PixlBit

I’ve kind of become the de facto horror guy around PixlBit, and that suits me just fine. For the longest time, I felt that the key to a great horror video game was graphical fidelity. Resident Evil was chilling for me when I was sixteen, but the original release doesn’t do it for me anymore. Surely, it takes bleeding edge graphics to terrify, right? Well, not necessarily. I learned that with Corpse Party, a game that chilled me to the bone on multiple occasions. That game looked like it came from the 16-bit era, and it was very effective at making bedtime a dicey proposition. So what would happen if someone made a horror game that used an art style from even earlier? Would it be scary at all? In the case of The Last Door from Spanish developer The Game Kitchen, you get a macabre and haunting horror title that gets in your head and stays there.

Set in 1891 Scotland, The Last Door is a free to play, episodic point and click horror game. The story begins in proper fashion, with a suicide. In this case, it’s the beleaguered Anthony Beechworth, who simply can’t go on after the things that he’s seen and done in his life. Before ending his own existence, Anthony sends a letter to his old school mate, Devitt. Devitt arrives at the Beechworth estate and tries to puzzle out the whereabouts of his friend while simultaneously unraveling the mysterious and often horrific happenings at the mansion.

Point and click adventure games can go in a myriad of different directions, from quite logical to completely obtuse. I’m thankful that The Last Door falls into the former category. Devitt’s comments when he examines items or notable environmental objects almost always give a firm clue as to what’s needed. Key items may be repurposed for puzzle solutions that seem a little out of the box, but I never ran into that wall of trying every item on every hotspot I found until something happened. I almost always knew exactly what to do with my inventory, and the few times that I got a bit stumped, the solution was a simple matter of looking at my situation in a different way. I applaud The Game Kitchen for their restraint in the puzzle elements, and hope they can sustain this through the entirety of the story.

At first glance, The Last Door isn’t much to look at. It resembles those early Sierra adventure games from the late ‘80s before the advent of VGA graphics. As such, the characters and environments are hyper pixelated, far more than you would expect if you only think of the NES when thinking about pixel graphics. At first I wasn’t much of a fan of this aesthetic, but The Game Kitchen leverages the primitive art effectively. A murder of crows somehow takes on a far more sinister bent when they are barely discernible from each other, and the ambiguous nature of the graphics allows the mind to take things the rest of the way. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in a darkened room with the sound turned up, The Last Door becomes an entrancing experience.

The other side of that coin would be the sound design. More than anything, I would say that sound design is the most crucial part of video game horror, and this game is top notch in this category. From the creaking of the floorboards as Devitt slowly walks through the mansion to the faint sound of glass breaking in a distant room, the sound effects in The Last Door kept me on edge. Additionally, Carlos Viola’s haunting soundtrack adds tension and a sense of dread that ebbs and flows throughout the chapter. I highly recommend playing this game with headphones on.

The Last Door is a crowd-funded free-to-play game from a small team. As such, it’s a little rough around the edges, most notably with the translation from Spanish to English, which results in some awkward phrasing. Thankfully, this didn’t impact my ability to solve any of the puzzles, and the story was intriguing enough that I wanted to play chapter two right away. The game will eventually be completely free to play, with the newest chapter initially only open to donors. I absolutely recommend playing the first chapter, and when you realize how good it is, I recommend chipping in some money for the next installments too.  I don’t know what’s behind the last door, but I am eager to find out.