The Last Express is without a doubt a unique game. Its visual
appearance and gameplay is unlike any other game I ever played. It
was created by Jordan Mechner, author of Prince of Persia–one
of the most popular games of early nineties (I spent a lot of time
playing Prince).The Last Express is called “mystery
adventure” by its creators, and it is a fitting description–as
you shall see from this review.

The name of the game refers to the famous Orient Express, an international
express train going from Paris to Constantinople via Strasbourg, Munich,
Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade. And why “last?” The story
takes place on the last train before the outbreak of the first World
War at the end of June 1914 (the service was not restored until 1932).
One character makes distressingly timeless remarks about “wars
on the Balkans going on for thousand of years and not going to stop
anytime soon.”

The express is populated by about 30 passengers of various nationalities,
each of them with their own agenda. There are French, Germans, Austrians,
Russians, Serbs, English, and Persians on the train, perhaps even
more. And of course there’s our hero–you–who is, surprise, American.

You play the role of Robert Cath, an American physician and adventurer.
You were invited aboard the Express by your good friend, Tyler Whitney.
You miss the departure from Paris but hop onto the train a while later
from a motorcycle (driven by a young woman nonetheless) in a dazzling
display of daring–and not the last either. You get into your compartment
only to find your friend Tyler lying dead on the floor with strange
claw-like marks on his face.

That is very unfortunate because you are already being pursued by
the French police in connection with a murder accusation (wrongful,
of course). Hence you can’t do the obvious, that is, call the conductor
and the police. But being a calm and resourceful adventurer, you dispose
of your friend’s body in a discreet manner and assume his identity.

And that’s where the story starts getting really mysterious. It quickly
becomes apparent that Tyler had some agenda on the train–but you
first have to discover what the agenda was. You only have a telegram
from him mentioning something big but not giving any very useful details.
You discover an empty case with some very expensive object very obviously
missing. And you have to identify Tyler’s murderer as well, especially
because he or she might be after you too.

There are various shady characters on the Express–militant nationalists,
anarchists, weapon smugglers, mysterious wealthy aristocrats, and
undercover agents of several countries. You have to deal with many
of them–and avoid getting killed in the process. On the upside, you
can get some romance as well–if you play your cards right. And of
course, you have to boldly go where you are not supposed to–without
arousing suspicion and without getting caught. But that’s standard
adventurer job description, nothing unusual really.

The interface is not-quite-point-and-click. You play in first-person
view and can look around and move in fixed steps. There is a small
amount of pixel-hunting when you have to find hidden buttons in certain
locations, but nothing an experienced adventurer couldn’t solve easily.
The movement can be confusing at first before you figure out the layout
of the train cars–it is easy to get lost.

There are some inventory-based puzzles of relatively low difficulty.
For the most part, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to be
in the right place at the right time–and finding out what the right
place actually is.

The Last Express employs an unusual system of saving game
positions. You do not get any save game slots, but there is a game
clock that you can rewind to any point in the past–or you can jump
back to major stops on the train’s route. It is also possible to have
several games in progress, each with its own clock. This save game
system is not as convenient as the usual setup, but it does have an
advantage: if you mess up and die or the game ends before reaching
the final destination for some other reason, the clock will automatically
rewind as far back as is necessary to let you perform the correct
actions leading to victory.

That may not be easy, however. The game is partially nonlinear–events
seem to take place in the same sequence and at about the same time
every time you play, but you have high degree of freedom of movement
around the Express. This means that you may or may not see certain
scenes, talk to certain people, or overhear certain conversations.
Most of them are fortunately not critical for completing the game
but may give you useful clues.

And this is probably what I liked least about The Last Express.
You often don’t know what to do. Nobody is giving you any clearly
defined quests (recover this, deliver that, kill this). I suppose
that’s part of the mystery, but I prefer slightly less mysterious
games. This game felt a little too vague to me. I didn’t get the right
feeling of identification with my character because I knew too little
about him at the beginning. Only during the game did some details
about his past surface.

But apart from the gameplay, which wasn’t exactly my cup of tea (though
it could well be someone else’s), I did like The Last Express.
It is a high-quality game, and it is clearly visible that no expense
was spared to get everything right down to the minutest detail (which,
unfortunately, is a quality that too many American productions lack).

The game producers were lucky enough to discover an old Orient Express
car in not too bad condition. From this car they created a very detailed
3D model, which served as a background for most of the game’s scenes.
Next, scenes with live actors were shot and combined together with
the computer-generated background into complete video sequences. But
3D models and live actors are not unique, and I said The Last Express
was. So what makes it so unusual?

The Last Express does not look like a game with live actors
at all. It looks like an art nouveau cartoon. If you don’t remember,
art nouveau is the style popular around 1914–one of the more famous
artists of that period was Alfons Mucha, whose paintings and posters
are well-known. The game creators achieved this cartoonish effect
by taking the completed FMV sequences and processing them with a computer
program that emphasized the contours and “flattened” the
pictures. The result looks in my opinion quite nice–you can see for
yourself from the screenshots.

On the game CDs there is a video about the making of The Last
Express, which depicts the process of the game’s creation in detail.

The animation is unusual, too. Most of the time the animation isn’t
fluent and looks more like a slide show (perhaps one frame per second).
It doesn’t look nearly as bad as it sounds, and I think this technique
allowed the authors to cram a lot more video sequences onto the three
CDs than would be otherwise possible. There are, however, some sequences
with high frame rates–and they look really good.

Those sequences are, for instance, the fight scenes–there are several
occasions where you have to engage in hand-to-hand combat against
your adversaries (usually armed only with your fists). It is easy
to get killed, but if you die the fight simply starts again, repeating
until you get it right. Personally, I could live without the fights,
but they are not all that difficult to win. I suppose the fights are
a legacy of Prince of Persia.

Another area showing an unusual attention to detail is sound. The
French actually speak French, Russians speak Russian, and Serbs Serbo-Croatian–most
of the foreign language dialogs are captioned so you won’t be left
out in the cold if you don’t speak all those languages (I certainly
don’t). The painstaking obsession with accuracy goes so far that the
people at Vienna train station speak with noticeable Viennese accents,
different from how the Germans speak. This little detail really impressed me.

The music is quite nice, too–properly dramatic in the right places
and recorded in high quality. There is even a lovely violin concerto
in the game (this slightly reminds me of the amazing opera scene in
Gabriel Knight 2). Unfortunately, you can’t listen to it much
because you have to busy yourself breaking into locked compartments
and “borrowing” items while everyone else is enjoying themselves
at the concert. But whoever said the adventurer’s life was easy?

The Last Express is a very well-made game, created with love
and unprecedented attention to detail. After long and hard thought,
I decided to give it an A-. The graphics and sound quality is excellent
and certainly deserves an A. The story is quite interesting too, although
it’s easy to miss some details. But the gameplay is a bit too unorthodox
for my liking, which accounts for the minus. Still, The Last Express
is a quality game and a classic.

Final Grade: A-

PC System Requirements:
IBM or 100% compatible Pentium, 60 MHz or better on Win95
486DX/2, 66 MHz or better on DOS
Windows 95 and DirectX 5 or higher or DOS 6.0 or higher
SVGA card with 1 MB memory or more
8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended)
4X CD-ROM drive
100% Microsoft-compatible mouse
Sound Blaster 16 or 100% compatible 16-bit sound card