her compartment, and if you walk through the train you hear her playing Bach partitas,
tuning up, playing scales, and so forth. Her character’s main theme is a violin theme as
well, and appears in different guises in different situations as the story develops.
It’s a game you really wouldn’t want to play with the sound off.
Certainly it would lose a lot without the sound. InLast Expressthe sound is more than
just the dialog. Without the shift in ambient noise, the music, the sound effects operat-
ing as clues, the feeling of hearing a conversation so far away you can’t quite make out
the words and then getting closer to it, and then the effect of hearing conversations in
foreign languages that you can’t understand no matter how close you get, all of that’s
really integral to the experience ofThe Last Express. It’s funny because people tend to
focus on the graphics. But one of the more technically innovative things we did was on
the sound track. Most people aren’t aware of it, but we actually have six tracks of sound
being simultaneously streamed off the CD and mixed on the fly. For example, you can
have the train ambient noise, the sound effect of a door opening, two people talking,
thunder rolling in the distance, and a bit of music trailing off from the last cut-scene, and
all of that going at the same time. It really creates a very rich sonic tapestry.
Again differing from many other adventure games,Last Expressoffers a fairly
non-linear experience for the player, where there seem to be multiple ways to
get through to the end. Do you think non-linearity in adventure games is
important?
It’s crucial; otherwise
it’s not a game. There
are a couple of game
models which I wanted
to steer away from, one
of which is where you
have to do a certain
thing to get to the next
cut-scene or the story
doesn’t progress.
Another is the kind of
branching-tree,
“Choose Your Own
Adventure” style,
where there’s ten ways
the story can end, and if
you try all ten options
you get to all ten of
them. One of the puzzle sequences that I think worked best inLast Expressis one of the
first ones, where you encounter Tyler’s body and you have to figure out what to do to
get rid of it. There are several equally valid solutions, and each one has its own draw-
backs, ripple effects down the line. For example, if you hide the body in the bed, you risk
that when the conductor comes to make the bed he will discover the body there, so you
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The Last Express