Helpful advice and links

Find Software: Downloads FTP Search Our Privacy Vow

The Last Express

"Interactive" is a word that gets tossed around a lot. Express ups the interactive stakes, giving you a game in which what you do and when you do it affects your experience. You're on a train. People say hello as they squeeze past then in the aisles. Go to the dining car and listen to the cute lesbian girls who think you don't speak French check you out (languages your character understands are subtitled). Listen to a conversation. Sometimes you can change it by talking to someone. While you're listening here, something is happening elsewhere that you're missing. Play the game again and hear a different conversation. Keep an appointment, or don't and the person will search you out in your room. Don't do something by a certain time (the game takes place over a three day period) and the game is over, whereupon you're taken back to the last point in time you could have changed things. Go to sleep and dream.

In terms of game playing there's not much to say. Puzzles are simply a matter of doing the most logical thing. There are only a couple of real puzzles involving deductive reasoning. The only places I got stuck and had to cheat were the result of not checking things out carefully enough with my mouse or not putting something on quite the right spot (or, in the one I feel the guiltiest about, not noticing a new sound). But this isn't a real puzzle game. It also has a few action sequences in which you have to fight people, which I think there should be a way to skip over (I read a hint that there was a way to skip fights, but it didn't work).

Like Riven: The Sequel to Myst, this is an incredibly immersive game, although in a very different way. The visuals are rather crude: instead of cinematic cut scenes, everything looks like drawings from a 19th century illustrated novel, and rather than people being smoothly animated you see a succession of drawings of them, so that people are animated at about 2 frames per second (as opposed to a movie, which is something like 20 or 30 frames per second).

But the story and the acting are so persuasive that you soon forget the low-tech look and feel like you're a character in a movie. This is a complete story, with romance, action, intrigue. You sneak into other people's compartments when they aren't looking, flirt with a world-class violinist, read people's diaries, and read about scandals of the period in the newspaper (the train keeps current, so on day 2 there's a different paper than on day 1.

The makers of The Last Express worked hard to get things right, even finding an old Orient Express car to study. The acting is first rate and the story is involving, although a bit unclear at the end.

This is the only adventure game I've played where I think you could play the whole thing over again and see a lot of new stuff (I got my non-gamer wife to play a bit of this: she really enjoyed it, but more notably things happened to her that hadn't happened to me). I have never played another game like this; I don't think there are any others.

-- Charles Herold -1998

Related Links:
demo
Official web site