image courtesy of Ada Rook (adarook.itch.io)
In Godspeed You! Black Emperor's debut album, F#A# Infinity, the opening track, Dead Flag Blues, is a soundscape of a dying America. The 16-minute-long track sounds like Americana made corporeal, slowly dragging itself, bloodied and beaten, gasping out its last few breaths. A voice says near the beginning of the piece: "we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death". I thought about this piece during a lot of my time with the hauntingly beautiful Fallow from Ada Rook.
Fallow is a project seven years in the making, its roots tracing back to the Steam Greenlight days. Mechanically, it is a throwback to early Game Boy adventure games (I found myself thinking back to the GBC title Survival Kids during my time with the game), but in terms of presentation, Fallow is both literally and figuratively on its own plane. The player controls Isabelline "Isa" Fallow, a young woman who has fled her birth family and the hustle and bustle of the enigmatic "City" to join a sort of found-family-commune out in the countryside. Her and her "sisters" have all adopted the surname Fallow as a rejection of their given homes to join together as something new. While Fallow finds comfort in her new family, her days are mired in existential dread and depression, as the world is slowly breaking down around her, and her loved ones are literally disappearing. Below the farmland, a constantly-shifting Geiger-esque fusion of earth and machine, colloquially called "The Skid" is devouring the Earth. Pulsing, fidgeting machines sprout from the Earth like birch trees, and the land is covered in mechanical waste and magnetized crystals that sprout from the ground. Large, worm-like beasts made as a fusion of flesh, wood, and steel, with sharp, toothy maws known as dynen (or dynon, singular) are implied to have once roamed the orange skies, but now lie in dead, crumpled heaps on the ground. Fallow's world is terrifying, unknowable, and dying.
The games space has undeniably made progress with regards to queer stories but it would be hard to argue that it's approaching anything resembling comprehensive. Even if one were to disregard the clearly rotted foundation made apparent by recent lawsuits/investigations related to toxic workplace culture at Activision-Blizzard and Ubisoft, queer stories in the AAA space are, by and large, relegated to tokenized representation. Even when they're placed front-and-center, like with Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II, these queer stories are often told through the lens of a heteronormative conservatism (at least, the American version of it). The idyllic happy almost-ending of The Last of Us Part II involves partial-protagonist Ellie and her partner, Dina, settling down on a picturesque farm, their own slice of dust-bowl-era heaven, complete with child and livestock. This is not to say that "four walls and a family" is necessarily an objectively poor goal for a queer character, or that there aren't real queer people in the world for which this sounds like a dream come true. What it does do is distill the queer experience down in a manner that is digestible for a wide audience. It ignores the non-traditional aspects of queer relationships, most of which are born from the reality that many queer people are unable to comfortably and publicly exist together without scrutiny, or worse, danger. It reveals the limits of straight people to capture the breadth of the queer experience, which remains largely absent from most mass-produced art, which often focuses on queer pain, if at all. Imagine my surprise to boot up Fallow and find it bravely defiant of these, deftly subverting these tropes.
Fallow is a deconstruction of the found family, and is about pain, yes, but Fallow boldly rejects the found family as a "happily ever after" in a queer person's life. Isa escapes the city and finds a new life with her "sisters" on the Fallow farmstead, slicing off her own piece of the American pie, but the foundations are still rotten. The shifting underbelly that lurks just beneath the scarred Earth still remains. The characters are not reborn into this family; they bring their own trauma, expectations, and experiences to the table, and this leads to conflict and heartbreak. Each "sister" represents a different role for Isa -- mother, potential lover, friend, etc., but at the start of the game, each of them has already left or literally faded away, leaving the player to construct them in their mind through the pieces they left behind. In the world of Fallow as a character leaves and fades away (literally or figuratively), their possessions begin to fade as well. The books on the shelves disappear, and Isa can only really recall them via formative memories, existing like polaroids in her mind.
The main gameplay loop of Fallow involves Isa awaking from a night terror to find that she has sleepwalked to another area of the game's world, and the player must solve puzzles to remove obstacles in her way to return home. However, even after returning to the homestead, she is usually blocked from entering by hazy entities of "the forgotten" who speak to her in vague warnings, telling her "it is not safe here anymore". Walking around the Fallow homestead, Isa can find trinkets that recall specific memories of the people she once lived with who have long since faded from the world. Once you clear the entities by reliving some of Isa's memories, you can finally enter the empty home which has only scraps of evidence of the family that once lived there. You can then go to sleep to progress to the next day. In Fallow the home has become a poisonous place, one that is dangerous and traumatic, filled with the ghosts of those forgotten. It is not a victory to come home, it is utilitarian to pass the day. In Fallow, to reconnect with these memories is not to unearth something precious lost, but to drown out the part of Isa's mind telling her that her home is no longer safe. She must submerge herself in the sadness of the memories of those that are lost.
The home is a central piece of classic American Gothic. So many of these stories are concerned with the corruption of the home by trauma, loss, grief, or a mixture of all of these. Yet, there is usually a healing -- the ghost is put to rest, the murder is absolved, the curtain is opened and a glorious light shines through the window once again. In Fallow, the home cannot be fixed, it must be left behind. In the beginning of the game, Isa receives instructions in her dreams to "seek the furnace", the furnace being a towering spire of metal and machine, jutting out of the forest in the distance like a broken sword. In the end-game, Isa enters the furnace and is transported elsewhere -- to an abandoned island where she takes on a new name and meets a new girl who has made her home there. I won't get to specifics for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but Fallow's end felt more impactful than anything I've played in quite some time.
So much art involving queer people involves queer pain. Fallow is full of pain, of loss, of isolation, of the decay of American idealism lurking underneath the surface of the lives of so many for whom the American ideal is, at best, a fantasy. However, Fallow refuses to stop at pain, and it is also not about pain. Fallow, for me, is a game about healing. A game about recognizing that life does not end with one group of friends turned found family, with one drastic change, with one brave trip through the unknown. It is a game about finding your place in the world, and with all else failing, about building your own.
Fallow is available for $19.99 on itch.io, or via Steam.