A spider named Karl guards Fallgrade's rotating city
vladkudas's black-and-white brutalist horror demo is out now, with walls that become floors as you run.
The main idea in Fallgrade is rotation. Walls become floors while you run, whole city blocks pivot under your feet, and the thing you are running from is, per the Steam page, "the monstrous spider Karl, who is watching to make sure your desire for freedom turns into a free fall." A free demo arrived on September 23, ahead of a January 27, 2027 release on PC.
The first 21 seconds of the Fallgrade teaser, silent here. The full trailer with sound is on Steam.
The game is the work of a single developer, vladkudas, and it looks like a broadcast from somewhere wrong: black and white, brutalist concrete (a favorite theme of ours!), and the smeared compression of an early-2000s analog video signal doing the psychological work that jump scares usually get hired to do. The forest levels invert the trick: instead of turning the buildings, you move the sun. First-person hands stay in frame the whole way down, which keeps the vertigo honest.
The game surfaced for us through a Spanish-language curation reel that read its atmosphere as a braid of three primitive fears: spiders, heights, and deep woods. On the evidence of the screenshots and teaser, the reading holds.
Brutalism keeps finding its afterlife in games. We asked where the style would go after concrete years ago; VHOLUME recently answered with parkour. Fallgrade answers with fear.
The city, the forest and the fall in Fallgrade. Images: vladkudas
One person built a city that turns under your feet, and almost nobody is writing about work like this. Killscreen is. The free newsletter finds it for you.
