Shame on Variable State. Shame on Annapurna Interactive. No, I’m not one of those fragile snowflakes bawling their eyes out and getting sandShame on Variable State. Shame on Annapurna Interactive. No, I’m not one of those fragile snowflakes bawling their eyes out and getting sand in their crack over the fact that this game includes races other than White people, and that the game dares to include characters that are LGBTQ. Those are not valid complaints.
However, what IS a valid complaint is that this game absolutely makes a mockery out of the art form of WRITING. How can you possibly have written this story, riddled with conversations that have no coherence, moments that have no fluidity, and attempts to trigger emotional beats from the audience that have in no way been earned? You know that frustration you get when you watch a movie, and you’re just screaming at characters not to do literally the dumbest thing possible in the situation, or despite their best interests, or for them to just say the one piece of information that would resolve the tension, but instead they opt to stay coy for no good reason? Last Stop is 6+ interminable hours of that exact feeling. Do you know how annoying it is to be playing a game that supposedly has choices and realize that all of your options are some variant of “Do anything except what a rational person would do in this situation”?
Did whoever wrote this drivel ever bother to try to reading it all written out as a script? Did you share it with other people who could maybe dissuade you from thinking that it was good? Last Stop was so poorly written that not only do I want the hours I put into this game back, I want this game to UNEXIST because of how damaging it will be to the art of storytelling and fiction.
Last Stop is a work of “interactive” fiction developed by Variable State and published by Annapurna Interactive that attempts to tell the story of the lives of 3 people and a mysterious portal. You have to play the stories of these 3 main characters individually, which just further amplifies the disjointed nature of the fiction. People who apologize for this game will want to pin the game’s narrative shortcomings on this poor choice. (Don’t get fancy with your writing if you are incapable of telling a decent story in a straightforward manner. Complexity is not the soul of wit.) But, that’s not where the majority of the frustration lies. You’ll have characters making 180s on their motivations and actions from sentence to sentence. One moment you’re deciding you’ve spent enough time with your dad after experiencing 4 dialogue boxes of conversation with him. He’s had enough of you, too. The very next text box after lying that you have to leave, you TELL HIM YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO. THEN HE ASKS YOU TO STAY FOR A CUP OF TEA. You literally (not figuratively) JUST told each other that you were don’t with this meeting, but no, you can’t go. Because you need to engage in a pointless making tea minigame, and you have to go back to the house to have a DRAMATIC REALIZATION!
This happens throughout the entire game. Characters just get hyper focused on details while absolutely ignoring pertinent information. Characters’ personalities go completely off the rails specifically because the writer feels there’s an emotional beat that needs to come at this point in the story, and then characters never behave that way again. This story is written by somehow who wouldn’t be able to maintain a coherent thought in a 240-character tweet, much less a full-on story. The game is paced in such a way that it tries to make you feel some kind of emotion every few minutes or so, but the dialogue and actions leading up to that moment are so poorly executed that there is no emotional foundation to those moments and the only emotions they evoke are consternation and anger.
The interactivity of the game is at the same level of the writing. Nothing in this game requires any skill. Why do these elements exist? Because they do. The choice to include them is as confounding and perplexing as the writing. The only times these elements will remotely resemble a challenge are because the game’s inputs are wonky. They at no point approach something resembling fun.
The art and the music are great, but unfortunately, they are merely window dressing to lure you into this terrible, terrible waste of time and money. I say again, shame on Variable State, and shame on Annapurna Interactive for unleashing this hot garbage upon the world.… Expand
