I have discovered some backstage photos of “The Last Express”. While I don’t like the game very much, its unique visual style has always interested me and I wanted to share them with you.
If you don’t know this adventure game, here is how it looks:
In order to create this visual style, which used rotoscoping techniques and live actors, the makeup and clothing had to be designed to create great contrasts and to highlight some important lines, so that the graphics artists could distinguish and trace more easily the shapes of the objects:
But the photos that I find really fascinating are those that depict the actors during a scene. They almost seem the product of some modern cell-shading 3D shader :
I assume that the only reason why the actors were re-drawn was the insufficient performance of the hardware from that time. Of course, there were interactive movies in 1997, but the data-rate, the graphics adaptor specifications and the available disk space were still too low for an appealing video compression.
I personally never played The Last Express, since 1997 was a good year for adventure gamers (CMI, GF, Blade Runner, The Last Express,…) and I just played other adventure games back then, which I was more interested in. Maybe I should make up for it.
The Last Express was one of the last games from Brøderbund and it was a commercial disappointment. The company which had created the famous Prince of Persia series was closed shortly after. It’s actually a sad story.
Now, a different company offers The Last Express on GOG.
Has anyone from these forums played The Last Express? Did you enjoy it?
I still don’t get warm with the save system and the timed events: The whole game and all events are happen in real time. If you miss an event, you won’t get the necessary information. If you reach a dead end (and you will) you have to rewind your progress - literally. You can’t just “save”. So the gameplay is some sort of “try and error”. Beside that, the story starts very interesting, but in the second part it gets a little bit weird.
But this is my opinion. If you can get the game for a reduced price, you should give it a try. The setting is interesting, the graphics are still beautiful and the game has different endings.
If you can get the game for a reduced price, you should give it a try. The setting is interesting, the graphics are still beautiful and the game has different endings. 