The Last Look Demo

Most gamers are pretty used to demons, zombies and every kind of monster you can imagine, so a classic horror game doesn’t really cut it nowadays. Obviously, jump scares are still effective, but in order to experience true terror, players need to be approached in a different way. The Penumbra and Amnesia series understood that, which is why they banked everything on atmosphere and sound design instead of gross monsters.

The Last Look is a first-person survival horror game that follows the same principle as the aforementioned games, albeit with a few interesting differences. However, the goal is the same, and that is to inspire fear into the players using a combination of story, atmosphere and graphics. Unfortunately, there are a few slip-ups that might ruin the experience sometimes, but the demo appears to hint at a pretty balanced game, overall.

The story puts you in the role of a woman by the name of Alice Johnson, who works for a company called Solaris Research. It all starts when she wakes up dazed and confused on the floor of a bathroom in a strange house, without any memory of how she got there. Not only that, but there’s also someone following her, and the entity in question does not appear to have her best intentions at heart.

As mentioned before, the emphasis is on atmosphere, which means that you won’t run around with rifles and gunning down hordes of monsters. Instead, most of your time is spent trying to find a way out of the house while remaining as hidden as possible. The AI is scripted to be as random as possible, which means that there’s always the possibility to stumble onto the enemy and have to make a run for it.

The puzzles put your mind to the test as well, even if they can be a tad annoying sometimes. In essence, it’s difficult to spot useful items in certain conditions, which doesn’t add to the experience, it just frustrates you. However, you can at least enjoy UE4’s incredible lighting capabilities, not to mention the nice level design that really makes you feel like you are in a real house somewhere.

It’s a bit too early to give a definite opinion on The Last Look, but it seems to be on the right path. The emphasis on atmosphere was a good choice, but the game itself is a bit rough when it comes to dialog, story and voice acting. Thus, it might fall flat for some people, especially if you are not the type to get scared easily.