Originally Kickstarted as a PC and mobile webseries over six years ago, The Last Door finally arrives on PS4 in its definitive, complete edition format. Though perhaps easily lost in the tsunami of recent releases on PS4, The Last Door is certainly without a doubt a veritable opiate for fans of atmospheric and well-written point and click adventures. Simply put, if dark and harrowing adventures are your thing than The Last Door is absolutely your bag.
The Last Door is a extraordinarily well written and stylishly framed tale of horror and madness
Set in the cloying mists of the cobblestone streets and sprawling rural expanse of Victorian England, The Last Door puts players in the shoes of one Jeremiah Devitt, who after receiving a worrying letter from old school pal Anthony Beechworth, decides to track down his old friend at a abandoned manor in the Scottish countryside. Of course this being a distinctly grimdark affair, what he finds is a disturbing scene of suicide and the maddening writings of a pained existence that thrust Anthony into a sanity eroding ancient evil that threatens to undo the very fabric of existence. Fun times!
If it isn’t already obvious, The Last Door hangs its hat on the horror stand pretty brazenly. Though the game has been solely characterized as a Lovecraft inspired effort in some quarters, the truth is that The Last Door is actually an amalgam of inspiration from a range of classic horror and suspense scribes such as – but not necessarily limited to, Bram Stoker, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe and many, many others.
The result of this wide range of literary influences is that The Last Door horror beats become more and more kaleidoscopic in nature the further you progress through its two season structure, with the wonderfully slow-paced build of dread and terror as Jeremiah gets closer to the truth being neatly accompanied by much more pulse-pounding scares and visceral storytelling.
Of course, being a point and click adventure effort, The Last Door also boasts its fair share of puzzles and though they can stump on occasion, there’s nothing here that ends up being too difficult or unfair to solve. Likewise, in tapping into its point and click design heritage, The Last Door also employs a multiple choice dialogue system that not only serves to further the story but also figure into some of the puzzles as well.
Where The Last Door comes slightly unstuck, at least upon first glance, is in how slowly the player character moves across the screen. With no ability to improve your pace beyond a slightly spirited strut, wandering from the entrance of a room to an exit at the far side can becomes something of a chore if you find yourself backtracking to a particular location.
Thankfully realizing the tedium that is inherent in such an activity, developer The Game Kitchen has implemented a neat fast-travel style feature that allows you to instantly hop to a previously visited room by the simple and quick double press of the X button. On a separate note, the Spanish developer is also keen to make The Last Door roundly accessible to most folks too, with its text heavy presentation often occurring against stark backgrounds and the inclusion of a dyslexia filter which alters the font into a much more easily readable style. More developers need to get on this train quite honestly.
The presentation of The Last Door is far more accomplished than an initial glance might suggest
It’s fair to say that on first glance the super low resolution and blocky characters and backgrounds of The Last Door don’t immediately endear well to the eyes – especially on a 55 inch television screen which is less than kind to such an almost jarringly retro presentation. The truth of the matter though, is that if anything the low resolution presentation reveals just enough that your imagination can fill in the rest – almost as if you’re witnessing these events from the perspective of someone who lacks clarity; a nightmare viewed from a different perspective than your own.
The only real issue that comes from The Last Door’s visual style is that because the environment is so deliberately low res coupled with the fact that there are no shorthand descriptors when you hover your cursor over points of interest, it means that you have to re-inspect everything to remember what everything is. As one might reasonably infer, this is an exercise which can get a little tedious in the early going.
Away from the ocular senses, The Last Door is also a delight to the ears too. The remastered sound effects are hugely atmospheric – dust coated floorboards creak with palpable strain as you stalk across them while the melancholy, unending tick-tock of a grandfather clock and the wailing of a tormented soul in the distance are all grand examples of how The Last Door effectively weaponizes its fear in an aural fashion.
Of equally lofty caliber is the soundtrack – with a selection of ponderous piano arrangements and melancholy strings with occasional striking chords reserved for dramatic and often frightening effect, The Last Door’s musical accompaniment to the on-screen action is wholly apt and never fails to perform tremendous service to its dark Gothic themes.
The Last Door: Complete Edition is a value stuffed proposition
Boasting some eight episodes total that are in turn spread across two seasons, it’s notable just how easily accessible and effortless The Last Door is. With each episode clocking at between the 45 minute to one hour mark (with that figure increasing yet further if you want to go off on a trophy hunt), The Last Door is a distinctly breezy offering that can be picked up and put down effortlessly – thanks in no small part to its frequent autosave system.
Adding yet further value to an already fairly value stuffed offering is the fact that The Last Door not only offers multiple endings and trophies to collect, but it also packs in a quartet of extra mini-episodes as well, with each one providing some additional exposition and insight on various events and characters that appear within the main plot.
What appeared to be something of an ugly duckling on initial viewing soon revealed itself to be an engrossing Gothic point and click adventure the likes of which the PS4 could assuredly do with more of. Frequently scary with great storytelling and a unique audiovisual presentation, don’t sleep on The Last Door: Complete Edition if you like your adventures dark and compelling.
The Last Door: Complete Edition is out now on PS4.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.