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Last Stop review: half a really good Doctor Who episodeLondon’s calling
London’s calling
I was a fan ofVirginia, Variable State’s first-person FBI thriller. It used unusual camera cuts to create a really filmic vibe, something that games are always trying to do but rarely succeed.Last Stopis Variable State’s new story adventure game, and adds two more fully voiced protagonists, three converging storylines, and a bunch of glowy green sci-fi light, while keeping the TV show style. With all the stories taking place in the same (fictional) borough of London, the result is somewhere betweenBlack Mirrorand Doctor Who.
Our three protagonists are middle-aged single dad John, ruthless spy Meena, and tearaway teen Donna. Each protagonist’s story has six chapters, with their stories all converging on a seventh, final chapter that ties everything up. Your job as the player is to make dialogue choices (some of which might have ramifications later), walk in the right direction where necessary, and do a few mini-games of the rhythm-game-piano or brushing-teeth-after-breakfast variety.
LAST STOP | Gameplay DemoWatch on YouTube
LAST STOP | Gameplay Demo
Walk this way…The changes in camera angle do still have that issue where you’re not quite sure which way you should be pointing your thumb stick. It’s honestly best to just keep pressing forwards. Also, in a lot of scenes you’ll be walking with an NPC, and it is not uncommon for them to freak out if you turn too fast or their path takes them into a bollard.
There’s a lot of really good stuff in Last Stop. As its name implies, there’s a strong transport and travel theme in the game, which accurately reflects how people interact with London in real life. Donna runs and walks around a lot, or gets the bus, and she visits places over a more limited distance than the others; Meena is a superior bougie and raging dickhead incapable of telling the truth, and goes everywhere in the back of a black cab.
It also has some great musical stings (a later one in particular giving off massive whiffs of “comedic sneaking around bit in Star Wars”) and the voice cast is universally great. You can tell they had fun with the script, and the writing in general is surprisingly light touch. Its cast of characters is wonderfully diverse, too, and many of them play against expectations for the type of protagonists you’d normally expect to see in their respective genre stories. The third person view also allows for even more filmic angles and cuts. It’s particularly satisfying when someone is running desperately down the street and the camera gradually sweeps upwards behind them into an extreme wide shot, just like in the movies!
Donna is my favourite of the three protagonists. She matches her makeup to her outfit because she’s a boss.
But alongside the good bits are bad ones. Animations in general are a bit wonky, with the facial animations in particular reminding me of the comedy and tragedy masks from Ancient Greek drama - a Sim doing a gurning downturned sad face or cartoonish joy. Background characters are literally faceless drones, like walking shop manequins. A stylistic choice, perhaps, but one that still feels jarring in the moment.
The ending is, I promise you, absolutely not what you were expecting either, but sadly not in a good way. Every character gets a Final Choice that is presented as big and important and central to their story, but all feel pretty tacked on and unearned. The three central stories themselves are inconsistent when stacked up next to each other.
Overall, Last Stop feels like a game of unfortunate inconsistency. That’s not for lack of effort, I have to stress. On the contrary, I get the feeling that Variable State could have really let rip with this if only they’d had more time, money and resources, along with the robust production and editing processes that goes along with that (and that’s not just because I’d have loved to play thefourth, although sadly cut, Junji Ito-inspired storyeither, I promise). In that sense, Last Stop is probably theoppositeof Black Mirror and Doctor Who… but one I’m glad I saw through to the end regardless.
