The hero of The Last Express is Robert Cath. Without any introduction, we find him riding parallel to the train just outside of Paris, leaping aboard while both are still in motion. We learn quickly that he is a wanted man, though the charges against him are false. He is called aboard the train to meet up with GET NAME, an old friend, although he does not give a reason. When Cath finds him, he is lying dead in his room. After disposing the body and assuming his identity, he learns of the holes that NAME has dug for himself. Not only is he in the middle of an arms deal with a weasly German named GET NAME, but he was also smuggling a precious artifact known as the Firebird, which has completely disappeared. Cath must not only fulfill the obligations of his departed friend, but foil other threats aboard the train as a result of the exploding tensions of a continent on the verge of war.

When actually playing the game, it uses a first person perspective, much like Myst and its ilk. Whereas many of those types of games sought to establish fantastic environments, The Last Express instead seeks to replicate the look and feel of the actual train. The development team found an old car in Europe and used it to meticulously model the virtual one in the game, resulting in an feeling of genuine authenticity.

The beauty environments is often overshadowed by the gorgeous character artwork. Conscious of the fact that CGI rendered humans looked awful and real life video was often hokey, The Last Express instead uses rotoscoped animation. The process is similar to Mechner's earlier games, Karateka and Prince of Persia, where a human is filmed taking various actions, then traced and recolored by a computer. Both of these older games were side-scrollers, and the sprites were quite small and indistinct, mostly used for running, jumping and fighting. Here it's used as if it were a whole movie - or, perhaps more accurately, a comic book. The animation is inconsistent, most often moving at about a frame a second, but it is occasionally smoother during certain scenes. The effect is slightly jarring, as single frames blend into each other in attempt to simulate movement, but the awkwardness fades once you become accustomed to it. When it is fully animated - when passing characters in the train hallways and during fight scenes - it looks completely amazing, but considering it already took the developers four years to put out this game, a full motion effort was undoubtedly far out of reach. 

It still looks amazing, though. Whenever any character passes you, they excuse themselves and look straight into your eyes, often giving you a quick and friendly nod. It's a subtle touch that more wholly immerses you in the environment, an important element when so many other games seem to relegate the player as a floating entity. It helps The Last Express stand out from its peers, and while the technique has since shown up in a few movies - most notably, GET NAMES - it does little to lessen the visual impact.

It helps that Cath is a totally badass too. The characters comment that he's a typical American - forward and confrontational when others are far more reserved, but with a dash of intelligence, him being both a skilled doctor and speaker of half a dozen languages. 









The use of a real time clock is not new amongst adventure games - even some of the early King's Quest games did it - but they usually acted as little more than simple time limits. Its implementation in The Last Express is far more complicated, as it governs the entire flow of the narrative. Each of the characters is governed by a script, moving to and from certain locations, eating dinner, chatting in the smoking car, or simply relaxing in their room. 

Most of your time aboard the train is simply spent listening to these people converse. Not all of it is necessarily important to the core plotline, but it does greatly flesh out the narrative, which is largely why this game is so important. As a period piece, it represents the anxieties held by the European nations on the verge of exploding into full blown war. Each character (or group of characters) represent a nationality, and not all of them get along. 



GET NAME of GET COUNTRY is traveling with her sickly grandfather GET NAME. Aboard the train is also GET NAME, a childhood friend who dreams of freedom from their countries opression. While at times it seems like their romance may bloom, they are split apart by NAME's anarchist philosophies, a tragic element that ensures the two will never be together. Although only a subplot in the grand scheme of things, it's an important representation of the political tension that led to the outbreak of the first World War.

Meanwhile, Anna Wolff, the famous (and beautiful) Austrian violin player who is accompanied everywhere by her dog, shows a curious interest in NAME, himself a rotund, balding weasal. 

The GET NAME family is traveling from their homeland of GET NAME to Turkey for the father's job, and the tension between them is quite evident. 

In a lot of ways, The Last Express is a more modern implementation of Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest, another mystery game from nearly a decade prior. That game worked on a similar principle, in that the story was largely character-driven, and much of the game was spent listening to other character's conversations. However, it did not operate in real time, instead moving forward in "time blocks" triggered by certain actions. 

But for as much as The Last Express improves on Sierra's almost-classic, it falls into the same basic pitfall - there is very little actual direction, and most of the game is spent simply click and forth through the train cars, hoping to stumble upon some interesting dialogue or important event. There are very few adventure game-style puzzles, and their appearance is almost jarring when they do pop up. The game is also very particular about what you can and can't do - you can only speak to characters when and where the game allows you, rendering them solely as background elements when you can't. And as a result of the action running in real time, there are moments where there simply isn't anything happening. There is no way to speed up time, so the only option is to wait it out.

There are, of course, a handful of key moments where you need to take action - recovering the Firebird during a concert, defusing a bomb, saving the train from terrorists - but it's not always clear what you're supposed to be doing until it's too late. That's kind of how the game is structured to work, oddly enough - at any point you can rewind time as far as you want, allowing you to fix any screw-ups, up to and including your own deaths. As estalished in the opening segments, when you need to get rid of NAME's BODY, you're almost expected to lose and then travel back in time to find a workaround. Whenever you do get a "game over", the game will automatically rewind time to a point where you can fix your mistakes, giving you some kind of a clue of what you're supposed to be doing. But there's still a sense of aimlessness that's hard to overcome, and it can easily frustrate.

There are those who will undoubtedly hate the game for its unconventional structure, but for those whom it clicks, it becomes incredibly, deeply involving, perhaps moreso than any other adventure game yet made.

While time is linear, your actions are not, and conversations can potentially change based on who you've previous talked to. Even though The Last Express isn't an incredibly long game, it's far more replayable than most, offering different dialogues to discover, or events that play out slightly differently based on your actions.

Historical fiction is rare in the gaming medium, beyond the endless recycling of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story or alternate universes a la Command and Conquer: Red Alert, which are only used as background for fighting anyway. 

---with a few nods to Raymond Chandler's The Maltese Falcon--