Megan Ellison if you send me at least $5,000,000 so I can finish my excellent video game DDD: THE NATURAL PLAYBOYS I will stop writing mean things about Annapurna Interactive games.
That is not a threat. That is an opportunity. Please consider it.
LAST STOP is a Heavy Rain clone. Or a wannabe Telltale Games episodic adventure. Whatever sounds worse to you – it is so boring that I almost feel bad comparing it to anything David Cage ever did. I hope you understand the weight such a statement carries.
It’s by the creators of VIRGINIA, a game I quit because its writers had no clue how much an American pizza cost in 1988.
Its copy describes it as “a video game about secret lives, the ties that bind and how magic can be found in the mundane.” That last bit, about the magic of the mundane? It makes me kinda mad, reading it now. Like, it makes me want to apologize to mundanity. Depicting any of the ordinary shit I do every single day would be more interesting than anything in this game. At the start there’s a slight focus on routine actions like pouring milk or choosing your poison but that soon disappears and all you do is walk down narrow paths and choose virtually identical responses to some of the most charmless characters I have ever seen in a video game.
Sometimes you get choices that seem promising, like talking to an 8 year old about taxes. I was so fucking hype to learn what this dude thought about taxes. But then he didn’t say anything about taxes, I don’t think? I continually felt swerved by the words that were coming out of my character’s mouth? One time I had to choose between OKAY and RIGHT so I chose OKAY and my character said “Right” and it took a beat before it really sank in what happened and even then I was in denial. If @lonelyfrontier hadn’t spoken up during the stream I would have just thought I was crazy, that I was just imagining things, that I’d probably chosen RIGHT, that it was all my fault.
IT WASN’T. I CHOSE “OKAY”. It wasn’t my fault!!!
Here are some other caps of great choices that go fucking nowhere. Except Vape Lord. You do meet the Vape Lord eventually. I didn’t include STICK MY HEAD IN A BLENDER cuz that’s a violence but now that I’m writing about this game at length I am no longer uncomfortable with violence, maybe it is the answer sometimes, maybe I’d feel better if I went outside and kicked a melon into mush or something like that.
LAST STOP has 3 playable characters. They’re all living their own lives in the same London neighborhood, totally unaware of each other, until the Final Chapter, when they all end up on Tatooine for some reason. I am going to spoil their adventures, right now, get excited please.
That bald dude in all those earlier pics? His name is John. He is a single father who works for the housing council. I don’t know what a housing council is (I am American) but this game depicts it as being kinda like Glengarry Glenn Ross but really lame and low stakes and without any quotable dialogue. He has a neighbor named Jack, who is a fit 20 something game developer. That’s his body in the screencap up above, wearing an anime girl t-shirt I picked out for him. That was maybe the only meaningful bit of player expression in this entire game.
Jack & John know each other because their mail gets mixed up often. That’s it, that’s the extent of their relationship. But one day they bump into a dude on the train, and he says “You two here meant for each other!” And there’s a flash of green Xbox light and they get Freaky Friday’d. Within 48 hours of the bodyswap they have both lost their jobs due to incompetence and young Jack is forced to move into the older man’s apartment after he receives a bank statement informing him that he is totally cleaned out and unable to pay rent and he must vacate immediately. I was under the impression that the UK wasn’t quite as hostile towards tenants as the USA but guess I was wrong there, can’t believe I ever watched EastEnders or As Time Goes By and thought “God, I wish that were me, they got it so much better over there.”
So these two go around, they try and figure out how to swap their bodies back. And they fail so much it causes the soft bald body to have a massive heart attack. And that prompts John – the old man currently residing in the extremely hot young healthy body, remember – to seek out the Vape Lord and do whatever it takes to get back into his soon-to-be-corpse. Like, that body isn’t dying cuz of the body swap, it’s entirely cuz John spend decades abusing it, but I guess dying in your home body and leaving your 8 year old child an orphan is the…right thing to do?
