Released to little fanfare -- but some critical praise -- way back in 1997, Jordan Mechner's mystery-adventure masterpiece The Last Express quickly fell under the radar and remains there to this day. It couldn't help that it is a point-and-click adventure game sent out into the world amidst a dying, stagnant, and largely ignored genre. Nor did it benefit from a non-existent marketing campaign -- the story goes that the entire marketing staff of publisher Brøderbund quit the company a short time before The Last Express came out. Even worse, the game adopted an unconventional Art Nouveau appearance, and was set entirely within a train. From the start, it was surely doomed to commercial failure and gaming oblivion.
Despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding its release, The Last Express is a great game, well worth the effort to track down and play. Sure, it suffers from most of the same interface problems and often-frustrating puzzles that contributed to the downfall of its genre. And although it promises (and tries) to prevent forced-reloading of much earlier saves, the game fails to make sure you have everything you need before progressing. But even here -- where it inextricably fails -- The Last Express leaves something positive to talk about. There is no game over screen; reloading is as simple as rewinding a clock; and every "failure" state/ending gives some semblance of story closure. This is enough to make the game bearable, thankfully, as beyond its problems The Last Express offers so much in the way of story, dialogue, atmosphere, pacing, and coherence.
The central plot of the game follows Robert Cath, an American fugitive who must jump from a motorcycle to climb aboard the Orient Express -- a train across Europe -- to find his friend dead in his compartment with a valuable golden egg missing from his belongings. Taking the role of Cath, you must act quickly to hide evidence of the crime and assume the identity of your friend Tyler Whitney. To add to the tension, it is the eve of World War I, and your fellow passengers include four Serbian nationalists, a Prince, and two spies. The rest of the journey involves deciphering the reason for Tyler's murder -- and with it, his killer -- and juggling several subplots, many of which are useful in deciphering the mystery.
It's in the telling of these subplots that The Last Express shines most brightly. The world (quite literally) continues around you. The other passengers act independently of you, filling time much as you would expect on a long train journey. They engage in idle chatter, read the newspaper, explore the train, and gossip about each other (amongst other things). Depending on where you are at any given time you may overhear different conversations, witness different interactions, and have a very different take on the other passengers. Everyone on the train reacts to your presence; you can interrupt private conversations by simply walking into the room, trigger odd behavior by acting as if you know some secret, and manipulate both people and situations to your advantage.
I honestly don't know how to explain what it is that makes these moments of interaction all around you so compelling without spoiling them for the uninitiated. You have to experience them for yourself to understand why this style of storytelling is so suited to games. It is an extension and adaptation of the "show, don't tell" mantra from film, and avoids the stiltedness of audio journals (sorry, Bioshock fans) while building on the idea of using environments to convey story.
The Last Express uses the environment (the train and its individual cars) to give context superbly, and backs this up with character design, required dialogue, and non-essential props like a newspaper and posters. But then it goes a step further and lets you explore the narrative through your decisions of where to be and what to stay and overhear. It takes yet another step beyond that in allowing you to impact on the subplots that continue around you. You can confront characters with certain information (provided you've obtained it, which is by no means required). Or you can use this information to go behind their back (for your own advantage), or simply continue to be a passive observer -- waiting to see what happens next.
Unfortunately the find-your-own-way approach doesn't always work. Certain story events are required, despite the appearance otherwise, and lengthy sections may have to be replayed in order to progress past key points in the timeline. Thankfully this is not as bad as it sounds, since it enables you to explore a different subplot, and the game is not particularly long -- it should be no problem finishing in under 10 hours. But it is still annoying to find that what you wanted to do appears at odds with what you were supposed to do. Sometimes you can anticipate this happening and rewind the clock yourself, an act made easier by the presence of milestones on the clock/menu interface. These milestones act like checkpoints and --barring one or two exceptional circumstances -- indicate that you will not need to return to any time prior to reaching that point.
The action sequences in The Last Express are among the worst I have ever played. Conceptually, they seem fine -- you are in a very dangerous situation with very high stakes, so why not add some fight scenes and guys with weapons to increase the tension? But their execution is deplorable. You must click at the right time and in a precise place on the screen to avoid being gutted or otherwise killed, and must similarly execute a counter-attack. The interface is too slow to register fast actions, though, so you use trial-and-error to work out where and when to click, and when it will let you move the cursor. This is one of the few places where the game suffers from the two biggest point-and-click adventure stumbling blocks -- a clunky interface and pixel hunting.
It is sad that an otherwise superbly designed game has such horrendously made action sequences -- which are compulsory, by the way, so don't think you can find some way around them. Thankfully there are only a few action moments, and they are spread through the entire game -- lasting mere seconds each (if you're lucky).
For all its flaws, The Last Express is a masterfully designed and crafted adventure game, with a fascinating cast of characters, unique setting, and overall coherence that is difficult to find elsewhere. Once hailed as the most expensive game of all time, it took four years to develop and still came out ahead of its time -- held back by what could pass as the interface that separates the player from the game-world. If ever there was a game that showed story, sound, art, and gameplay can add to more than the sum of their parts, this is surely it.
I wrote that review about a month ago and published it on Giant Bomb. A lot has happened in my life since then, and I've learned about many more great games, but I stand by every word I wrote as well as the 4.5 star rating I initially gave. I think it is worth reflecting on both the review and the game itself now that I've got some distance from them. So read on if you're interested in a more subjective take on the game and its relevance today.
I am surprised that no-one has tried something similar to The Last Express. The use of a small, closed system makes sense as the easiest way to tell a good non-linear story in a game. It would be much more manageable from a development viewpoint to take this approach, since the need to produce levels and art assets would be dramatically reduced. This game takes place entirely on a train. Others could be set in a house, a plane, or a boat, and do something similar with a small cast of characters that have a disparate background, but a believable reason to be stuck together for a day or two.
If you concentrate on making a small number of people in a relatively small and closed environment as believable as possible, then you need only think up some interesting mystery for the player to solve and some fiery relationships between a few characters. This is what made The Last Express a great game. You could be contented just walking around the train looking at things and listening to conversations. The way the world reacted to the player whilst also continuing to turn regardless of player input is what made the game immersive -- I felt like I was actually a part of the story, and that my experience was unique, but also that the story would go on without me if I died or failed. To an extent, the game even lived up to that expectation. If I died or made a mistake that resulted in a forced reload, the game would (usually) present me with a reasonable account of what happened next, told through narration from the diary of one of the female characters.
The Last Express made such great leaps forward in establishing meaningful consequence and believable worlds in video games. But in almost thirteen years I feel like we haven't done much to move beyond its shortcomings. Games praised for their stories today tend to have none of the intrigue or plot twists that were present in The Last Express. My question is why? You could argue that it has something to do with the poor sales of the game, but that was mostly down to a lack of marketing and the declining popularity of the genre. It seems like it was just overlooked and forgotten.
Maybe Heavy Rain will be the game that raises the bar. Maybe it will be something else coming out soon. I don't know, but I hope someone with the means to do so has looked at The Last Express and thought to make a game that builds on its best ideas (whilst scrapping its worst).
What do you think -- did you play The Last Express? Has there been another game with a story or character subplots that match it in quality? And is the small closed environment the right way forward in telling a really good character-based story?
