Previews
[Hands-On Preview] ‘Last Year: The Nightmare’ is a Multiplayer Horror Tribute to Self-Aware 90’s Slasher Films
Last Year: The Nightmare was a tough interview at this year’s PAX West. I was talking to the game’s executive producer, Justin Vazquez, about the game and the ‘90s horror movies that inspired it, but there were a bunch of big screens over the booth showing off what was happening during gameplay demos. About every thirty seconds, a player’s character was getting a knife to the face or a crushed skull. We’d get two sentences into a given topic and I’d get distracted by yet another onscreen kill.
Vazquez didn’t mind, though. He was explicit about the game’s inspiration: Last Year is a love letter to the self-aware ‘90s wave of slasher movies, like Scream, Disturbing Behavior, The Faculty, and I Know What You Did Last Summer. (The moment I saw Last Year in action, I started mentally populating its soundtrack album: Sum 41, Everclear, Moby, probably something off Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album, definitely Less Than Jake.)
Last Year is set on Halloween of 1996, because of course it is, when five students – a jock, a nerd, the class overachiever, the local wallflower, and the guy who just moved to the suburbs from the city—end up trapped in an alternate version of their high school. The building looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, it’s strewn with graffiti and homemade traps, it never seems to be any time besides midnight, and—oh, yeah—there’s a lunatic hunting them down. There’s eventually going to be somewhat more lore than this, but for right now, this is the skeleton: it’s five scared teenagers vs. one supernatural serial killer in an asymmetric multiplayer deathmatch, cause unknown, motive unknown.
As you might expect from other recent games like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th, the killer in Last Year is equipped to wreck any survivor in a one-on-one fight. The killer’s player can pick one of three characters: the strangler, the slasher, or the giant, each of which comes with its own particular set of skills. The giant is slow, lumbering, and capable of tossing survivors halfway across the map; the slasher is a more typical movie-killer pastiche, equipped with a woodsman’s axe; and the strangler is a fast-moving, hyperactive little bastard that runs around like a jackrabbit.
In each case, however, the killer’s player is arguably more dangerous before he spawns. In “predator mode,” you can race around the map as a disembodied ghost, planting traps, opening trapdoors that are set into the floor, and doing reconnaissance. Once you’ve managed to put as many bottlenecks in place as you can, you can spawn in as the killer and go on a murder spree.
That said, the killer also isn’t invincible. Taking enough damage from the survivors will “kill” you, forcing you back into predator mode where you’ll have to wait before you can respawn. The killer in Last Year feels a lot more like playing a real-time, live-action version of Left 4 Dead’s “Director” than, say, Jason. The guy I played against on the PAX show floor got very good at splitting up my team, forcing one or two of us to fall into the nearly-inescapable school basement where we could be picked off at his leisure. The one time he simply waded into my group, fists flying, he instantly ate an improvised grenade and had to eat a thirty-second respawn timer.
Conversely, the survivors are individually weak, with a difficult set of objectives. In the PAX demo, the survivors’ escape route required them to find two cans of gasoline somewhere on the school’s premises, then use them to fuel up a scissor lift in the gym. Once it was running, they could activate it to reach an exit door in the ductwork. All the while, we were harassed by the killer, split up by trapdoors, and occasionally paralyzed by bear traps.
Each of the five survivors on the team gets to pick a class when they spawn, with a maximum of two members of each class, and each class—assault, medic, technician, and scout—gets a unique piece of starting equipment that helps to reinforce their role in the group. The class is also independent of the player character, so you make Chad the dumb jock into the technician, or Amber the skinny cheerleader into a pipe-swinging damage dealer, without any attendant loss in effectiveness.
As you explore the school, you can accumulate scrap from the environment which can be used to craft upgrades to your equipment, including firearms and bizarre improvised weaponry. The technician can even counter-trap the school, forcing the killer to have to wade through automated gun turrets before he can reach the students, or locking down doors so the killer can’t get through them in predator mode.
It sounds like they’ve got a lot going for them, but the relative fragility of the characters was consistently an issue in the PAX demo. You can theoretically get your objectives done faster and accumulate more resources by splitting up, but a killer is more than a match for even a solo assault player, and can still be a real problem for two or more. If you move as a group, you’re safest, but you’re also limited by the slowest member of the group. Combined with the trapdoors, which always seemed to open at the worst possible time, the groups in the demo were consistently split up, isolated, and eventually mowed down.
When you do die—and it was “when,” not “if”—your character eventually respawns somewhere in the school, locked inside a closet or classroom until someone else lets you out, much like dead players being allowed back into the match in Left 4 Dead. The killer wins the round if all five survivors are dead simultaneously.
I did come away from Last Year with a few questions. It strikes me as a game that might end up as somewhat biased towards the survivors once people know the map since a killer can be easily beaten into the floor by a cooperative group of survivors. That being said, it’s also a game where one big move can change the entire balance of the match. We were doing fine when I played it, with three survivors alive and the killer nowhere in sight, until I went to refuel the scissor lift and dropped through a trapdoor I hadn’t seen. Then I was suddenly alone, stuck with one of the two items we needed to win, in the school’s basement, where most of the stairs to the ground floor have been blocked off. I had no idea where to go, and ended up running around looking for a way back up right up until the killer put me out of my misery.
Last Year: The Nightmare is planned for a digital release later this year, and will be exclusive to the Discord digital storefront for 90 days following its debut. It’s currently priced at US$29.99, which includes three maps, all five survivors, all four classes, and all three killers.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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