Downfall (PC) review "This is what happens when your childhood is a real blast..."

Note: This review pertains to the 2016 "redux" build of Downfall.

I'm not going to lie: I struggled with Downfall during its opening segment. Having never played it predecessor The Cat Lady, I had no idea what I was getting into. The game initially presented itself as a romantic, coming-of-age, point-and-click adventure with wooden acting and a hand-drawn art style. Obviously, I knew it wasn't going to remain so sweet, so I decided to humor it and see where it goes. After fighting off a few uninteresting scenes that (unbeknownst to me) laid the foundation for more profound commentary, I finally reached a climactic point. As with numerous horror stories, someone unearths an item that triggers a horrific series of events. Let's just say this cold open features a truly explosive conclusion, resulting in heartache, trauma, and eventually madness...

The art style darkens, and colors bleed out. The effect is a little on-the-nose, but nonetheless appropriate. It's like a promise that things are only going to get worse. You wonder, looking at the gory mess the prelude left behind, how events could worsen. Rest assured, they do...

Jump forward some years and the main characters from the intro return as a struggling husband and wife: Joe and Ivy. The former wishes to rekindle their dying marriage, while the latter shows signs of coming unglued. They travel to a homely hotel known as Quiet Haven for a getaway, but their romantic escape sours almost immediately. Ivy complains about entities in the mirror taunting her, and Joe believes the hotel's manager is coming onto him. After a brief marital spat and a sleep, Joe arises to find Ivy gone. He moseys into the dining room, believing she may have gone to breakfast, and finds a ghastly, surreal scene. The manager stands at the center of it all, smiling slyly, giving Joe further instruction...



From here, your journey takes numerous unexpected and grisly turns. Bizarre decor litters the inn, from rooms filled with mirrors to a graffiti-strewn hallway. Those pale in comparison, though, to the blood-spattered banquet hall, secret surgeon's office, and makeshift mortuary in the basement. On top of that, the grounds mutate and morph with each passing event. Corridors inexplicably loop back around, hidden rooms crop up, and doorways lead to illogical places somehow within the hotel's confines. For instance, one room on the fourth floor takes you to an exterior location where Joe and Ivy's dream house lies. A monstrous lump of a creature sits in the living room within, gawking at a television in the dark...

For Joe to find Ivy, he'll have to perform the usual point-and-click duties of gathering items to use in different areas. However, the goods Downfall sends you to fetch aren't always your usual supply. Sure, you find your share of paper currency and rusty keys, but the game also features a segment where a brainless corpse shuts off a gas valve unless you give it a brain. And your solution? Well, you find a surgical saw at one point, plus there's a pig dangling in a freezer. I trust you can work out the rest...

Dialogue choices dog you at every cutscene, and you know multiple endings are on the table. In most cases, what you must say is pretty obvious, with your choices amounting to “critical prick” or “compassionate lover.” Now and then, though, less flagrant terms could actually mess up a perfect playthrough. You know that Joe is no stranger to sarcasm, but that doesn't mean that every snazzy quip will safely guide you to the "good" (or really least traumatizing) ending available. Each segment asks you to be extra discerning in how you characterize the protagonist, careful not to turn him into a monster like those around him.



If its opening serves as any indication, Downfall is often nasty and grotesque. You perform a lot of unpleasant tasks all in the name of love, while the game explores various types of psychological disorders and themes, from poor coping to body dysmorphia. At times, the commentary is pretty obvious, but no less poignant. You know from the instant Ivy talks about creatures in the mirror that her own self-image is disordered, and the plot plays to that knowledge. It doesn't really try hard to hide Ivy's condition behind a veneer or underneath a bunch of deep symbolism because it knows the audience is already aware. It presents itself this way as a kind of ruse, and you end up spending more time launching an obvious character study on Ivy when the one you should be questioning is the one you're controlling...

I don't want to give much away, but the game slowly build toward more overt revelations about Joe. The groundwork for his own personal demons lie there, having been lain by the catastrophic events from the prologue. It's funny, because when you dive into the game in earnest, Joe doesn't even mention the introductory events. He seems keen to move on from them, but you know he hasn't; no one does, really. So Downfall raises its veil bit by bit until the closing events make everything plain.

Downfall features three different endings, and each one is grim in its own way. There is no "happy" finish here; that's how life rolls sometimes. Maybe that's just part of the tale's commentary. You're not always going to get to ride into the sunset and live happily ever after, so maybe just living ever after at all is good enough. The arts frequently show us glimpses of life and love through glamorous lenses, but reality isn't always so glitzy. This game isn't going to lie to you. Sometimes life is rough, disgusting, difficult, and full of undesirable options. In that respect, Downfall pulls no punches.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 07, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.