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.

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.