Last Stop is endearing with its story and characters with a Hollywood caliber narrative design. It just wants to be a movie more than it wants to be a game, but it is entertaining, nonetheless.
Stories are what make games memorable. That’s a mantra I have stood by for years and I’m not changing it anytime soon. Narratives drive it all. I’m sure there is room for someone to argue, but this is my review and we have comments turned off. So, bleh.
With that bold statement in place, that doesn’t mean a game can’t falter in other areas of gameplay design. While the story will surely be the foundation for a game, it still must function and be a game, otherwise, it’s a movie. You didn’t buy a PlayStation to watch a movie. *thinks about that* You didn’t buy a PlayStation only to watch movies. *goes with it*
All of the above taken into account, I had the pleasure of playing Last Stop this past weekend. It’s a beautifully crafted narrative-driven game with branching parts that will certainly leave you with your heartstrings tugged. What it brings with story, it somewhat lacks in interactivity. Let’s get right to it.
Story is the heart of every good game
Three stories are told. Three stories weave in and out of each other. Three stories form one climactic conclusion. Last Stop does a superb job of bringing a Hollywood-worthy narrative to life. It does so with a careful crafting hand that makes sure to delicately curve its potential rough edges. The game presents three distinct and distant stories that feature a militant turned spy, a struggling teenager coping with her mother’s sickness, and a single father trying to stay fit and raise his only child.
Starting with the former, you can play as Meena, an ex-military who works for an undercover agency. She is unfaithful to her husband and can’t stand being at home with her family. She struggles with building a relationship with her young son and makes her job the priority.
The second story revolves around a teenager named Donna who is struggling to stay on the good side of life, as well as the law. Donna is rebellious with her sister, who is trying to keep her on the straight and narrow. Every act of rebellion is compounded and driven by her terminally sick mother, a situation that Donna cannot deal with or accept.
The last story is about a middle-aged and single father named John, whose wife left him and their daughter. John is a survivor of a divorce and a mild heart attack, which means he has a lot of scars to deal with, as well as a job that he hates. He does his best to survive and keep his daughter from seeing the bad side of life.
All of these stories intertwine and weave through a simple supernatural story built around a green portal and disappearing people, and some Freaky Friday-esque situations. Trust me, you will care about all three characters by the time this is all said and done. If I give you any more details of the story, you will have played the game without playing it.
The story is the heart of the game and about 80% of the gameplay in it – you watching the story unfold and making choices to swerve the story in and out of different paths, which will mostly make it replayable. The gameplay is driven by narrative choices and sometimes the game traps you in the corner with said choices. For example, you may find that Meena doesn’t really stray away from her cold and calculating demeanor when it comes to making choices about someone’s life. Generally, branching narratives have varying degrees of choices, a detail that LucasArts was always proud of in its days (be a good person, a neutral, or baddie – but you get all three). Last Stop’s story sometimes struggles to give you a choice that is out-of-context with the characters built. That means that Meena will not be giving hugs to anyone at the beginning of the game, no matter how bad you want her to break character. The choice simply is restricted. Providing a choice, much like what LucasArts did, that is out-of-character for the…err…characters is almost completely off-limits. You are asked to stay focused and on task with the story because there is no time to waste. That puts this on rails, which means there isn’t a lot of time wasted doing much besides watching the story push forward. So, is this game good or bad because of those restrictions? Well, kudos to Variable State for sticking to their guns with dedication to the story. As I stated at the beginning, you paid to play a game, not to watch a movie, which makes this review difficult. The story and narrative design of Last Space are well-thought-through. Variable State did one of the best jobs I’ve seen in a while on a game’s story. But again, this is the main crux of gameplay and at times it’s restrictive with choices.
Do you want a good story? You got it. Do you watch most of what you play? Yes, you do. Is there more? Just a bit.
A bit more than story
The story is great. Awesome. Fantastic. Very memorable. No doubt you’re going to walk away remembering what happened in this game and be drawn back to the game to see what the other side looks like thanks to its branching narrative.
Here we are now at actual gameplay. Yeah. Here we are now.
The gameplay in Last Stop is incredibly pedestrian. While most of the focus was on the story, the actual gameplay, meaning player-controlled moments of non-dialogue, is limited. The game does a good job of keeping you on the ground on a linear track. You will find moments between dialogue or during dialogue that you can control your characters and walk them down the streets of wherever to get to the next pit stop of story. You will have QTE-like experiences, such as jogging and/or eating, where you must push a button at a certain time to successfully complete an action, but you don’t have much beyond those types of control steps. No skills tree, no inventory to take items that you found out to help you along the way – just nothing more than skimming the surface with gameplay design outside of dialogue choices. Is that bad? Well, sorta? Variable State is a small developer group, so I wasn’t expecting anything incredibly complicated in terms of gameplay design depth. I was just expecting a bit more interactivity with environments and a tad bit more freedom and trust from the devs that the player wasn’t going to screw things up to delay good story content. I can see that was a big concern with this game’s design that the flow of everything might be pushed off a bit if the player was given too much freedom. Hell, if I was them, I would be concerned that someone was going to screw that up. The story is damn good and strong, so delaying its delivery would make the game less entertaining. Providing too much freedom to explore or to grind to build characters up or anything like that would only delay or derail the story. This game, like a lot of games, is art. Pure and simple.
That said, it’s also interactive art.
Again, this isn’t a movie. Gamers need a bit more interaction and connection with the game, the story is there with the connection, but the gameplay simply doesn’t deliver with that category. There are certainly moments that it could have delivered with a change or two in gameplay design, but passionate storytelling took over with Last Stop. I can’t fault it too much for that decision.
Conclusion
Last Stop is endearing with its story and characters with a Hollywood caliber narrative design. It just wants to be a movie more than it wants to be a game, but it is entertaining, nonetheless.
