Unedited, vaguely stream-of-conscious-ish review today. The Last Express is an adventure game published in 1997 and played by me, your blogatrix, in 2015. In some corners of the internet it is still much-loved, with many people even calling it one of the best adventure games of all time, and I'd heard about it from a few people before I decided to purchase and play it myself. I have a bit of a weakness for point-and-click adventures, despite lacking the unique brain-wiring which allows me to successfully work out that you need to hit the sandwich with the balloon to open the fourteen-sided codex, so I usually need a walkthrough and a fair bit of patience to get through them. I'm also a sucker for anything that seems to have a compelling or unique setting, so this game seemed perfectly positioned to charm me. So why did find myself getting so angry at it? Why did I have to drag myself through it over a period of about a month when it shouldn't have taken half as long?
I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this game. I hate doing all the background info because I struggle to write about it without sounding clunky, but essentially the game is set on the Orient Express just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Tensions are high among the guests, and within the first few minutes your character, a mysterious American who boarded the train without a ticket, discovers his friend murdered in his compartment. What follows is the gradual unfolding of a mystery, featuring romance, gold and anarchists. (I'm sure saying this will get my blog put on a list somewhere, but I think there should be a lot more anarchists in things. I like any time period where there's lots of anarchists hanging about.) The most notable thing about the game is that all the train's passengers and staff live their lives in real-time, wandering about the carriages and hanging out in their compartments, having dinner and chatting. Your job is to solve the murder and work out what strange things are taking place on the train, by exploring, eavesdropping and interacting with guests. All in all, it's a brilliant concept.
First of all, I want to say that despite coming away from it with some negative feelings, the game is a pretty impressive feat and I feel quite bad for being harsh on it. It's easy to pick on the flaws of a twenty-year-old game, especially one which aims so high and therefore has a long way to fall if it misses. My knowledge of game design is pretty basic but the real-time mechanic must have been difficult to handle, and anyone who at least tries something interesting and new gets an eager thumbs-up from me. The art is beautiful and the setting enchanting. The voice acting is pretty decent for videogame voice acting. When I wasn't getting frustrated at the various issues I'll talk about in a second, it was really nice just being there. Sitting in a train car and watching a Russian noble sit down for a cigarette with an uninterested French lesbian. Listening to a chef and his apprentice bicker in the kitchen. Finding the attendant's secret drawings of all the passengers whilst he nips off to check the compartments. There's also a couple of newspapers you can find with full stories you can read, which gives an insight into the complicated political situation you are perhaps unwisely wading into. Some have complained that if you solve the train's puzzles quickly, you are left with a lot of downtime where you just have to wait for stuff to happen, but I liked having this breathing space. I liked knowing that I didn't have to rush, and that there was no problem with me just leaving my character in the smoking car and hearing the chit-chat of the characters around me. For its flaws, it is truly beautiful.
The flaws though. Grnnn.
The most immediate thing that strikes you is that the controls are like using your nose to guide a slice of wet bread through lumpy custard. You play from a first-person perspective, and the point-and-click mechanics feel especially clunky when you have to use them to turn yourself around or look up or down, which you often have to do when sneaking into people's carriages and looking through their baggage and whatnot (all in a day's work for a totally legit amateur detective). There can end up being a lot of "no SHIT no I didn't want that door I wanted the other door no oh wait what wall is this do I go this way NO I WANTED THE OTHER WAY". There are also a couple of fight scenes, which feel equally awkward. I initially bought The Last Express on my phone so I could play it on my commute, but had to switch to playing it on PC because the controls were so bumworm.
There are also a lot - a lot - of dead ends. If you don't do things right, your character will be killed or arrested and you will have to rewind, taking you back to the last time the train stopped at a station. This could mean you lose up to an hour's worth of playtime because of something you did, or didn't do, that you have no idea about. Fair enough, you need a bit of trial and error to work out what you need to do, and it is sometimes nice to get to replay bits so you can discover new things happening that you didn't catch last time around. However, the deaths feel a bit too random and caught up in adventure-game logic and these restarts just feel infuriating as a result. At one point a woman ended up clobbering me to death about five different times for reasons I had no idea of; furthermore there weren't any obvious connections between her and what I'd been doing so I didn't know how to get out of that dead-end. Using a walkthrough I didn't have to waste too much time on these mistakes, but without help I think I would probably have given up. One time I found an object which was then taken off me by another passenger; the game doesn't end when it happens, but apparently if you continue the game there is just no way of winning and you would have no idea. In order to actually finish the game you also need to do something small and seemingly insignificant halfway through the game, and again there is no way of knowing this. I don't need to have my hand held all the way through a game, but I think there's a certain level of obscurity where it's unfair to let someone play all the way through to the end of a game without letting them know they've prevented themselves from actually finishing it, due to not giving the whistle to the balloon vendor between 3.15 and 3.30. Maybe it's just the nature of adventure games but the things you have to do often seem artificial and like you're just trying to get the game to progress rather than actually solving a mystery.
I really wanted to at least enjoy the ending, but unfortunately the ending is awful and for me almost ruined the story. I won't spoil it, but basically it adds in a bizarre psuedo-magic element that was totally unexplained and completely unnecessary, and introduced it in the context of a stupid quick-time event. (The most radically world-changing, brutal war to ever take place on the face of the Earth is about to start! You don't need wizardry to add drama!) Still, now that I've had a little bit of distance from it, I look back on it with more fondness. I prefer to remember those bits in the middle, just idling up and down corridors and chatting with chubby true-neutral arms dealers.
So, should you play it? Erm...yes. I think so. For a bit. With a walkthrough. Maybe. Sorry, I really still don't know. Leave me alone.
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