Last Labyrinth Review (Talis)
Day 8 of the October Horror Reviews: Last Labyrinth
Ever wanted to feel absolutely powerless while someone else does all the heavy lifting?
Ever wanted to yell at a little girl because she picked up a block you just had her put in the right spot?
Ever wanted to feel stupid when you don't figure out a puzzle and then watch yourself die in multiple horrific ways?
You can do all that and more with Last Labyrinth!
Last Labyrinth is the passion project of a small dev team in Japan... with a surprising cast list including Stefanie Joosten.
The game really feels like a brutal test of your problem-solving skills, with an equally brutal punishment if you don't figure it out. Every level has a unique death, and some of them are pretty gruesome.
You're stuck in a chair. Bound to it, unable to move other than holding a little button in your hands that runs the laser pointer attached to your head, and using your head to basically be your communication with someone who does not speak your language. You communicate with this person by pointing at what you want her to do, and nodding or shaking your head as she points at what you're pointing at.
Your job is to make it through a labyrinth of various puzzles that get progressively more difficult as you go along, some of them require a pretty functional understanding of mathematics, some of them require a bit of common sense, etc.
Interestingly enough, the game doesn't actually punish you for dying: In fact, if you die at every level, you get to see a grail slowly fill up with your blood and you get an achievement... plus, probably a special ending? Still figuring that part out!
Graphics are great, they feel foreboding and mesh very well with the sound design, not only that, but all the assets seem pretty original which is another big check but a lot of horror games nowadays just copy-paste assets from other places.
Speaking of: Technically, this isn't a recent game. This one came out in 2019, but it's still one of those games that endures and can be both very frustrating and very rewarding. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a game that makes you work quite so hard to figure out minute details. 7/10