On your way, you take in the environment, talk to NPCs some of whom will want to hitch a ride on your train, gather crafting materials, and fight some zombies. The person you need to find is almost never where they should be, and you’ll invariably have to head out and find where they are or what happened to them (you don’t always find them alive and well). Once you arrive, you’re tasked with finding the person who has the code that will let you leave the station. The idea is to make sure you keep the train running long enough to arrive at the next station. The train also has a crafting station where you use gathered material to craft food, ammo, and medkits.
The train itself is a janky old hunk of metal, always in need of attention, but the maintenance itself takes the form of low-effort QTE’s that happen just frequently enough to convey the desperation of your state but don’t stay long enough to ever get tiresome. Failing to do so will cause the train to break down.
On the train, you have to juggle the engine, fuel pumps, air conditioning, etc. The core gameplay loop here flits between maintaining the train and exploring locations on foot. You play as a nameless, mute-ish protagonist (it’s implied that you say things to NPCs but there’s no text above your head) being put in charge of a southbound train going from outpost to outpost. It’s less interested in telling a complete story from beginning to end and is more about conveying a tone through environmental details, NPC chatter, and music.
You see, The Final Station isn’t so much a story as it is a mood. If you think that description of the game’s lore is too vague, that’s because it’s exactly how the game presents it. Set several hundred years after a vaguely alluded to catastrophe called ‘The First Visitation’, the world is now overrun by zombies, causing humans to get quarantined into cramped colonies with the army seemingly having enforced marshall law on the whole world as they build something or something called The Guardian that might help humankind in the face of a possible or inevitable Second Visitation. Developed by indie studio Do My best and published by tinyBuild games (the people behind Hello Neighbor and the absolutely excellent Party Hard), The Final Station was a short, dark, and wonderful action game with some survival elements. The Final Station original released on September 2016 - seemingly out of nowhere - and absolutely blew my mind.
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