The Last Night: Blade Runner meets Another World in a cyberpunk city

The train pulls into the station and we slink off onto the sidewalk.We’re in a city high rise flats and sodium lights flicker behind us, and in the foreground a woman smokes a cigarette while two others chat. They don’t notice our presence. The train (which looks like something that’s come from Final Fantasy XIII via Blade Runner) flickers in a blur of red and green neon a vibrant flash of colour against the smoky shading of the rest of the game.

“You’re late,” says some guy with a quiff, blocking our passage to the next screen. “This is your target, you’ll find him in the nightclub.” A translucent blue hologram pops up in front of us. That’s all we need to know. We get on our way. The next screen has floating traffic buzzing around a road, each vehicle uniquely lit and detailed. The pixel art style reminds us of the ridiculous levels of detail you’d see in Sword & Sworcery, mixed with the natural palettes of Papers, Please. Your character walks (and looks) exactly like the protagonist of Another World, but that’s intentional.

Odd Tales is trying to recapture that cinematic platform feel that was so predominant in the Nineties think Oddworld, Flashback, and Blackthorne. It’s a genre that’s not really been too popular since the budding 3D graphics of systems at the time distracted developers’ attention, it seems, and the genre was left in stasis, its glory days firmly behind it. Thing is, the cinematic platformer had reached its peak we knew what to expect from the likes of the Oddworld franchise: environmental storytelling, graphics that punched above the weight of the systems at the time and some really hardcore gameplay that would reward the players that invested in them.

“  We want to revive the forgotten  cinematic platformer genre. We want to pursue the tradition of Another World, Flashback, and Oddworld ”

The Last Night has been built with those developmental pillars in mind, but rather than the pre-rendered backgrounds or rotoscoped animations that defined its predecessors, The Last Night is opting for a more retro feel with its pixel art and a visual direction that puts some of the lazier attempts at cyberpunk noir to shame. With parallax mapping, layered environments and fluid animations, The Last Night hits upon everything that made the cinematic platformers great.

But what’s the point of a game that looks great without some tactile gameplay to back it up? The Last Night brings in modern gaming elements to an old genre you’ve got divergent dialogue options to help you understand your objectives (and the world) in more depth; you’ve got the option to hack droids, pilot drones and take to the road to evade your pursuers; you can negotiate in difficult situations to give you more time to tackle puzzles. It’s a fully thought-out adventure game, in the truest sense of the genre.