Reviews
[Review] Asymmetric Multiplayer Horror ‘Last Year: The Nightmare’ is a Deep and Rewarding Experience
Four years after being crowdfunded into existence, is Elastic Games’ asymmetric multiplayer horror a slash hit? Our Last Year The Nightmare review suggests the wait has very much been worth it.
Splicing horror with online multiplayer has become increasingly popular this past couple of years with Dead By Daylight and 2017’s Friday The 13th video game vying for control of this niche subgenre.
However, it was Last Year: The Nightmare that first pitched the idea of having one player adopt the role of a crazed killer, the others working together to escape them. Successfully crowdfunded in 2014, it’s been a long road to release but Last Year is finally here, launching exclusively on Discord with console versions also in the pipeline. Its thunder may well have been stolen, yet having that extra time has allowed developer Elastic Games to create a deeper, more rewarding multiplayer experience.
It’s Halloween night, 1996, and a group of teenagers awake to find themselves wandering the eerily quiet campus of East Side High School, a supernatural force lurking in the shadows, attempting to pick them off as they desperately search for a way out. Last Year presents you several playable scenarios, each taking place within a different part of the school’s sprawling campus such as the gym, library, and belltower.
The core setup will be familiar to anyone who has dabbled in either Friday The 13th or Dead By Daylight. Matches follow the same structure, tasking survivors with a series of objectives they need to complete before making a beeline for the exit. Meanwhile, the killer will need to use a combination of cunning, patience, and unpredictability to thwart their plans, wiping out all five survivors or keeping them distracted long enough for the timer to run down.
Trying to balance these two asymmetrical sides sounds like an unenviable task yet one Elastic Games has managed to pull off quite well. Survivors can select one of four classes with a cap on two of each per team. These include the Assault (doles out melee damage), Scout (highlights traps and other hazards), Technician (builds gadgets), and Medic (restores health) with players able to unlock bonus abilities by scavenging for crafting components strewn throughout the campus. You’ll each have your own role to play as part of a team though if the killer should catch you straying too far from the group you’re as good as dead.
While the teens have strength in numbers, the killer has a diverse range of tools at their disposal as well as a feature dubbed “Predator Mode”. This allows you to travel the map as if you were some kind of ghostly spectator, albeit one that can lay traps, teleport, and stage ambushes, stepping out from the shadows at any time.
There are currently three flavors of killer to choose from including the Jason-like Slasher, the hulking Giant, and the aptly named Strangler who can lasso survivors with his chain. You’ll get a chance to alternate between all three during a match because, unlike Dead By Daylight and Friday The 13th, Last Year’s killers aren’t invincible, and the game also features a respawn system.
If there’s one major downside to playing games in this tiny subgenre, it’s the permanence of death and how they force you to sit and watch the rest of a match or drop back out to the main menu. While respawns rub against the very concept of slasher films and how its heroes are often nothing more than disposable machete fodder, in Last Year they keep players involved with a chance to turn things around even if they’ve committed a devastating blunder.
Where the killer sits out until a timer expires, survivors will need to rescue their downed teammates from specific points on the map. Again, this helps create balance and while the act of busting out a fellow student requires a simple button press, there’s the chance that a killer may have booby-trapped the area in anticipation.
There’s a lot more tactical nuance to Last Year than meets the eye and it will be fascinating to see what strategies top-level players come up with. However, for those who are only starting out, there really isn’t much in the way of onboarding with zero tutorials or help screens on hand. Instead, players are left to learn everything themselves, from the basic control layout and general flow of gameplay down to the more detailed minutiae of various mechanics, upgrades, and abilities.
As a result, those first few matches are bewildering though everything quickly comes into focus. Even without stabilizers, it’s pretty easy to pick up and play and doesn’t suffer from feeling too cumbersome of choppy. Survivors will soon learn how to work together as a unit while staying clear of ambush spots. On the flipside, killers will hone their skills at using Predator Mode to quickly navigate each map, learning where best to lay traps and create chokepoints.
Last Year evokes a certain nostalgia for 90s teen horror with each of its survivors based on high school stereotypes and killers who generate terror through their seeming invulnerability rather than their appearance alone. Even though you are limited to one central location, each part of the East Side campus feels diverse and expansive even after repeated playthroughs. Elastic Games delivers when it comes to atmosphere, especially when you factor in the surprising level of detail within each environment, the great voice work, and a fitting soundtrack.
Despite being more than four years in the making Last Year isn’t quite finished, in the same way that just about every multiplayer game released nowadays is unfinished. The aforementioned lack of tutorials is something Elastic is surely looking to remedy, and Last Year could really do with a progression system. With only a handful of maps and nothing in the way of character customization, you may feel somewhat short-changed if paying the full launch day price.
These caveats are easy to overlook when the core game is this well put together. Elastic has really thrown down the gauntlet here and although fans have had to wait, Last Year: The Nightmare is easily one of the best, most inventive horror games of the past several years and one that will hopefully ply us with new skin-crawling content in the weeks and months to come.
Last Year The Nightmare review code provided by the publisher.
Last Year The Nightmare is out now on PC via the Discord Store.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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