Final Call

This game is graphics-and-sound heavy, with a lot of images of casinos and creepy houses. You play as a thief in a casino who suddenly finds himself tasked with escaping a house of horrors.

Gameplay involves exploration and collecting clues, as well as emotional reaction options in the past.

There are some inconsistencies, like some links being capitalized and others not. But the puzzles all seemed to work out all right, with everything becoming useful at some point and the game solvable by clicking every option.

Overall, I think it would have been fun to have more challenges after the first set, as the game felt like it was setting up for some really heavy-duty stuff, and that could have made the ending more powerful. But there are many good things here.

Final Call is the tale of a small-time crook who gets kidnapped and chucked into something that resembles a cross between an escape room and a Saw trap. It’s a solid premise; not groundbreaking, but there’s definitely an audience (one that includes me!) that will happily take several dozen of this kind of thing as long as it’s well-executed.

The game, which took me about a half hour to complete, is ambitious and very unpolished. There are a lot of rooms, but most of them don’t serve any actual purpose. The puzzles are entirely lawnmower-able, which is just as well because the logic can be shaky. Sometimes sentences are capitalized and sometimes they aren’t; sometimes they have punctuation and sometimes they don’t. There’s timed text. There are intimations of backstory, but nothing is ever really explained. The ending comes abruptly and is somewhat confusing. (At least, that was true of the ending I got. I did wonder if things might have wrapped up more sensibly if I’d made a different choice, but the timed text dissuaded me from trying again.)

Final Call is aiming for a little more emotional depth than your average “what if escape room but lethal” tale via the PC’s relationships with his girlfriend Roxy and partner-in-crime Mike, but none of the characters quite gets enough development to rise above stereotype status. As such, I wasn’t sufficiently invested for the crime-doesn’t-pay message to hit home in the way it was obviously meant to. (So I will be blithely carrying on robbing casinos IRL—sorry, authors!)

That said, the authors of Final Call do have excellent instincts for quality-of-life features (timed text notwithstanding). I was initially disheartened to encounter a list of links to “Door #1”, “Door #2”, et cetera, but once each passage has been visited, the link text is replaced with a more descriptive phrase. Every clue you come across and every puzzle you encounter is listed in the sidebar for easy reference, which was great. There’s a text entry bit that’s case-sensitive, and the game specifically tells you it’s case-sensitive—which may seem like damning with faint praise, but a lot of newbie Twine authors don’t think to do that. (My personal preference is for these things to not be case-sensitive in the first place, but you do have to dig into JS a little to figure out how to do that, so I don’t blame people for not realizing you can.)

And despite the issues with the writing and game design, on a technical level, Final Call was a very smooth experience for me—I didn’t encounter any bugs. Which is pretty good for a first outing, especially considering that the game is doing some things I would consider at least advanced-beginner-level, SugarCube-wise.

All things considered, while Final Call was overall rough, I did come away with the feeling that the authors had promise and might someday make an escape room thriller I would really enjoy. They just need some practice—and maybe a proofreader.

In Final Call, you play a down-on-your-luck con man. But unsympathetically so: you've seemingly ditched your partner Mike at a previous job, and your long-suffering girlfriend Roxy - aren't they all called Roxy? - is dragged through yet another mud puddle of your failure and she's had enough. I imagined a slimy but somehow likeable jerk like Worm from Rounders. Out of guilt or a chance at redemption, you've taken on one last job with Mike: a simple little trick to flog money from a casino. No problems.

Of course it's a trap and Mike has gotten his revenge. You wake up and your casino job has become something like a Saw movie. Abandoned buildings, cracked mirrors, mysterious corpses and a feeling that you're being watched.

I have to admit the setup was pretty obvious, which is A-okay for horror movies. It's a warmup for anticipating worse things. But the setup was drawn out. Several paragraphs said pretty much the same thing and there was quite a lot of tell, and not a lot of show, in the old writing parlance. Each character was sketched very loosely and you are given a chance to name yourself, but it doesn't pay off in any way that I could see.

The main horror gameplay involves exploring a thoroughly unsettling building to find some clues to type on a typewriter. Why? Not sure. Why is Mike and the casino dropping you in a place like this? Not sure. What do they get out of it? Not sure. If you were to be carved up by Jigsaw, they gave you a hell of a lot of latitude to just walk about. There were hand-waves towards a chilling message by the organizers, but it never really pays off.

