The Last Express

1. Everything in The Last Express is topnotch: the graphics and the voice acting; the varied, fascinating characters, and the absorbing story. It's an atmospheric mystery/thriller like "The Maltese Falcon," plunked into a colorful, stylish Art Deco set. As Robert Cath, a young American doctor, you hop a ride on the Orient Express, where you encounter a sumptuous world sliding inexorably toward violence and war.

2. Nearly all the action takes place on the train, which heightens the intimacy and drama. In this, it is reminiscent of Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes." Last Express takes place in "real time," which means that events and conversations continue on at their own pace. A rewind feature permits you to go back in time to redo things you missed. If you have played "Titanic: An Adventure Out of Time," in which the end game takes place in (much more frenetic) real time, you will have a sense of what Last Express is like.

3. There are several endings, but the one in which you "win" is a classic. IMHO, the ending alone is worth the price of the game.

Cons:

1. The characters in Last Express were filmed, and then animated; the end result is rather jerky. I found that I noticed this for about the first fifteen minutes, then I adjusted and forgot all about it.

2. The game includes a handful of fight scenes, although there is an easy cheat to get past these (I used it). There are also more subtle adult themes. They might go right over the head of a child playing the game with you. On the other hand, they might not.

3. The save-game mechanism, which doesn't allow you to easily identify your game.

Bottom Line: Wit, Beauty, Romance, Elegance, Intrigue, Action, Suspense.

However, I thought there were a few problems that kept me from giving it five stars. This game is real-time (you need to keep track of the time) which means you have to be in the right place at the right time to have a conversation. If you need to sneak into a room and miss your chance it's to late (this happened to me more than once. ugh.)You can't quickly reload the game like you would in other adventure games. Last Express only lets you start over at certain points in the game. It's very frustrating! My other complaint is that I found some of the puzzles to not be very intuitive. I don't want to give anything away since this is a truly great game but I did have to hunt down hints at a few points during the game.

Overall, this game is great entertainment, if you don't mind some of the frustration.

Looking at the screen-shots, it may not draw in the traditional video game player (such as myself). And yet, once you are in the environment, the game is totally aborbing. There aren't enough "puzzles" to qualify the game as Myst-style, but the characterization and story make this game something beyond any other video game I've ever seen. It's emotionally involving, in the way that we merge ourselves into truly good movies and books. The somewhat cartoonish style isn't so much like King's Quest or Space Quest as it is like Toulouse-Latrec. And the background design is stunning and intricate. There are plenty of plot-twists and mysteries to solve -- this is no stale adventure -- but the involvement you experience in the story is unlike anything I've seen since, despite all of our technological advances. This is, still, one of the finest video games ever produced, a first-person story of the highest order, where you determine, every time you play, the flavor of the story.