Anyway the Vape Lord sends him to a bazaar on a sand planet, where John immediately meets the dude who Freaky Friday’d him, and that dude’s like “my bad, I was cranky that day, sorry, here’s how you undo it” and that’s pretty much that. As the game closes John is back in his chromedome looking sadder than ever, because not only is he back to being fat, old, and single but he’s also way more wheelchair bound than he was before this whole mess started. The end!! No moral.
I don’t remember this character’s name. Meena, maybe? She is a spy or something. Her adventure starts with failing the Voight Kampff test. Then she does adultery. Then she goes home to her putz husband and stupid kid and lets them know she doesn’t love them. She threatens one teenager, and then another, because she is a very unlikable woman who continually makes bad choices. This leads to her playing a role in the deaths of her elderly socialist dad’s drug dealer and a rival lady spy whose most notable trait is being maybe the only person in an Annapurna game who canonically owns a dildoe. Her dad rocks, he is the only good character in this game, I wish we’d spent more time with him, I wish we saw him doing the cocaine he loves so much. Before those bodies are cold she is summoned by her boss who lets her know she must go through a Stargate and visit the newly discovered Tatooine. There she meets a purple Elfquest and her boss’s childhood crush. Then she comes home and she’s all cheezed off for some reason, and she tells her boss to go to hell, and he’s like “Well do you want to quit your job and go to jail or do you want to keep being a spy and protect your family?” And you better believe I said I wanted to quit my job, why would she want to protect her family? She hates her family. So of course her ending shows her hugging her husband and child as they visit her in prison. The end!! I’ll never be free!!
This is Donna and I only remember her name cuz it’s in the screenshot. Her deal involves stalking a beautiful man who she believes is having lots of sex. She follows him to an abandoned yet sparkling clean pool, where he strips down to his skivvies and takes a dip. This causes his eyes to glow Xbox green so her friend brains him with a shovel. They then tie him to a chair and drop out of high school because keeping a hostage is a full time fuckin’ job.
Donna owns a mobile phone. Sometimes she uses it to take photographs. But her phone is always running out of memory, and the player must make Hard Moral Choices by deleting photos of her loved ones before she can selfies with her crushes. That’s the kinda heavy shit Tale of Tales could only dream of, that’s the kinda shit that makes me go "…that’s so bad ass,’ that’s the kinda shit I’ll easily deliver if the gang at Good Ol’ A.I. (as i like to call them) deposits millions of dollars into my bank account.
Eventually Donna’s mum is at death’s door, because she was sickly, and Donna didn’t notice because she was too busy being playing Reservoir Dogs. She asks her superpowered hostage to save mum, and he agrees in exchange for Donna’s hand in space marriage or some shit. She agrees and the dude just erases everyone Donna loves from existence and whisks her away to Tatooine, where she spends about 2 minutes of screen time acting like she drank too much cough syrup before stabbing the dude to death with a sword.
Upon her return to London she is shown tidying up her apartment, making the best of a life after love, but then the night comes, and Donna goes to sleep without any kind of sheet, kinda weird there, maybe she only had a treasured blankie and the bad dude wiped it from existence cuz it had too many love vibes attached to it. Anyway that guy comes back from the dead and says “I will resurrect everyone you love and in exchange you will grant me your hand in ghost marriage once you die.” And you can agree to this? Even though the whole reason everyone died is cuz this dude broke his word the first time you struck a deal with him? And that’s it, I think that’s the end, I don’t remember what happened after. I do know that Donna had the absolute worst bare feet I’ve seen in a video game, they were like those fuckin’ GTA lobster hands, but for feet, and I can’t blame someone if they don’t wanna model feet, feet are gross, but maybe don’t have them taking 1/3 of the fucking screen during the final scene, GOD. The end! Don’t show feet.
I left out the bit about the dude who builds a spy empire so he can track down his teenage crush who got lost in a portal but that’s fine, who gives a shit, this is probably 4,000 words, I am pretty sure this is the most boring game I’ve ever played, please never play it
THE END
NO MORAL
MS. ELLISON CALL ME
