Final Call

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.