Last Labyrinth Review
Despite having behind it a creative team with an impressive legacy of projects like Ico and The Last Guardian, Last Labyrinth is an absolute mess of a game, from story to visuals to gameplay mechanics. It’s nearly incomprehensible that seasoned, competent professionals had any involvement in this product. If they did, they must have made a pact to ignore their instincts at every turn and instead do the opposite.
In Last Labyrinth, you play as a wheelchair-bound character whose hands are chained together, only able to make simple head gestures and control a forehead mounted laser pointer. Aiding you is a preteen girl named Katia, who speaks a vaguely Japanese-sounding nonsense language, so the only way to cross the communication barrier is to point with the laser and nod or shake your head. Your goal is to solve some sort of mechanical puzzle in each room and escape/be wheeled to the next room and the next puzzle. There is a slightly more elaborate narrative driving the action but it neither follows any good rules of storytelling nor engages the player in any meaningful way, a real issue in a game that can easily last over ten hours.
Devoid of a logical difficulty progression, the puzzles in Last Labyrinth jump between simple and obtuse with no logic, visual themes or mechanical consistencies connecting them. Good games teach the players a set of rules over time, bad games like Last Labyrinth do not. A simple button push in one room opens a door. In the adjoining room, that same button press — without any logical explanation — results in the death of both Katia and the player. Since the player has no mechanical agency or ability to manipulate objects apart from the girl’s directed actions, a fail state in solving a puzzle often means that one spends many uncomfortable minutes watching unpleasant and unskippable death animations. Although generally devoid of gore, there are many grisly deaths, including — in an early room — the decapitation by guillotine of a child. Films like Saw that traffic in violent death and dismemberment are not to everyone’s taste, of course, but they feature adults. There is a despicable element to Last Labyrinth that is pretty hard to rationalize, even for fans of horror. If the storytelling or graphics were better and more involving, these situations would be nearly impossible to stomach, so maybe it’s a good thing that both are sub-par.
In addition to many of the puzzles being absurdly difficult, Last Labyrinth looks like a title crafted during the PS2 era, with dark and muddy colors, primitive textures and frustratingly slow animations for Katia’s movement. While it’s true that the Oculus Quest does not have the horsepower of the PSVR or Rift, Last Labyrinth’s grainy, mobile phone VR-quality visuals are literally fatiguing to look at over an extended time. A seated and stationary VR experience, aside from the more engaging and lifelike presence of Katia, the game makes only marginally effective use of VR. Other aesthetic elements, such as sound design, voice and music, are unremarkable throughout.
At a near-premium price of $40, Last Labyrinth suggests a polished product, crafted by experienced designers and generous of content. In truth, almost nothing about Last Labyrinth is fun or rewarding. While solving some of the game’s head-scratchers can be a relief, doing so often demands an act of sheer will that ignores a lot of unpleasantness. As a hobbyist and critic, I’ve played a lot of games in the past few years that feel like they make a solid case for VR, games of imagination or innovation that simply couldn’t exist in any other medium. In contrast, Last Labyrinth just demonstrates that a poor game is not redeemed by VR, but made exponentially worse. Dark, dull and depressingly devoid of real entertainment value, Last Labyrinth is — like a shadow-filled room — best avoided.
