

Cons - I did notice the story on it's own is maybe around 3 hours long if you're casually playing it, and I've seen some leaderboard scores of finishing the game in about 1 hour. (redeemable with the "New Game+" features and replayability).

Overall, this is a good game for an afternoon game time.

Tight controls, nice soundtrack, not terrible storyline. Reminded me of a slow more methodical Super Meat Boy. Overall alright game, not worth the price though, completed in 1 hour with little replay value (trying to get the 3 challenges on each floor, same on each), if there was more defenately worth the pickup; but there isnt so wait for it to be on sale before picking up.

I never really played the falling games more than couple minutes, because they're mostly stupid and boring. Still I made the decision to buy this game and I never regretted it. I liked this game a lot. It has a right combination of fun and harder parts. I liked the princes' notes and drawings a lot. The game just had something clever, warm, nice and beautiful about it.

Really cute art style and storyline+presentation. Gameplay is fun too! It's like Super MeatBoy platformer/parkour, with the exit at the bottom of the stage

But it's too short, took about 1 hour 30 mins to beat. You can time attack the stages and there are other endings I guess, but I'm not sure those are enough to carry it.

Get it if it goes on sale!

What is Freedom Fall?

Freedom Fall is a down-scrolling indie platformer set in a very tall prison tower. You are a prisoner who is trying find your way down to the bottom of the tower through all the traps set up by a twisted princess. The goal is to get your freedom back by escaping the tower.

The writings on the walls in the tower are funny and drives the story forward as you get to know more about the princess. If you are any kind of fan of the platformer genré then you should definitively try to pick this game up. The game is for Windows and Mac which is always nice and the replay value of the game is pretty good since you can try to improve your scores and times for the levels. As far as I'm aware there are two different endings you can get decided by which way you go in the tower.

At the time of writing this review the achievements are glitched but I'm sure they will fix that soon[EDIT: They have indeed fixed it]. The menu screen is good and you can have a few different save files. I personally like the art style and level design in this game and these kind of games are right up my alley. The game has full controller support but I haven't had time to try it out with a controller yet and the keyboard controls work just fine.

Another part of this game that I enjoyed was that you can choose between harder platforming and easier platforming.
The harder platforming rewards you with more cogs than in the easier parts, cogs which are the in-game currency that you can use to buy equipment like a pair of dragon wings or a glider. As the game progresses it gets harder but even if you aren't very good at platformer games it shouldn't get too hard and it is not a game that frustrates you as for example Super Meat Boy.

Conclusion:
As a conclusion I would like to say that I recommend this game with all my heart even though it is a bit short but as I stated above the game has good enough replay value for me to still really recommend it for anyone who is looking for a good time. The music is nice and fitting for the game and there are also trading cards which everyone always seem to like :)

- Liam

A very charming platforming game with traps laid out for you as you fall down the tower to reach the goal
You play as a boy who is jailed on top of a tower, why you are falling and who laid the traps of the tower for you? The answer you shall find as you thwart the perilous tower.

+charming story
+like the art, a bit flash style
+the price is reasonable
+like the way you can pick choices of hard or easy depending on where you want to fall
+challenge the leaderboards
+the music is nice

+-its a casual game, so once you beat it

-Could expand on the powerups and concept as you fall maybe adding more gameplay and powerups for the next game
was only 3 in the game really.
-Hoping a 3d version in the future and continuation of the story
-lacks a real multiplayer competitive mode of any sort.
-Short game

Beat it in under an hour. Very overpriced for the time it took to beat. It is a fun cutesy platformer if that's your style, but it could REALLY benefit from either DLC or a longer main drop. If on sale, grab it for fun, if not, pass it by.

Short but sweet, a lot of replayability, an overall joy to play. Music is awesome, graphics are amazing, and the gameplay is fantastic. Go and buy this game!

Updated: Achievements are now working as I am told.

Can't really recommend this game even at it's discounted price.

Don't get me wrong it's a relatively fun game. But it's way too short (beat it in roughly an hour) some sections of the game the frame rate drops and is horribly annoying.

Like I said, it's not a bad game at all, but to me it's overpriced for how short the overall game is.

Really fun and entertaining. The writing on the walls is very humerous and will give you a laugh. Not to mention the trickery it gives... sometimes it says this ways easy but really you just fall and die... it's pretty hilarious definitely recommend!