The Final Station is a retro-pixel 2D game where you play a train conductor who delivers important cargo and ferries survivors through the zombie-ridden wastes of a post-apocalyptic world. Developed by indie duo Do My Best and published by tinyBuild, The Final Station is Do My Best’s debut title.
At its best, The Final Station ’s haunting art and suggestive snippets of found text give you a sense of nostalgia for a world you never really got the chance to meet. You know that there was a First Visitation, over a hundred years ago. You know the military runs the world. You know the train is the world’s lifeline.
According to a press release, “ The Final Station 's localization file has about 7 thousand words... So the post-apocalypse on a train is heavy on story.” In notes taped on walls and on laptops in abandoned apartments, you can find snippets of human interest stories, brief glimmers of lives interrupted by disaster.
But it turns out that the core concept is cooler than the execution. Much of the writing is weak and unconvincing. The bleak glow of a pale sun over a ruined gray apartment building speaks volumes more than almost any text in the game.
The Final Station is a game split into two parts. The first part is train management: taking care of survivors you find, making sure the train keeps running and crafting any medkits or bullets you may need for the next station. This part is not fun, point blank. The survivors’ health and hunger bars deplete rapidly and food is scarce, so the conversations you can eavesdrop on are often interrupted by one party’s untimely death.
The survivors don’t ever lift a finger to help themselves. You have to physically grab medkits and food and bring them over, for which they barely scrape up a “thank you” before returning to their petty bickering. If the survivors make it to certain stations alive, you receive unique rewards per person, which is basically the only reason to bother wasting resources on the ingrates. The reward is listed under the survivor’s name, making managing their survival a very cynical affair.
As for keeping the train moving, it’s not hard or anything - you press some down buttons, some up buttons, tug a lever - but the lack of explanation may trip you up the first time. Also, going to the front of the train for food or to check for messages from other conductors takes you away from the survivors’ conversation, which is the only entertainment between levels except for watching the landscape change as you pass. You can even arrive at your destination but not realize it if your sound is low and you’re too busy eavesdropping, and all the while your survivors’ bars are dropping.
When you arrive at a station, the zombie survival horror part of the game kicks in. You have to root through the whole level for supplies (a handful of which you can use to craft medkits or bullets, the rest becomes money you can use at certain stations for more resources), locate the station code that lets you move on to the next stop, and fight off zombies.
I can’t express how done with zombies I am; I’m completely over the phenomenon in gaming, literature, television, comics, etc. The concept is a stone and the final drops of blood have been wrung from it. At least in The Final Station , the zombies are pixelated pitch-black silhouettes, sparing me the parade of gore that other works seem to deem requisite for the genre. But there is nothing overly new about The Final Station ’s approach to zombies. Some go fast, some go slow, some explode, and none of them are hard to figure out. As a vehicle for an eerie apocalypse, zombies are convenient enough, if totally overdone.
While you do find bullets on the regular, you find few enough at each turn that scarcity is a pressing concern. No bullet can go wasted, which made me redo more than a few checkpoints trying to use as few as possible in preparation for tiresome zombie chokepoints. You can defeat zombies through melee or by using handy objects in the environment, though these methods require quick reflexes.
Exploring every nook and cranny of each limited map, gathering all survivors into a blossoming little community of whiners, moving onto the next station: rinse and repeat. This is your game for 30 levels, with difficulty based on how many bullets you waste. To Do My Best’s credit, each level is visually distinct from the next. I can’t emphasize enough how really lovely the pixel art is: it practically carries the game. But as far as gameplay, each level feels linear and repetitive in its own unique way.
All in all, The Final Station’s five- to six-hour runtime isn’t a bad value for its $14.99 sticker price if the retro gameplay and pursuit of an optimal run suits you. If you’re a fan of 2D side scrollers or are looking for a gorgeous indie game, The Final Station is a great pick. For my part, the zombie post-apocalypse story is played out, the survivors are charmless and the retro gameplay verges on tedious.
But I’d pay The Final Station’s full price for a single quality print of its background art.
The Final Station is available on Steam, Xbox One and PS4.
