Fallbearers proves physics has no time for mourning

Picture the scene: you’re taking a walk, and your heart drops as you bear witness to solemn mourners lining the street to pay their last respects to someone who recently died. Then the coffin comes into sight, carried by two apparently competent pallbearers, except the corpse isn’t strapped down and the coffin has no lid.

That’s the basic premise of Fallbearers, and physics is not your friend in this darkly hilarious game. 

This chaotic, open-casket nightmare of a game is being developed by Bones Brothers, and it might be one of the funniest yet simple games I’ve played in a very long time. I dragged my fiancé along to play the demo, and I had tears of laughter streaming down my cheeks as we tried to respectfully transport the recently deceased to their final resting place, wherever that ends up being. 

Damn you, physics

Look, you can go into Fallbearers trying to be as respectful as you like; physics has no time for mourning. The road to the grave is littered with obstacles that need to be navigated while the corpse you carry flops around like a fish out of water. The poor man in the coffin is not having a dignified exit from this world, and the poor witnesses may end up traumatized for life, but none of that stops the laughter from coming as you attempt to keep things in check while walking like you're a part of Monty Python's Ministry of Funny Walks. 

You might think you’ll be good at this, but no matter how good your intentions, that corpse seems to have been lubed up with baby oil. If you and your second player even slightly mistime a crouch and go down at different speeds, the corpse slips down so that his legs are poking out over one end, or he might even sit up like he wasn’t dead in the first place and is now wondering how the hell he found himself in such a situation. 

Stairs are particularly difficult to navigate, with you and your coffin co-pilot having to coordinate heights to keep the coffin on as much of an even keel as you can. Get the wrong angle, and the corpse starts Slip 'N Slide-ing, or worse, ends up being catapulted out of the coffin entirely. There is no greater shame than having to go back and pick up the corpse you dropped. And no, that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d have reason to write.

Sharing is caring

Fallbearers can be played solo as well as with a friend. You would think that playing alone and removing the need for communication with a second player would make it easier, but that isn’t necessarily true. If you’re anything like me, trying to split your attention between two controllable characters arguably makes the whole thing more confusing and more difficult. That’s my experience when trying it alone, anyway. 

The shame of yeeting a corpse out of a coffin at such speed that his head goes flying off is so much worse when you only have yourself to blame, and Fallbearers goes from a quirky and hilarious co-op game to a single-player rage game when you’re trying to make your fingers work as you know they should, and they refuse to cooperate. That’s absolutely not a bad thing, but having a friend there to laugh with you definitely makes the ordeal much less brutal. 

Whether you go into it solo or enlist a friend to help shoulder the burden, the entire slow procession in Fallbearers is punishing, though not impossible to overcome. The Steam page for the game shows challenges that are far beyond where the demo ends, and each of them looks harder to navigate than the last, but I’m hoping we’ll all have enough practice carrying corpses by that point that we can get past it without traumatizing anyone else. 

There isn’t a release date for Fallbearers just yet, but the demo is absolutely hilarious and dark. I highly recommend bringing a friend along as your player two, especially if you have as little coordination between your brain and hands as I do. 

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