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.
