One of the best games of all time, but was left in the dark thanks to forces at play.
You are Robert Cath, an American doctor who was assumed to be a murderer of an Irish cop and is on the run from French and English police. You are invited by your friend Tyler Whitney to go with him on the Orient Express to Constantinople (now known at Istanbul) and except about 3 days from WW1 breaking out. You miss the train departure in Paris so you board by jumping on it from a motor cycle driven by a nameless friend. When you get to your compartment, Tyler is dead. Who killed him? Why was he killed? What was the thing he had in the wooden box that looks like it holds a giant egg? All of these you will solve while keeping your identity a secret and keeping yourself alive. All I can tell you for sure is this: there is a love story, a story involving a former Russian pollination and a Russian Communist revolutionist, and the murder mystery of your friend. The rest of the story is up to you. I mean that in a literal sense. What happens, when it happens, and what order it happens in is totally depending of what you do with people or things when. The game scrips itself as it goes so no 2 games are the same. There are so many things that can happen, the script for The Last Express is over 800 pages long. Even if you use a walkthrough like I did (I'll get to that in a later) you will do something different by accident but end up with the same result. The game has about 30 bad ending, i.e. you get caught or you are killed. There are 4 good endings though. The ending I saw when I beat it was the best game ending I've seen to date. It was so emotional that I wanted to cry but I wasn't sad enough to tear up. I also made my jaw take residence on the floor from the beginning of the end cut scene to the end of the credits. It defiantly makes up for any frustrations encountered in the game.
Gameplay:
At a glance, The Last Express looks like your average MYST rip-off with a different story line and actual people to interact with. But that is the farthest thing from the truth. The story line becomes so intricate and interesting that the puzzles and action sequences just become an excuse to advance the storyline. The characters on the train represent powers at play at the time the game is set. A English spy, a German arms dealer who cares mostly about the "Father Land" (i.e. the German Empire), and a Russian Communist revolutionist. Thoughs are the best examples. The bad part of the gameplay that keeps it from a 10.0 is about 1/5 of the time there is nothing to do. You just sit there bored out of your mind waiting for whatever your waiting for to happen. I read through about 2/3 of a Nintendo Power magazine in the 1/5 of boredom. Another bad part is the action sequences. These are ok at first encounter with each, but after 4 or 5 times it becomes frustrating. Another minor thing you can get over with a little practice is when you double click you go into speed mode where you race down the hallway very fast to the next car. It is easy to do this by accident when you try and reach a room at the middle of the hallway as fast as possible. But like I said, this can be over come with a little practice. Everything else about it is perfect.
Graphics:
The graphics in this game are out of this world of a 1997 game. It's a lush 3D environment but is kind of ruined by the lack of anti-aliasing in the 90's. The people are fantastic. The Last Express is the only game to date to use something call "rotoscoping". Rotoscoping is when you make a movie but the sets can be bland because detail can be added in later. Or you can use blue screen like they did here. You take all of the important stuff on the screen (i.e.mostly the actors in the case of The Last Express) , put it in the computer, turn that into a black and white drawing like thing, and add color and detail. That gives the people in The Last Express the look and feel you will never see in any other game. You know that "lack of anti-aliasing" thing I was talking about. That also hurts the look of the Characters a lot at first, but after a while you get use to it and you see the real beauty of them.
Sound:
Sound is a key aspect in The Last Express, which is why they spent so much time and money on it. And it shows. You would not know if this game was from the mid to late 90's if you based it on sound design. The sound gets stronger then fades realistically when the conductor comes through the hallway announcing the dinning car is open or where they are stopped for how long. Sound is also realistically muffled through walls, doors, and windows. The reason sound is so important is because there is a lot of eavesdropping in this game to say the least and it is very important to advancing the storyline. First time difficulty:
The first time you play through is really hard because you have no idea what so ever about what to do. So you will spend a lot of time looking at a walkthrough or reading the strategy guide. Or you're a god at adventure games. After you beat it, you can go back and experiment to see what happens and try different tactics. The Sad Reality:
Although The Last Express got raves reviews from almost everyone, the game sold next to nothing because of a few but huge forces at play. 1. No marketing at all. There was a trailer for The Last Express, but that's all the marketing it got. No joke. The reason is Broderbund's marketing department quit just weeks before the game was released. 2. Softbank, one of the publishers and distributes, pulled out of the gaming industry, dissolving its subsidiary GameBank and canceling several dozen titles in development, including the nearly finished PlayStation port of The Last Express. 3. Borderbund was bought out by The Learning Company which was only interested in making educational software (CURE YOU CRAPPY EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE!!!!!!) and forced Borderbund to stop production of all of its video games. This happened only after a few months of production on The Last Express. It didn't even make it to the holiday season of 97' ;( The Re-release:
The Last Express was revived in 2000 when Interplay bought the rights to The Last Express and put it on shelfs as a budget title. Sadly, this also only lasted a few months because Interplay went bankrupt. It's such a same such a perfect and revolution