Some of the bite-sized set pieces are dripping with atmosphere. The secret found on the body is properly chilling, for example. But others are just sorta creepy rooms with nothing more going on. You are encouraged to return to rooms, but this does something meaningful once, maybe once-and-a-half times.

There are a few instances where you can choose to do something different and get different information, but none of it is exceptionally enlightening. I managed to smash through the story in maybe 15 minutes and got to a "nice ending". But it was an ending like a dead end - it just kinda stopped. I played through again, doing things slightly differently and seeing different details, but nothing radical. I chose a completely different ending which attempted to explain the backstory for the creepy building, but didn't really.

In horror you want to dunk your audience into a deep vat of questions. Unsettling questions that they might not want answers to, but are driven towards. Final Call had all the aesthetics trappings of horror, but didn't quite fulfill it in gameplay or writing. With the same attention to atmosphere and perhaps a longer polish on the writing, future games from Emily and Zoe could do well at Ectocomp.

Mike, as I’m sure you’re aware, is a very common name in the U.S., so much so that in my elementary school class of 25, I was one of four Mikes – even my sister would call me “Russo.” So I suppose I should have been quicker on the uptake when Final Call, a choice-based escape-room-inspired scenario jumping off from a casino heist gone wrong, seemed to be getting confused about who was saying what to whom. The protagonist – whom I’d naturally enough dubbed Mike since one of the first screens in the game asks you to input your name – is a down-on-his-luck con artist getting ready to scam the penny slots via a smuggled-in magnet; he spends the introduction on the phone, going over the details of the plan with his partner in crime to make sure they’re ready to do what needs to be done. Except sometimes instead of my partner telling me “Mike, you need to do XYZ”, it seemed like my internal monologue was referring to myself in the third person, saying stuff like “Mike said it would be easy.” Shamefully, I was well past the game’s first-act twist, which sees the protagonist kidnapped and abandoned in a creepy lock-and-trap-filled asylum, before I realized oh wait, these aren’t bugs, I just inadvertently Fight Clubbed myself.

Er, spoilers.

Unlike with the Curse, though, where something vaguely similar happened to make my experience idiosyncratic, I think I can reconstruct what a more typical playthrough would look like. Such a player would probably enjoy the clean interface, which adds a helpful sidebar keeping track of the inventory items and clues you’ve found to the typical options-presented-in-blue-text of the main window, as well as nicely-chosen photos with a creepy filter illustrating the abandoned facility you’re trying to escape. They’d probably wince slightly at the prose, which gets the job done but is weighed down by omnipresent typos and odd leaps:

"The door creaks open. It’s just dusty and messy room. Looks like it could have belonged to a pair of twins, or maybe close friends."

They’d likely find the puzzles straightforward – there’s only one or two of them, made relatively simple to solve by the aforementioned helpful interface; even if the steps the protagonist takes occasionally seem unmotivated and hard to predict, well, you’re just clicking through all the options available to you. I suspect they’d be rather conflicted about the copious flashbacks – unlike the thin context escape-room games typically provide, Final Call offers a bunch of scenes fleshing out the protagonist’s relationship with his girlfriend Roxy as well as with other-Mike, and also digs into the pathologies underlying his failures as a partner to both and the pathologies that drive him. But the consistently lackluster writing, lack of direct connection between this material and the main action, and inexplicable plot twists (seriously, who could have possibly paid other-Mike a boatload of money to set us up?) might make our idealized player think the game would be more focused without all this.

So yeah I noticed all of that stuff, but I was more excited about building out my own version of the story where other-Mike was a facet of the protagonist’s personality, an angel or demon on my shoulder given increased reality by the omnipresent “hangovers” and “headaches” that plague the primary identity. As I got to the end, I figured out how to reconcile the various narrative strands that seemed to pull in different directions: other-Mike, you see, had enough separation to recognize that the compulsive way we keep returning to high-risk, low-reward behavior and chronic substance abuse was pushing Roxy away; to salvage matters, he used our meager savings to hire some people to scare us straight, make us think our criminal ways were going to get us killed, and allow us to escape a reformed man ready to walk the straight and narrow. God bless, other-Mike: you’re the very best part of me.