Games You Haven’t Played Yet: The Last Express

After hearing another writer complain that there haven’t been any new games out there that caught his eye, I realized that many of us are staring in the wrong direction. Why do we spend months (or years!) looking for upcoming releases, when we should be looking in a gigantic library of quality games already at the tips of our fingers? So, in the spirit of offering something new to the current generation of gamers, I’m beginning a series of recommendations for games that bring something new to the gamer’s repertoire… yet were released years ago. And in that spirit, I could imagine no game more appropriate than Jordan Mechner’s masterpiece: The Last Express. Although stylistically different from Planescape: Torment, Day of the Tentacle, or Final Fantasy VII, I consider it one of the finest games ever made.

The game takes place on the Orient Express, days before WW1 breaks out, and quickly embroils you into intrigue as you are implicated in the murder of your own best friend. The game has an elaborate branching narrative system in which all the characters have their own plots, their own desires, and often results in player experiences being radically different from one another. If you go to sleep early, or spend too much time exploring the sleeper cabins, there’s a good chance that you’ll miss a juicy conversation in the dining room. And what other game has a 15 minute violin and piano concerto, played from start to finish, that you can either attend or use it as an opportunity to scout out the cabins of your fellow passengers? What other game follows the romantic entanglement of two female passengers, allowing you to sneak a peek at one of their private diaries? Aside from Roberta William’s The Colonel’s Bequest, there is no other game that has this kind of living, breathing, world of layer upon layer of developing plots. And aside from the beauty of the narrative, the game has a wonderful Art Nouveau flair reminiscent of famed artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as rotoscoped animation that gives Eric Chahi a run for his money.

For nearly a decade, little was written about the game and only recently a few very good articles recognized that the game has a charm and sense of poetic (perhaps magical?) realism that has went unmatched since its release.

Tom Cross’s article, All Aboard The Last (Narrative) Express reflects upon how the kinds of narrative and visual styles the game relies upon opens up an emotionally realistic space within the constrained physical quarters of the Orient Express. In it, Cross makes the argument that poetic realism (I’m paraphrasing him freely here) creates a truly believable and intimate world, whereas the geometric or representational realism we find in 95% of modern games truly fails to. It suitably whets the gaming appetite of someone who has never played the game, yet desires to.

Chris Remo’s article, The Last Express: Revisiting an Unsung Classic, consists of a lengthy interview with two of the gamer’s developers and provides a sense of the technical (and motivational!) feats involved in creating a truly unique adventure game. The article makes good background reading for someone who has already played through it a couple of times, and gave me a real sense for how a game could become a critical success yet fail financially.

If I’ve piqued your interest at all, you have quite a few options for playing it. Thankfully, the game runs just fine in Windows XP and Vista. GameTap subscribers have had access to it for years, but it is not available on GOG.com yet unfortunately. (Please Jordan, release it on GoG.com.. the folks there really do care about the classics!) If you’d like a physical copy, there are a few reasonable auctions on eBay, including a very nice boxed (complete) version. The game runs on Mac in “Classic” (OS9) mode, but not in OS X – so I’d suggest either booting to XP with boot camp, or playing the game in Dosbox.

I’d love to play through this game again, so if there is any interest in starting an ongoing play-through by e-mail, let’s get a discussion going!