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.
The gaming world owes so much to David Lynch. “Twin Peaks” alone has inspired the premise and setting of so many games, from Deadly Premonition to Alan Wake, and its dreamlike tone is one that’s perfect for an interactive medium.
Silver Pines, the upcoming title from Swedish-based indie developer Wych Elm, is the latest in the lineage of Lynchian games, this time presenting survival-horror-style gameplay from a 2D perspective. While I’m not traditionally as hot on 2D games, after spending time with the demo, available now on Steam, I can’t wait to see more of this intriguing new world.
It starts out simple. After a brief, narrated dream sequence, you wake up in an empty diner in the small American town of Silver Pines. There’s a quick tutorial sequence that teaches you the game’s mechanics as you escape from the diner, followed by a phone call that sets up the premise of the game. You play Red Walker, a private investigator on the hunt for a missing musician named Eddie Velvet. It’s an elegant bit of exposition that’s delivered with a slightly dreamlike vibe, setting the tone for what’s to come.
As you begin to explore the titular town, you find it eerily abandoned, thanks to an evacuation order that’s caused the majority of the residents to take the ferry out of here. Empty streets and vacant buildings bring to mind Silent Hill, which is a great start in my book. There’s something really unique and special about small town horror like this, and Silver Pines is able to capture it immediately without feeling too much like a tribute act.
Navigating the Unique 2D World of Silver Pines
One of the things that impressed me immediately was how easy I found it to navigate the 2D space. Much like the indie classic Lone Survivor, you have a map that represents the space, and you turn down streets and hallways by pressing up or down at certain openings in the background to “turn” on the map. It seems like it should be incredibly difficult to follow directional shifts like this, but it becomes immediately intuitive, especially with the addition of diegetic signage that guides you without feeling out of place and handholdy.
I usually associate 2D games with more dynamic jumping and movement mechanics, but Silver Pines keeps things grounded, managing to find ways of creating navigation challenges without resorting to platforming tests that would feel out of place in a narrative like this. The map is particularly excellent in this game, as you can use a camera to add photos to it to help remind you what’s there. I love it when main characters mark up maps with locations of puzzles or items, and putting that power in the player’s hands was an interesting mechanical wrinkle that felt helpful and unique.
The other thing that gripped me from the start was the art style, which uses a slight cel-shading technique for the character models that makes them look hand-drawn. They really pop when compared to the backgrounds, which have a slightly different, but complementary, style to them. Wych Elm also shows off a masterful understanding of lighting, creating a shadowy look that’s never too dark to understand what’s going on.
The way the various layers of background and foreground give a parallax effect as you walk adds so much depth to every moment, making the imagery feel more dynamic. This game is treading familiar ground, with abandoned hotels and empty small town streets, but the unique look sets it apart enough to justify it among its peers.
Puzzles Balance Logic and Surrealism
Aside from just navigating the spaces, you’ll need to solve a variety of puzzles in order to progress. Many of them are just finding keys to open doors or figuring out which item is helpful in which situation, like an adventure game, but there were a few in the hour-long demo that gave me a level of satisfaction in actually figuring something out. Like the best survival horror games, the puzzles are an equal bit grounded in reality and slightly surreal, adding to the tone of the game. One of them gave me a Silent Hill vibe with its logic, asking me to win a BB gun shooting range mini game to get a pool key (which also teaches you how to use weapons).
While the game isn’t crawling with enemies, there are more threats scattered throughout the levels than I expected. Early on, you get a blade to defend yourself, which also acts as a key to cut through doorways blocked by cloth, and it’s just the right balance of effective and clumsy. There’s a surprisingly useful dodge that lets you slip past enemies. With the right timing, it’s not too difficult to survive one-on-one encounters, but it’s also not so easy that you can go on autopilot. Once multiple enemies get into the mix, it starts feeling more desperate, forcing you to make smart use of your stamina and weapon durability to survive.
A pistol gets introduced late in the demo, and that also felt surprisingly punchy, but its power was balanced smartly by limited ammo. One of my favorite gameplay elements of survival horror is ammo management, and it seems like Silver Pines is going to make that a core part of its combat experience, asking you to think carefully about which enemies are worth your precious bullets. This is further complicated by the fact that your gun can also be used to shoot padlocks to access previously locked areas, making it an even more valuable resource.
Enemy Design is the Demo’s Biggest Question Mark
Ammo and tape will be crucial to the continued use of your gun and knife, respectively, and there’s a quick little minigame for reloading and repairing that adds some tension to encounters. In addition to scavenging for resources, there was a vending machine I ran across where I could spend money to buy ammo or health kits. Be careful, though, the money is what you use to save at the payphone save points, so you don’t want to spend it all. It’s a clever variant on the classic Resident Evil-style ink ribbon system that makes your resource for saving a more abundant currency, but one that is used for more than just saving.
There were a couple of mementos that I ran across while exploring, and these can be equipped to provide specific character modifiers. I’m not entirely sold on the system yet, as there weren’t enough in the demo to really be able to craft a meaningful build, but with the surprisingly fun combat I’ve seen so far, I’m hoping that they will allow you to shape your playstyle in a way that’s tuned to how you like it. Any new wrinkles on combat are welcome, as it will need to find ways to keep fresh if it wants to stay compelling throughout.
As much as I think the combat is responsive and interesting, I think the enemies might be the weakest part of the game’s identity. This could also be a symptom of just seeing the early game, but so far, they are a bit more indistinct than I’d like, consisting mostly of shadowy people and bugs that didn’t have much going on. There was a boss fight that had a bit more of a menacing design, but I don’t know enough about the full shape of the narrative yet to see if the enemy design is in sync with the tone it’s trying to achieve. Right now, they just feel a bit generic, but I’m hoping things improve as it goes on, because they are pretty fun to fight for a survival horror game.
A Strong First Impression
Back to the opening thoughts about Lynch, the part that has me most interested in this game is the narrative. It’s simple so far, but there have been some surprisingly effective surrealist sequences that make me think this story is going to be something that will sink its hooks into me. One of the coolest moments of the demo involved turning off a light switch and being transported into an entirely different space, one dripping with dreamlike vibes. Even the choice to have the person you’re searching for be a musician adds a nice bit of texture to the narrative, putting a thematic focus on the game’s music in an important sequence involving a performance.
The cutscenes shift to a distinct painterly style, making them stand out without having to animate them, and it’s all brought to life with great voice acting. There’s even a little show you can watch in bits on TVs you pass, feeling a bit like a nod to Alan Wake II’s “Night Springs”.
I’m going to be honest, watching the initial trailer for Silver Pines had me feeling a bit sceptical. Not everyone can nail that Lynchian vibe, and when you try for that tone and miss, it can leave you with a narrative that’s either confusing or pretentious. Based on my hour with Silver Pines, I’d say they are on the right track, ready to deliver a surrealist narrative that draws from its inspirations while still carving out its own identity.
No word on the release date yet, outside of a vague 2026 timeframe, but I’ll be there day one to check it out.
Silver Pines is scheduled to release on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
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