Episode 271: The Last Express

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead continues to explore World War I in an extended episode that looks at 1997's The Last Express. Rob and Troy are joined by Idle Thumbs' Chris Remo to dive into an adventure game that explores the often-overlooked time in history that preceded World War I.

 

Links:

Chris Remo's interview feature at Gamasutra

 

Jeremy Peel's Mechner interview

 

Umberto Eco on Casablanca

 

Rob's article at Gamers With Jobs

 

 

Listen here.

[clyde]

Obviously I'm going to listen to this. 

 

I'm having a hard time deciding whether I would enjoy it more having read the articles, or enjoy reading the articles more after listening to y'all talk.

[CEJ]

Fantastic cast! The Last Express is one of my favorite games. I think the realtime aspect of the game is crucial to my enjoyment of it. However I think the rewind feature is only a necessary function of the fact that the game have fail states. A save and load setup would have been a nightmare for this game. But I do think the rewind feature takes away from the permanence of the player choice/expression and the fact that time is fleeting potentially loses some of its impact. I would like to see a realtime game with a wider possibility space but I do think The Last Express is a source of inspiration of how that would work. The fail states serve to tell a specific chain of events, but without fail states I think that the structure of the game could support something with more nuanced player expression and narrative.

 

Also Troy or Rob mentioned a few books at some point, but I'm too lazy to scrub through the episode again.. Did anyone write them down? The Guns of August was one of them.

[Troy Goodfellow]

I am reading Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers"

 

Rob is reading Max Hastings's "Catastrophe 1914"

 

I am assuming we will trade books sometime in the next six months.

[Procyon Lotor]

The Sleepwalkers is an absolutely amazing book.  I read it a few months ago.  It REALLY drills down into the causes, chains-of-events, and personalities that led to the war.  I hope you enjoy it!

[MikeO]

This was one of your best episodes, guys. I remembered The Last Express from when it was first released, but I had never played it. Downloaded on iPad and have been playing the last couple of days, and it really is a unique game. (game, or whatever you want to call it) No doubt I will eventually reach some fail state, and will have to resort to walkthroughs, but I am really enjoying the ride so far. Thanks for bringing it to my attention again.

[Gormongous]

I agree about the excellence of this episode, particularly the need for more games that take place within the context of a given event rather than being expressly about that event. Speaking of The Guns of August, I've mentioned elsewhere on the forums that another of Tuchman's books, A Distant Mirror, would be a good inspiration for a game that takes place after the beginning of the Hundred Years War, as the outbreak of the Black Death approaches. There really is need for games that don't consider history to be solely high politics with occasional cameos from the "big" names, for sure.

[clyde]

I wasn't able to solve the first puzzle in The Last Express. Now that I know how, I think I'll give the game another shot and then come back to listen to the rest of the podcast. I've never played a game with a walk-through. Maybe I'm missing out on yet another type of experience. Maybe this can be my first game I play with a walk-through.

[mikemariano]

I had three copies of PC Gamer stacked next to my desk while playing The Last Express so I could never be without their three-part walkthrough.  Even then I had difficulty getting through the game.

 

Using the walkthrough was kind of dispiriting, though.  It discouraged just walking through the train and experiencing the activity on board.  Forget that: you need to hurry to obscure locations to plant items you will use days later!

[clyde]

I'll try to find a happy medium by just using a walk-through when I get stuck.

[clyde]

What a coincidence! I just played a game that has the walk-through embedded in it.
http://kittakaj.itch.io/secrets-agent

[sclpls]

I really appreciated all the discussion about the effects used by this game to produce distance between the character and the player, and that is certainly one of the many distinguishing characteristics about the game. It is such a rare quality to see in a game since most developers seem obsessed with chasing player immersion that it is easy to lose sight of the value of other goals. I suppose it is a feature of strategy games (who/what is the player exactly?) but not something you see in most narrative driven games.

