Re: Fall Flat
Laverne Levenstein
It's hard not to compare Human: Fall Flat with Ubisoft's Grow Home and Boneloaf's Gang Beasts, because Human: Fall Flat [official site] tumbles in the exact same physics-powered footsteps. In Grow Home you control a little robot called BUD, unsteady on his feet, using physics to solve puzzles and climb a giant plant. In Gang Beasts you control little blobby creatures, unsteady on their feet, using physics to have multiplayer fights. In Human: Fall Flat you control a little blobby creature called Bob, unsteady on his feet, using physics to solve puzzles and progress through its rooms. However, rather importantly, HFF makes a strong effort to do something appropriately different with the same ideas. Here's wot I think.
First of all, Bob can't climb! Well, he can, a bit, but his independently controlled arms (see, I'm not kidding), are only capable of hauling himself up over low ledges. Despite his appearing to have similarly suckery-hands to BUD, he cannot use them to scale vertical surfaces - instead you need to aim his hand-blobs on top of a surface and hoik yourself up, which is itself very satisfying. His antics at ground level, meanwhile, are much more involved, challenged with a series of floating levels to find his (I only say "his" because I read his name was Bob - he seems entirely without gender) way through puzzle-filled locations.
And I thought I wasn't going to like it. For the first couple of levels, it felt derivative but less than its peers, both clumsy and underpowered. I know, from checking old brain scans, that I felt very differently when I started Grow Home - there I immediately felt delight, and overwhelmingly paternal toward that little red bot. I immediately emotionally connected with him. With Bob, the game presented a pharmaceutical sterility to the featureless humanoid and his environs. Blank-faced, blank-everythinged, this unfinished Pillsbury Doughboy left me unenamoured. I think, right up until I got the hang of climbing.
His animations at first seemed simply clumsy, missing that appealing vulnerability. Incapable rather than inchoate. And then, when realising that to safely jump a gap I need to raise the little guys hands above his head (hold down both mouse buttons, look up a bit) and then run toward the edge, it was all in place. He looks adorably daft. Leap, click both mouse buttons to grab at the other ledge, and then look downward to start hauling up. Remember to unclick to not look ridiculously ungainly, and now I'm on Bob's side.
After this point, I really feel your mileage may vary. With BUD, you had a goal, goddammit, of reaching the top of that blasted tree. With Bob, you've no real idea where you're going, other than that each increasingly sprawling level ends with your falling through the sky to the next one. For BUD it felt desperate, urgent. For Bob it feels trivial, if entertaining. And then that last part really does depend upon how patient you're feeling at any moment.
After knocking a box off a high platform where I needed it (I was smashing some windows with it, sue me), I had the most extraordinarily laborious process to get it back up there, rather than restart the large level. I was building steps out of crumbled rock wall, but knocking them down as fast thanks to Bob's outlandishly cumbersome limbs. The former felt satisfying, as though I were beating the game in a way it hadn't planned; the latter felt morose, tiresome, as my efforts were thwarted by some hard-coded frustration. I did it in the end, and yes, it felt like I'd discovered the cure for cancer while reaching the peak of Everest, but I'm still not sure it was entirely worth the swearing.
However, that ability to improvise around the theme is very rewarding. A puzzle wanted me to knock down a wall by swinging rubble at it with my arms. I know that because I spent so long faffing around building a bridge that went around the side of the wall out of planks and rocks as counter-weights that it thought I was stuck and dropped a hint. No no, game, just having fun over here. The point being, you can - there are multiple ways to solve a bunch of the puzzles, and some of them certainly never considered by the creators. It's just limited by how much of the roly-poly physics you're capable of enduring at any time.
My fondness for it swings back and forth accordingly. The levels look lovely after you get through the first couple, far more colour and character. The castle is especially splendid. Then I get annoyed by the clumsiness for a bit and think about how much more fun I'd be having in a physics puzzle game if I were able to walk in a straight line. Then I feel a massive sense of achievement for knocking a wall over in a way that would have been boringly easy if I could walk in a straight line.
Human: Fall Flat is unquestionably charming, and tremendous fun when it's not annoying me so much I want to find the developers and put staples in their toes. It's a logical next step for the Grow Home concept, and they beat Ubisoft to releasing it before Grow Home 2, so kudos for that. They've done enough with the idea to make it their own, no matter how naggingly familiar it all feels. And that climbing up animation is just the loveliest.
