have to deal with that somehow. You can avoid that problem by throwing the body out
the window, but if you do that, then the body is discovered by the police. And they board
the train at the next stop and you have to figure out how to hide from the police when
they’re going compartment to compartment checking passports. Either way, your
actions have consequences on the people around you. As another example, if you throw
the body out the window, you may overhear François, the little boy, saying to his mom,
“Hey, I saw a man being thrown out the window.” And she’ll say to him, “Shut up, you
little brat, don’t tell lies!”
I hadn’t even noticed that.
The game is full of little things like that.
So is that why you don’t tend to like other adventure games, because they’re
too set in “primrose path” style?
Some adventure games have great moments, but in terms of the overall experience it’s
rare that a game consistently keeps that high a level. InLast Expresstoo, there are parts
of the game that don’t quite live up to the expectations set up by that first dispos-
ing-of-the-body puzzle. Defusing the bomb is one I wasn’t so happy with. You just have
to grit your teeth and follow the steps; there’s no way around it. It’s not a particularly
clever puzzle. But again, the main concern was that the story would work overall, and
that the overall experience would be satisfying.
I’ve heard many adventure game designers say that to effectively tell a story,
you really need to limit the player’s options and force them on a specific path.
Do you agree with this notion?
It’s true, of course; it’s just a matter ofhowyou limit what the player does. The
too-obvious-to-mention limit inLast Expressis that you can’t get off the train. Any time
you get off the train, the game ends. The only way to win is to stay on the train all the
way to Constantinople. So in that sense, yeah, it’s the ultimate linear story. You’re on a
train, you can’t get off. But given that, within the train you should be able to move
around as freely as possible. There are some doors that we just had to close because
they would have changed the story too much and they wouldn’t have let us get to the
ending we wanted to get to. What if you take the gun and go through the train and kill
everyone? We decided you just can’t do that. So there’s definitely a trade-off. The more
wacky, off-the-wall options you give the player, the more that limits the complexity and
the power of the story you’ve set out to tell. Whereas if you want to keep a very ambi-
tious, central narrative that’s itself large in scope, then you have to start closing doors
around that, to make sure the player stays in the game.
Every game approaches this challenge in a different way. WithLast Express, the
train motif gave us the metaphor that we needed to keep it on track. I think once people
get the idea that they’re on the train, time is ticking, and they have to do certain things
before certain stops, and they have to get to Constantinople or else they haven’t really
made it to the end of the line; once they get that, the story works. It’s a matter of finding
a balance for what works for each particular story. What’s right for one game might not
338 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner