Murder most foul! Let's play The Last Express!

Good evening. My name is Mr Bean and I will be your host for a tale of mystery that will chill the very marrow of your bones. The year is 1914 and Europe is on the brink of war. As the opulent Orient Express pulls out of the Paris station on its cross-continent journey to Constantinople, it carries a man who could change the course of the impending conflict.



The Last Express is an adventure game created by Jordan ‘Prince of Persia’ Mechner and his Smoking Car Productions. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it had the misfortune to be published by Broderbund in 1997 right before Broderbund folded up shop, meaning the initial release was only distributed to stores for a few weeks before being discontinued. Interplay apparently did a budget re-release in 2000 that worked a bit better with more modern operating systems, but Interplay went bankrupt a short time after publishing, meaning that both disc based versions of the game are rather hard to find. Gametap has a digital version, but for the most part, the game has slipped into obscurity and that’s a damn shame since I think it did some really interesting things.

Like many adventure games of the period immediately following the release of Myst, The Last Express is a first person environmental puzzle game. What sets it apart is the fact that instead of exploring a vast empty world, you explore a smaller environment, the Orient Express, fully populated with a cast of characters that move to their own motivations and timetables. The game moves in accelerated real time and there are very few hard plot triggers throughout the story, so the only way to piece the complete story together is to try and be in the right place at the right time to overhear conversations and clues. Since you can’t be everywhere at once, you have to pick and choose who to follow and who to ignore. This is where you guys come in. I’ll be opening up the floor for votes after every segment. Let me know who you think is most interesting or suspicious and I’ll focus my attention on those characters.

The other interesting mechanic is the unique save system. Instead of having to keep multiple save files for different points in the game, the game constantly auto-saves and you can rewind time at will to any point in the past. Deaths and game-overs are handled by the game auto-rewinding to the last instant where you could avoid your current fate. Sometimes this is a few minutes, sometimes a few days. Once you rewind time, either at will or because of a game over, you have a short window where you can move forward again if you decide that messing with the space time continuum is a bad idea.

Alright; enough jabbering about the mechanics of the game, let’s get down to business.

Opening Cinematic



Aaah, summer in Paris. The date tells us that it is a scant 4 days to the start of open hostilities and World War I. We find ourselves at the Gare de l’Est station.



Here we meet a man in a sweet hat apparently waiting for someone or something.



Even with the international tensions ratcheting up, there seem to be an awful lot of police patrolling the station.



We don’t have time to mull this over for very long before the train pulls out of the station without whatever or whomever our friend was waiting for.



What’s this? A late arrival? And he’s in the mood for some daring do!



After a quick thanks to the mystery rider and a quick check of the tie to make ourselves presentable, we can begin exploring.

Meet our hero, Robert Cath.



We start here in the rear of the train with nothing but the contents of our pockets. Since this IS an adventure game, let’s take a quick look and see if we have anything useful:



Since we don’t have a suitcase, our inventory is limited to just what we can carry around with us. Currently all we’ve got is a telegram and a scrap of newsprint.



We’re here to meet our buddy Tyler Whitney to assist him with some ill-defined… thing. Let’s see if the scrap of newsprint is any more informative.



Ok, just blurb article about the search for a couple of cop-killers. I’m sure that won’t affect us in the slightest.



Movement is handled by clicking when your cursor turns into that handy little arrow there.



Wow. Check out the hat on whoever that is at the end of the hall. Maybe the pope is on this train! Incidentally, if the game promotional materials are to be believed, the train interior was modeled from period correct photos of the Orient Express.



The game handles all the contextual duties, so if it’s possible to talk to someone the speech bubble pops up automagically and conversation is just a click away.



Cath: Excuse me, can you tell me which compartment is Tyler Whitney’s?
Conductor: Ahh, monsieur Whitney. Excuse me. Your compartment is #1.

Hrm. Apparently Tyler didn’t get out much before the train left if even the conductor doesn’t know who he is yet. Oh well, we can correct him later, let’s go see our friend.



Knock, knock, knock…

Nobody home. I’m sure he won’t mind if we pop in and freshen up before exploring the rest of the train.

