Introduction
"The Last Door" is a
Lovecraft-inspired horror adventure series. Originally it was an online
Flash-based game, released in chapters, and playable in a web browser at
the thelastdoor.com website. The first episode was funded by a
Kickstarter and the remaining chapters are being funded by donations
made through the Last Door website. The series is ongoing, and the next
in the series (Chapter 5, aka Season Two, Episode One) has met its goal
and is in development, scheduled to release in summer 2014. Although the
developers have met their funding goal for Chapter 5, they're hoping to
raise more money for stretch goals.
"The Last Door: Collector's Edition"
is a downloadable game that includes the first four Episodes (Season
One) into a format that does not have to be played online. The four
episodes (or chapters) are:
Episode One - "The Letter"
Episode Two - "Memories"
Episode Three - "The Four Witnesses"
Episode Four - "Ancient Shadows"
"The Last Door" games are being
created by a small Spanish development team known as The Game Kitchen.
The Collector's Edition is published by Phoenix Online, and is available
for purchase at the Phoenix Online website as well as other online
distributors such as GOG, Steam, Gamefly, Desura, Amazon, Greenman
Gaming, Zodiac, and the Mac Game Store. Links for purchase can be found
on
The Last Door website here.
Story and Characters
The Last Door takes place in
Victorian England in the late 1800's. For most of the game, you play as
Jeremiah Devitt, investigating what happened to your friend Anthony
Beechworth, and ultimately being drawn into whatever bizarre research or
experimentation Anthony had gotten involved with. Occasionally there is
a scene where you play as a different character, but mostly you are
following Devitt's story.
In Chapter 1, Devitt explores
Beechworth's house, trying to make sense of what happened there. In
Chapter 2, Devitt visits the site of what used to be the boarding school
that he and his friend Beechworth attended. For some reason, Devitt
doesn't remember what happened there, but thinks it may be related to
his current problems with weird nightmares. I don't fully understand how
Devitt gets from where he is at the end of Chapter 2 to where he is at
the beginning of Chapter 3, but he seems to be in a London slum
throughout most of Chapter 3 – or perhaps it's one of those "border
regions" on the fringes of reality – neither wholly in the real world
nor in the world beyond. In Chapter 4, Devitt visits the house of
another of his old schoolmates, still trying to find out what it was
that Beechworth, and apparently this other friend, Alexandre, were
working on that could have caused the strange events surrounding
Beechworth's fate.
Besides Devitt, you follow the
progress of Devitt's doctor, Dr. Wakefield, and his consultant, Dr.
Johan Kaufmann, who are treating Devitt for his disturbing nightmares.
When Devitt disappears and fails to keep scheduled appointments, Drs.
Wakefield and Kaufmann are concerned and try to find out where he might
have gone. Their search so far has happened only in cut scenes, but
perhaps they'll be playable characters in Chapter 5.
Recaps
At the beginning of Chapters 2, 3,
and 4, there is a recap of events from the previous chapter. The recaps
are done using sepia-tinted images from the previous episode accompanied
by brief descriptions of what had happened. These recaps were especially
useful for me at the beginnings of Chapters 3 and 4, where I was not
entirely sure what had happened in the previous chapter. The recaps
would certainly be useful to refresh your memory if some time has passed
since you'd played the previous chapter.
Puzzles
Most puzzles are inventory-based.
Occasionally you speak with other characters to progress in the game,
mainly in the 2nd and 3rd chapters, where there are more characters to
speak to. The first chapter has one puzzle that uses sound as a hint
that a certain interaction is available, and the third chapter has a
puzzle that absolutely requires sound cues to solve. For those with
trouble distinguishing sounds, Closed Captioning is available in the
game's Options menu.
Controls
The controls for The Last Door are
simple point-and-click. The Main Menu includes Continue, Episodes,
Extras, Options, and Quit. "Continue" is for playing from your saved
game, and does not show up until after you've begun playing. "Episodes"
allows you to start playing from the beginning of any of the four
episodes. "Extras" include Achievements, Credits, and access to four
short, playable scenes after the game is completed. (The game is not
interrupted by silly announcements that you've received an Achievement,
which would ruin the atmosphere. You might never know Achievements exist
unless you access them through the Extras menu.) Options include
Language (my version had English or Spanish), Fullscreen (or not),
separate volume controls for music and sound effects (there is no
voice), Closed Captions (for the sake of those who can't hear the sound
effects or audio cues), and Dyslexia-friendly Fonts.
While playing the game, clicking
inventory items on the magnifying glass icon (located in the inventory
bar at the bottom of the screen) may give a description of an item, or a
close-up view, as in the case of notes and books. Using the Escape key
on your keyboard takes you out of the game and provides access to the
Main Menu.
