PC
THE FINAL STATION
A post-apocalyptic adventure
The Final Station is a Post-Apocalyptic Action-Adventure game by Oleg Sergeev, Andrey Rumak and Do My Best and published by tinyBuild. I did have the chance to make an (admittedly terrible) video with the demo, so my trip through the game wasn’t entirely blind. There were, however, some pleasant surprises.
The setting is a somewhat dystopian post-apocalyptic world. While humanity has rebuilt, a few old people still remember the first attack. The effects of the gas turn most people into nearly mindless shadow creatures. Mute, powerful, and pupil-less, they’re easily capable of overpowering the engineer if they get in striking distance. And the game will take every opportunity to put them there; you really have to prepare yourself to enter every room. Well, on your first playthrough, that is.
Much of the story is deliberately obscured. There are more questions than answers to be found talking to various NPC’s. This isn’t necessarily made any better by the fact that the game was translated out of, I believe, Russian. You never really figure out what’s going on with the few people that were changed differently by the gas. You’re always just the tiniest distance away from really finding something out, but you’re constantly denied, since the meat of their conversation is already done. You finish the game roughly as in the dark as you were in the first place.
Graphically the game, for lack of a better word, donuts its environments according to the story. The very beginning and end of the game are relatively vibrantly colored. The middle, however, is very bleak and monochrome, getting darker and darker right up until the end. The desolate cities and towns you come across are all very grey, but not in the sort of way that is usually maligned. It fits the mood they’re going for to a great degree.
There were a few major changes gameplay-wise between the demo and the final version. For one thing, the train no longer requires you to run around fixing it. This is an improvement, because originally there were only two things that could actually go wrong. In the final version, it rotates between compartments per section, and there are more things that you would have to juggle. Running between five things and dealing with passengers would quickly leave you frazzled. Having only one thing malfunction per train section gives you the time to make sure passengers survive and craft enough to make it through the next area.
"Though short, The Final Station provides a satisfying apocalyptic experience,especially thanks to its pixel style."
// Publisher: tinyBuild // Developer: Do My Best, Andrey Rumak // 227
OS: Windows 7 64bit
Processor: 2 ghz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 560 series or higher / AMD HD 6870 or higher
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 400 MB
available space