"I fell from Grace" is an older game from 2017. It's a venerable 7 years old at the time of this review. It's a rather poor attempt at making a "dark and edgy" psychological horror adventure thought waves and waves of endless, garbage Visual Novel writing and the occasional bad puzzle. The schtick is you're an antiheroic jerk with a sick wife and to try cure her and not get fired from your job, you go on a horrible adventure where a lot of people die and imaginary children talk to you. Yeah, a terrible idea. Oh, and the dialogue rhymes (badly) but you can turn that off. I don't know what they were thinking, but one thing we know for sure, they were wrong.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, whether this is deliberate or through incomptence or deliberate is unclear, but Sierra moved on from keyboard-only controls as soon as the mouse became a mainstream peripheral. There's no excuse here, and this makes the game awful to play... even before the writing hits you.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
"I fell from Grace" has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $8 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $8 asking price for this game could get you games like "Lethal Company", "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" or "Far Cry 5". No pixelcrap is worth $8. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