Cath: Tyler…

Oh crap. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.



He’s dead Jim. There’s a murderer aboard! We have to warn someone!



Yeah, I’d call this an emergency.



Click.



Oh hell. If you haven’t figured it out already, the brown haired man in the newspaper clipping that we have in our pocket is Cath. With a cop-killer handy at the scene, the police don’t even bother to investigate the crime and pin the whole thing on us.

For every premature game over, we get one of these little diary entries narrated by an as-of-now unknown British woman. We’ll find the source of these later in the game, but for now, just know that they give us the resolution to all the little non-cannon branches of the timeline.

If we can’t bring the gendarme into this, that means it’s up to us to solve Tyler’s murder! First thing’s first though, we have to do something about the body lest we be hauled off to some dismal French dungeon.

We have two options:
1) Hide the body and risk someone here on the train discovering it
2) Dispose of the body immediately while we’re still close to Paris and risk someone in the suburbs discovering it

Whichever we choose will have consequences further into our journey, so please choose wisely. Help me Talking Time! I’m way too pretty to go to prison!

By the time they inform the train that somebody threw a body off, you'll be long gone.

2) Dispose of the body immediately while we’re still close to Paris and risk someone in the suburbs discovering it

(I've heard good things about this game, but never got a chance to see it in action, so bravo on LP'ing it!)

I dunno about throwing it off the train at the moment - if someone does find it, they'll notify the police...even though we'll be long gone, the police will probably telegraph the nearest station to search the train.

On the other hand, since the conductor doesn't know who we are, we can fake being the dead guy until we get somewhere more remote to dump the body.

So I say Option 1 - Hide the Body. At least until after we go into the country or pass by a river or something.

Hiding bodies seems to be a great idea.

Oh man, this game is so wonderful.

Definitely hide the body, I say.

I remember seeing a promotional trailer from the original publisher back in the day... I don't remember what game, but the trailer and a behind the scenes on how they do the character animation. I was super excited about the game. I remember searching my local store and never seeing the game and like most people, it fell off my radar.

Super excited about this LP. Hopefully this game will live up to my past-self's expectations...

Wow they had cel-shading way back when...
Oh.

Get rid of the body. If you try to hide it, obviously someone is gonna find it.

Oh man I always wanted to play this game since way back when. You can say that I'm "on board."

Get rid of it quick! People always walk in on ya when ya try to hide something like that.

Man, I remember playing this game! It took me a hell-ass long time to work out how to get started, then everything just unfolded. I seem to remember getting it as a Christmas present one year from now-estranged cousins because they knew I liked video games and trains.

Better than most of the other options, that's for damn sure.

Toss the body out the window.

Or eat it.

Wash off the blood and arrange an elaborate series of pulleys and winches throughout the train to fool everyone into thinking he's still alive.

That only works if he's named Bernie!

Oooh, those of you who haven't played this before are in for some fun with this.

I'm going to stay out of the way lest I spoil anything, but this is one of my favourite adventure games from the period just ahead of the genre's hibernation.

I've always thought it was kind of funny how the girl who gave you the bike ride to the train takes off her hat as if to say "oh, I'm a hot chick by the way."

Yes, this game does continue Mechner's long standing love affair with rotoscoping.

Wikipedia actually has a nice progress shot of a scene from about mid-game. It's interesting how heavily the actors had to be made up in order for the details to survive the process.

It's a pity Mechner doesn't still make games like this. Technology has advanced far enough that all of that post-production work could be done automatically with video filters. A pity the technology wasn't up to par back in the day; Last Express is kind of choppy with most animations (though a few of them are beautifully smooth). A 2D title with this sort of rotoscoping and consistently fluid animation would be quite the sight!

Saw this today and thought it may interest anyone who wants to play along at home.

Expect an update this weekend so if anybody else wants to vote on horrible things to do to Tyler's body, get them in now. So far, body disposal is winning 4 to 3.

Chunk the cadaver off the train.

Hide the body in the conductors cabin.

Switch clothes with Tyler and let him take the fall posthumously.

Or, failing that, just chuck 'im.

The horror...