After finishing an episode, the game
offers you a button to click to start the next episode. Or you can start
from the Episodes menu. At the end of Chapter 4, the button takes you
back to the beginning of Chapter 4.
Saving and Loading
The game allows you to choose which
of the four episodes to start with. This can be useful if you want to
replay a chapter. Unfortunately there is no manual save, but since
individual episodes are not that long, it isn't as much of a problem as
it could have been. There is a single autosave, and the game saves every
time you enter a new area. If you exit the game, restart it, and want to
load your save, you use the "Continue" option. The game also gives you
the option of restarting the chapter. As far as I can tell, your
autosave is overwritten if you decide to play a different chapter.
The Last Door was originally an
online Flash game. As such, I was a little concerned that it would use
Flash cookies for saves the way Machinarium did, and unexpectedly dump
all my saves. However I did not have that problem with The Last Door:
Collector's Edition. I'm not absolutely sure if the game uses Flash or
not (right-clicking does not bring up that Flash configuration box you
see if you right-click a YouTube video or online Flash game). But there
is an .swf file in the game folder.
Installation
Installing the game was fairly easy,
but probably varies with where you buy the game from. With the Phoenix
Online version, there was no actual installer. I simply extracted the
game to the folder where I wanted it. Then I created a desktop shortcut
from the game executable. On Windows 8.1, this was: Right-click the "The
Last Door CE.exe" file, choose "Send to," then "Desktop (create
shortcut)."
Great Honkin' Pixels (and other
graphics-related stuff)
I don't usually mind playing
pixellated games. I've played older Sierra and LucasArts games that
display at 320x200 resolution. However the pixels in The Last Door still
looked unusually large to me. I counted them up to be sure, and I ended
up with 103 pixels across and 78 pixels down. Now with an odd number
like 103, I probably miscounted and am off a pixel or so. But I can't be
that far off. So... 103x78 resolution or close to it? That's a
significantly lower resolution than the old DOS games I sometimes play,
including King's Quest I from 1987 (which I think is the oldest I've
played).
According to The Last Door website,
the graphics are intended to "show only what's necessary, triggering
your imagination to bring the game's world alive." That's fine in
theory, and keeps certain scenes from being too explicitly gory for some
players to endure. But I've seen a few comments in game forums from
people who were not able to play the game – not because they were averse
to games in low resolution, but because the game gave them headaches
because their eyes kept trying to resolve the pixels into an image. Most
people don't seem to have this issue, but it might be advisable to demo
the game before purchase to make sure the oversized pixels aren't going
to cause headaches. You can play the online version of the game for free
at thelastdoor.com though you're required to create an account and log
in before you play. Alternatively, watch a YouTube video of someone else
playing the game at full screen.
I really liked the use of color in
this game. According to The Last Door website, the color depth is 8-bit
(256 colors). In most areas (except for the foggy area) colors are
intense and atmospheric. They're one of the things I liked best about
the game.
Even though the resolution of the
game is very low, the lighting in the game uses an enhanced effect.
While old DOS games use pixels to indicate lighting effects, lighting in
The Last Door does not stick to the pixels. Street lamps and hand-held
lanterns glow just as they would in a high resolution game. The only
place where I remember seeing lighting indicated by pixels was in the
Extras menu.
Sound
The music, composed by Carlos Viola,
is excellent. It varies from orchestral to somber piano to atonal (in
the weirder game locations). Sound effects are similarly well done.
Occasionally the music disappears, leaving only the sound effects and
whatever background sound might be present. Overall the sound
contributes greatly to the overall atmosphere.
Soundtracks from the individual
episodes are available from the Last Door website. Music from the first
episode is free, but is by donation for the later episodes.
Jump Scares?
The Last Door occasionally has what
could be considered a "jump scare." Sudden, unexpected changes in a game
location, accompanied by sudden, discordant music or sound effects, may
cause you to jump. But the game is more about building suspense, and an
escalating sense that something is terribly wrong, than sheer sound
volume or something jumping out at you. Your character may be attacked
on occasion, but it's usually in a cut scene. It's not like there are
monsters jumping at you from out of dark corners and devouring you,
where you have to click, click, click to get away. I'm not even sure if
Devitt can actually die in the game, though perhaps part of him does as
he delves deeper into forbidden mysteries.
Differences in the Collector's
Edition
The Collector's Edition is promoted
as having enhanced graphics and remastered sound as compared to the
online Flash version. I've only checked the first Episode, but I noticed
more detailed descriptions of the pictures on the walls in the lower
hall of Beechworth Manor. One of the rooms that was blue in the online
version was changed to shades of tan and dull orange in the CE. My sound
system is not such that I could discern a difference in sound "quality"
between the CE and the original, but some sound effects were different.
