The Final One

Darkness has the power to make almost any place feel creepy and scary, but it’s that much more effective when the place in question is already pretty unsettling. Hence, hospitals and asylums have the unique power to be creepy under any circumstances, but it gets that much worse when there’s no light to help you find your way around the corridors.

The Final One is a first-person horror game in which your goal is to explore a museum and solve puzzles in order to find out more about what’s going on behind closed doors. To make matters even better, the museum in question is abandoned, and it used to be a doll museum as well. Hence, everything looks about as unsettling as you might expect, although the graphics quality is a bit poor.

The gameplay mechanics are nothing out of the ordinary, since most of your time is spent trying to interact with objects and understand how to advance to the next room. In the meantime, the environment gets creepier and creepier, not to mention the fact that there are all kinds of jump scares to keep your pulse even. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make for a very memorable experience.

The atmosphere is very important in a horror game, but it’s not really a hit in the case of The Final One. While the setting itself if pretty scary, the actual mood is that of a cheap horror movie, because there’s nothing truly traumatizing to help you remember the story or the atmosphere. Granted, the linear level design has a lot to do with this as well, because you are always following narrow corridors with nothing interesting to see most of the time.

As for the graphics, the game may be using Unreal Engine 4, but it’s clearly not used to its full potential. In fact, everything looks pretty dated when it comes to object quality and textures, and even the lighting is somehow annoying. Thankfully, at least the sound effects are pretty nice, which is always a must in a horror flick.

In the end, The Final One could achieve a lot more with the elements at its disposal, but it would seem like the developer focused on all the wrong things. Hence, it can still be saved with a bit of work and dedication, but it’s not going to be easy.