Final Call

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.