[Ryan Kasch]

Rob brings up a really good point about how in history many things were broken that were never fixed. Countless civilizations that had existed and even prevailed against others eventually disappeared. Rome never came back, the holy roman empire just dissolved, and many others just didn't bounce back, including the old world order before WWI.

[ricardioheartguy]

This was the first episode of TMA I've listened to and I subscribed immediately afterward.  Not only is this one of the best episodes of a video game podcast I've heard but I've always felt this game needed to be discussed and is criminally overlooked by both the gaming media and gamers.

 

I disagree on the impact of the ending, however.  The game makes it pretty clear up front that it's an Indiana Jones style pulp story (you begin by leaping onto a moving train from a motorcycle) even if it's framed as a build up to WWI.  The main character is even a witch doctor mystic who can hypnotize people and I'm surprised this point wasn't brought up.  Just like Raiders of the Lost Ark was completely mundane until the last 5 minutes, so was TLE and the ending didn't come as any kind shock or surprise to me when I played it.  I actually think the game was stronger for it because the action helps round out the more cerebral elements.

 

I also wish you guys pointed out that you could sit through the piano concert which is like an hour long in real time but that's only a nitpick.

[iax]

Ok I think this might be one of the best game-related podcast episodes I've listened to.

 

I didn't actually play the game yet but it definitely sounds like one of the "unfamiliar feeling, experimental in a good way, little bit flawed" nineties game e.g. Bullfrog had been making. It's not very common for PC or console games to feel that way today, even the original or the fresh ones are built using established practices in areas like the controls, the interface, various genre expectations, the art pipeline and graphic algorithms used etc. I also think there are two spaces where at least the unfamiliar and experimental parts of the feeling can be found more often, namely handheld and mobile games, probably because they don't share the "know-how history" with the larger platforms and many (now) traditional techniques just don't work there. Of course it doesn't guarantee the "experimental in a good way" part of my description...

[falselogic]

I loved this episode. Made me wish for a podcast that just discusses adventure games...

[BobbyBesar]

One thing that, I guess, was implied but never stated outright is that the feelings that "there must be some way all of this could just be avoided" are likely deliberate and entirely appropriate to our understanding of the politics of the time. Everything had to be balanced just so to get the war that we got.

 

 

It's getting pretty far off topic, but given the comments about the use of archetypes as stand-ins for countries, I couldn't help but wonder if any of the panel had seen Grand Budapest Hotel, and what you though about it.

 

I found Grand Budapest Hotel disappointing, I think because it had the feel of an allegory for the WWI transition period that Last Express captures, but then it never really seems to pay it off. It may be unfair, because that may not be what Anderson was really trying for, but it did have a distinct allegorical feel to it that felt abandoned.

 

(Although the villains were essentially Nazi stand-ins, the general theme, of the dissolution of the more genteel world represented by the hotel into modernity has greater echoes of WWI. The best that I can construct, it could have been intended as an sort of revisionist illustration that the nobility of the pre-war era was just as grasping and ugly as the period after it, but that's something of a stretch.)

[sclpls]

The Grand Budapest Hotel very self-consciously aped a lot of conventions, techniques, and structures of 19th century European novels. Although it was definitely evoking a similar era, and therefore bears some similar thematic traits, I don't get the impression that the effort was allegorical.

[hedgefield]

"The hero's journey is not the only journey" is one of the best quotes related to narrative design I've heard in a while. I never thought about it conciously, but it's a great way to write characters, to keep in mind that they too are going through something at that moment probably and aren't just there as conversation fodder for the player.

 

Otherwise an allround good discussion too, I've found this game fascinating for a long time. It's funny that you mention Sophie and Rebecca, as I was briefly dating a Sophie at the time I was playing through the iPhone version a few years back, which made me pay more attention to them than maybe the average player does.

 

P.S. I just noticed Last Express for iOS is now only .99c on the App Store! What a nice coincidence, if you haven't played it it's now super easy to pick it up.

[Punggung]

I liked this discussion a lot. There was another really good take on it at the Moving Pixels Podcast a few years back. 

 

https://soundcloud.com/popmatters/moving-pixels-podcast-16