The Collector's Edition includes
"Achievements" that can be viewed after finishing the game. The
"Achievements" do not interrupt the game while you're playing it with
distracting proclamations that you "achieved" this or that. I didn't
even realize there were Achievements until after I'd finished the game
and checked the Extras menu.
The Collector's Edition also has 4
short playable scenes in the Extras menu. Although I was able to play
the scenes before finishing the game, they make more sense if you've
played through the game at least once.
Technical Issues
The game crashed once during the
first episode when I was going through a door in the upstairs hall. It
was one of those crashes where you click the error message and you're
back at the desktop. The game autosaves each time you enter a new area.
It may have crashed when trying to save. Fortunately not much progress
was lost since it had saved when I first entered the hall. I restarted
the game, chose Continue, and I was back at the start of the hall. The
crash was not repeatable, and may have been caused by a conflict with
something my Windows 8.1 computer was volunteering to do in the
background. Except for this one glitch, the game was stable.
Miscellaneous Comments
The Last Door has been compared to
the works of authors Lovecraft and Poe. Though the first episode
reminded me of Poe, with the black birds (reminiscent of The Raven) and
something being walled up in the basement (The Cask of Amontillado),
most of the game reminds me of Lovecraft – with supposedly educated
people being corrupted by a search for "truth," and unleashing an
ancient evil which seeps through to the physical world from its own
plane of existence, permeating and slowly poisoning everything.
Is that what's happening in the
game? Well, maybe. It's a little hard to tell. The first episode is
fairly straightforward, with the protagonist, Devitt, investigating in
the real world. This starts getting more confused in the second episode,
where Devitt visits what used to be the boarding school where he first
met his friend Anthony Beechworth. He visits the ex-boarding school, now
a sort of nursing home run by nuns, in an attempt to remember what had
happened there. Present day events and memories become intermixed, and
it's unclear how Devitt gets from his location at the former boarding
school to his location in London at the beginning of Episode 3. Strange
things happen in Episode 3, and it's not clear whether they are really
in London or taking place in an alternate dimension or along fuzzy
dimensional borders.
Some misspellings in the free Flash
version have been corrected in the Collector's Edition. However there
were still a few mistakes, such as "Why not to organize a race," "I have
made my mind," "Cristal" instead of "Crystal," and the word "disarray"
when they probably meant "disrepair."
"The Last Door: Collector's Edition"
is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (Ubuntu and other Debian-based
Linux). Purchase through Phoenix Online gave me access to a page with
download links for Windows, Mac, and Linux versions – 10 downloads of
each. At one time, some the individual chapters were available for iPad,
but as of the time of this review they've been removed from the iTunes
store.
Individual episodes are not terribly
long. Some players may finish an episode in 45 minutes, or even less on
a replay.
I thought the first two episodes
were the best. The 3rd was too mazelike for my taste and didn't seem to
advance the story as much as the first two chapters did. I'm not sure
why I didn't care for the 4th episode. It was shorter than the other
episodes, and I guess I expected more revelations from it than what I
got. There is also the problem of this being an ongoing series, so
Chapter 4 didn't have a nice neat ending and ended on something of a
cliffhanger.
Recommendations
I'd recommend the game to any fan of
Lovecraft or horror adventure games in general, provided they are OK
with the low resolution graphics. The resolution is low enough that the
few scenes with blood leave all the gory details to your imagination.
Grade: B+
System Requirements
Minimum system requirements (PC):
Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 (or Debian-based Linux)
Processor: Intel Atom 1.6 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video Card: Integrated with 64 MB RAM
200 MB free HD space
Recommended system requirements
(PC):
Windows XP / Vista / 7 / 8 (or Debian-based Linux)
Processor: Dual Core 2.4 GHz
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Video Card: Dedicated with 128 MB RAM
400 MB free HD space
Minimum system requirements
(Mac):
OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) or later
Processor: Intel Atom 1.6 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Video Card: Integrated with 64 MB RAM
200 MB free HD space
Recommended system requirements
(Mac):
OS X 10.5.x (Leopard) or later
Processor: Dual Core 2.4 GHz
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Video Card: Dedicated with 128 MB RAM
400 MB free HD space
Note that GOG lists OS X 10.7 as the
minimum Mac OS, while Steam lists Leopard (OS X 10.5.x) as the minimum.
I checked the Mac version on a computer with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x),
and it seemed to work fine. So I'm guessing Steam is correct about
Leopard being the minimum.
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
June 2014
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