When I joined a previous company as the head of product, I tried hard to make the company more data-driven. We paid for an expensive business intelligence platform and I worked with our data team to create a killer dashboard. I led a weekly meeting where we reviewed the dashboard with team leaders.
Now I understand what the real problem was. It wasn't that people didn't care about the story the data was telling. They did care, and they were worried that the numbers were flat. The problem was they had no idea what they could do about it. The metrics in the dashboard were divorced from the actual work happening on the ground. Viewing the charts made everyone feel helpless. While I thought I was making my company more data-driven, I was actually just torturing my colleagues.
The lagging KPIs like revenue and retention are critical to the business, but they can't be directly influenced by work. That's why companies like Amazon identify "input metrics," lead measures (1) that can be influenced by work and (2) are predictive of lagging business KPIs.
For example, we're doing marketing to get more trial users, sending better push notifications to increase frequency, improving our recommendation algorithm to lengthen sessions, and prompting users to share more.
If everyone in the company had access to a dashboard like this, they'd know how their work fits into the big picture of the business. At DoubleLoop, we've seen that providing this level of strategic clarity measurably improved employee satisfaction for one of our customers.
We *think* that growing our north star metric will grow our business KPIs, that growing our input metrics will influence our north star metric, and that our projects will improve performance of our input metrics.
Our strategic assumptions could be wrong. Having our dashboard laid out like a graph allows us to examine the relationship between metrics and the efficacy of how our initiatives are moving metrics, or not.
Based on this insight, we can stop our effort to improve that metric and narrow our focus to metrics that are more predictive of business success. Our company strategy should orient work around the highest-leverage lead measures.
To help with this form of analysis, at DoubleLoop we're developing correlation scores between metrics so you can find flawed assumptions in your strategy. For example, one of our customers found that dozens of their people were focused on an input metric that was inversely correlated with their North Star. The $2M per year that the company was spending on the initiative, they discovered, was actually hurting the business. With this insight in hand, they adjusted the metric to a measure that was predictive of their North Star. If they hadn't mapped their strategy with live data in DoubleLoop, they would have continued to pour money down the drain.
Sometimes the problem is not the metric. Instead, the problem can be how we're trying to move that metric. For example, we might conclude that our effort to improve push notifications is not increasing sessions per week.
Welcome to level 6, Castle, which, in my opinion, is the most annoying level containing miscellaneous achievements, and some of these achievements are a pain to get. But hopefully this walkthrough will make it a bit easier. Also a bit of a preface with regards to the video walkthrough in this level. When recording, I did the Zipline achievement, then For Whom the Bell Tolls, and then Smooth Moves. This is not the best way to approach this as it requires backtracking, so to save some time, the order I'm going to list them in the text walkthrough will be Smooth Moves, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Zipline.
Now at the start of the level, pick up the rock close to you and swing it against the lock until it breaks. Once it's broken off, grab the lock handle from either side and wiggle it out of the door. Once it's out, pull the door open and continue on. In this next room, head up the stairs to your right and once you're at the top, jump up to the window ledge and pull yourself up onto it. Once here, jump to the platform with the door, open it, and continue outside. Open the door and head to the left and you'll see a catapult. Head over to the left side of the catapult and turn the wheel over here clockwise to lower the sling. Pull the catapult back a bit, then put a rock into the sling and grab the brown lever just to the right of it and push it up. This will launch a rock and hopefully break the wall across the gap. If it doesn't, pull or push the catapult to change the distance. Once the wall is broken, turn the wheel again to bring the sling down and climb in. Once you're in, grab the brown lever to your right and push up and you'll be launched into the air, unlocking:
Now that you're across the gap and have breached the castle walls, you'll notice a cart in front of you and a broken ledge as well. Walk up to the front of the cart, the part with the two poles sticking out and grab the left one with your left arm and the right one with your right arm as this makes it easy to maneuver it. Move it under the broken ledge and jump up onto the cart, then jump up onto the ledge. Walk up the stairs and jump over the wall in front of you and you'll be on the other side of the door you were just in front of. Head to the door and lift the wood blocking it and open it. Go back to the previous area now and grab the cart and push it up against the house in the open area.
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