The Last Express

The Good
Note: this review if for the Gold Edition release distributed on Steam. No noteworthy modification from the original game intervenes.

The Bad
(review is below)

The Bottom Line
One can not really see Jordan Mechner's self-assigned mission with The Last Express as unambitious. This adventure game is a videoludic reinterpretation of Agata Christie's masterwork Murder on the Orient-Express. A work realised in the end of XX century, based on a book from ---- narrating events and intrigues taking place on a train in the 20s. If porting works of art from one media to an other one is always a risky enterprise at least, porting a masterwork is risky all the more, specially since the source book belongs already with contemporary art, that which is conscious that reality is not reality. Mechner's adventure finely fulfils subtle surrealism, yet this is not going to be what the player notices firstly, for sure. More likely, that will be the environment, the inside of the train, with that visual, bodily narrowness that feels like a minacious cage. Controls reveal to be simple once getting accustomed to them, which, because of the introductive tutorial's inadequacy, does not occur much early. One feels constrained, and surrounded by peril. Relaxation and relief are to be waited for: they'll come once the time-manipulating mechanism that is the core of the gameplay becomes familiar. At any time in the game it is possible to move back to any time in the past and change the course of the story: by there, game overs though many are all painless.

Meanwhile, the train proves as spatially limited as dense with facts, words actions emotions purposes passions, and of course deceit mystery, and murders: it takes it not long to stop looking small. Like life, and the book, it houses many lives, or rather many games, as parallel as to seem one, in reality each alternative to the others. To play The Last Express naturally implies not to see all what happens, not to hear all what is said: conversations, happenstances, take place simultaneously, and everywhere. The perplexing clock, on the user interface marks fundamental moments with its heart-beat; many other ones flow free, unknown. One can subvert this realistic logic by replaying several times each section prime gameplay innovation, moving back and forth in time at will. And then follow the actions and speeches of each of the characters for the entire trip. It is a different way to live the game, as right and wrong, if less natural, as the opposite one.

Graphics are exquisite in animation, drawing, technique; the relatively narrow spaces are represented with the subtlety of a mosaic: the hands of a clock, the feather of a hat, the texture of a leather chair, everything is given the richness of a painting. But there is no invention, no alteration, no addition to reality: just faithfulness to the source: just an authentic portrait. Which requires of the author respect and courage. Drawing is that of an animated film, joined with a vivacious Victorian palette, having an aristocratic scent. One actually feels on the Orient-Express, a train of a gone time for an aristocratic class that is not there anymore, which goes along a route that is not covered anymore. In regards with the gameplay, it is proficient in design. Puzzles, the range of possible interaction with the environment and the non-playing characters: all is no less than well designed, less for the initial tutorial.

The myriad of stumbling blocks and chances for inconsistency threatening a game which deals with a multitude of characters all in action for the whole time is nearly completely prevented. Voicing, most essential here, is on par with that in a serious film, far from what is found in TV series or fiction. Since graphics are the same, shat would elsewhere be cutscenes is an integral part of the gameplay, well-played to the point of asking for repeated watching. The whole game is pictured in a technique similar to full-motion video, animations taken from actors with excellent results.

It gets to unexpected details. See how voices that reach us from nearby are differentiated from those coming from another room or compartment. What about the thunder and noises from rain, coming through windows? This is what tells about a work: that M.me Wolff often changes her dress and if we inspect her baggage we see the one she was wearing before; the whistle of the train stopping, the clatter of the train leaving; a philanderer nervously checking his clock in the wait for a date, a little rascal who turns his curiosity ripe eye on us while going to dine with his parents, the quantity of train staff members and how their characters and appearance differ from each other (even assistant cooks and waiters aren't mistakable for the head waiter and the chef, li they usually are not in reality), while all of them remain easy to distinct from the travellers, as easy as in real life... Notwithstanding a non-negligible part of these will go unnoticed in the standard walkthrough, subtleties are countless.

None of this grants The Last Express its height, instead it does that while it deals with numerous questions one would see as contingent it is a drama about the hinges of human existence. The slavery to greed and even further to the irrepressible desire for power, which make conflict triumphant and endless; the fact that love be a draught promptly secured by the hermetic seals of reciprocal self-centredness. Apart from, of course, the innocent; melancholic shadows destined to fade after the sunset: Alexei, Tatiana... above all Max... that can love and loves, while he obviously finds strange the totality of events around him. This is a trip going to inspire keen passion in the kind of traveller who will notice that, at a certain moment, the slave muslim women have freed themselves from their burka and will be glad to hear, by then, their lively chit-chatting; and to earn no less than appreciation from any player having the slightest inclination for adventure games.