The 1001 list write up for this rotoscoped point and click adventure suggests that The Last Express could be the greatest game never played.
A tale of murder on the Orient Express, characters who go about their daily routines in the background, multiple options and endings to make this express your express. Is it the first express of many?
Fun Times
The Last Express puts you in the shoes of Robert Cath, an American on the run from the authorities in Paris, in July 1914. The 24th, as it happens. Which would have been a Friday. The more you know.
You're brought into a world of rotoscoped animation, turning actors into brightly coloured hand-drawn pictures. The effect is fine, and the characters stand out clearly from their detailed surroundings. In fact, the whole look of The Last Express is something worth seeing, but to see it in motion...
Frustrations
Oh, gosh, no. No, we can't be having that for too long. The Last Express looks like it runs in single digit framerates as a result of only using the most important frames in a given piece of movement. Sometimes, inexplicably, the animation speeds up, but when it seems like the game can get away with not doing something, the game will not do something.
Make no mistake, this isn't a Telltale Walking Dead title or something. This is fixed camera, see what we show you stuff, and it hasn't taken long for me to get lost.
You can, effectively, go where you want, recording your own Last Express, but you're prompted by the plot to meet up with your pal in his compartment, either by talking with the conductor or sneaking a peek at his passenger list - options decided by how long it takes you to faff about with the controls.
To be fair, everything is done with the left mouse button, with context-sensitive icons largely making sense to move you around the train. My problem was that everything was brown. A well-detailed and probably quite authentic brown, but brown nonetheless.
Arriving at the compartment I find a slight problem in the fact that my pal here is dead, and The Last Express begins. Who killed him? Why did he do it? How am I involved? Am I involved?
The body barely cold, my pal is now an object to be inventory managed. Some objects, like dead bodies, are too big to be put into your inventory and must be placed back on the train somewhere, so I scoot this guy onto the seat and do the first thing that comes to my mind - I inform the conductor of this troubling event.
Game over.
Ok. Well. Time to use the rewind mechanic, I guess. The Last Express allows you to reload a game around 30 seconds in the past in order to have a grace period to rethink your actions and try something else. That's handy, isn't it? Maybe I should pull the emergency alarm thingy.
Oh for crying out loud...
Final Word
At this point in the game, I quit. Two game overs in what feels like as many minutes? I'm not having that. That's not fun. As ever, I headed over to YouTube to watch a playthrough. Not even four minutes in and I was watching someone hide the body in the bed, which folds under the seat in the cabin. Of course it does. Why wouldn't it? Fffff...
Point and click adventures are so hit and miss for me. The Last Express has so much going for it, so I read. Robert is multi-lingual, to a point, and can eavesdrop on certain conversations, translating them for you. Listen to a language he doesn't know, and he can't do anything about it. Have something written in a foreign language, same problem.
That's worldbuilding. That's great. Now I've got to make small talk with foreigners on the Orient Express as I attempt to unravel a murder and clear my name at the same time, while they walk about the train minding their own business, going to and from the dinner cart, relaxing in their cabins, sleeping or whathaveyou.
First, I have to figure out why I can't grab the coat hanging on the hook that was clearly the coat I needed to wear, which would allow me to get rid of the one I'm wearing - the bloody coat covered in bloody blood. Ugh, why don't I get point and clicks?
In another life, I'd have been all over The Last Express, but I'm in this life instead, and I'm not all over it.
Have I played it? Technically. Enough to tell you to play it or not? Most definitely not. It's probably one to watch at least because of its ambitious nature, but all these mechanics making for your story to unfold how you see fit (with a massive asterisk there, pointing to 'probably won't unfold how you think it will') does mean that you should try it out before doing so.
Hell, I should try it out before doing so. Need to find some patience first. Good thing Robert is a doctor.
Oh yeah, I'm ending this post like that.
FILLING YOU IN
I'm not saying my memory is perfect, but the fact that I have no memory of a game unlike any other on this 1001 list can mean only one thing: That I think I was so offended by the solution to the first puzzle way back when that I refused to watch any more of it. I mean, the alternative is that The Last Express was so forgettable that I forgot about it, right?
Well, I have definitely sat through nearly 4 hours of point and click puzzles now (most of them utterly impenetrable, or some other more appropriate word - who the hell can work out that you have to trap a bug in a matchbox and half an hour later give it to a kid in exchange for something else?) and I can safely say that The Last Express is intriguing, and definitely not for me.
So far as I can tell, this is a living breathing train ride whose occupants have their own business to attend to, which you often hear through eavesdropping on conversations, and somewhere amongst all that you have to attend to your own business, which is... somehow slowly revealed piece by piece by the situations you find yourself in.
How you get into those situations, I do not know. I have not seen an obvious thing for the player to do at any point, yet the story keeps on moving in the right direction. No idea how, nor do I know how any of the characters relate to each other, or what it all means. As I say, intriguing because of what's going on, both in terms of gameplay and plot, and not for me, also because of gameplay and plot.
The Last Express seems to require absolute knowledge of things you couldn't possibly know about unless you found out what not to do in the last thirty seconds, and you know that's not how I like to play my games.
But it really is unlike anything else you've seen. The greatest game never played? I can see why such a thing is suggested now.
Fun Facts
I've not given credit where credit is perhaps due with regards to the rotoscoping technique used. After three solid weeks of filming in over the top costume, it was a computer that stripped out the relevant information - notably the edges of things - for regular people to colour in as required, saving untold amounts of man-hours versus doing it all by hand, like I imagined they would have done. How wrong I was.
The Last Express, developed by Smoking Car Productions, first released in 1997.
Version played: DOS, 1997, via emulation.
Version watched: PC, 1997 (NintendoComplete)