Why aren’t there enough PS5 consoles in stores? Will the problems of getting a switch return when the OLED model debuts? And from the leading graphics cards, better not to mention.
That we squeeze the planet drop by drop and through all of its pores (These days, there are electricity-induced droughts in several cities in Europe to benefit even more from the electricity bill disaster) is hard to deny. But it has seldom been put in the same way as The Last Survey, a reasonably playable short story created from start to finish by Nicholas O’Brien with music by Lewin Kopenhafer and editing by Essay Games.
Released a year ago on itch.io, it is already in the Nintendo Switch eShop and on Steam ready to stir the conscience of a much wider audience for less than four dollars. It’s a short trip a sitting reading
It can’t be otherwise when they tell you that the end of the world as we know it is approaching and your character is the only one who knows and admits it. This geologist had to deliver the news to the director of a multinational mining company based in Brazil that, as he knows beforehand, the veins are practically exhausted. The impact of this information extends far beyond the business world, as it is not enough to shut down already exhausted companies and lay off workers. This report concludes that the lack of minerals such as nickel or cobalt, which are essential to the manufacture of electronic devices, will create commercial, territorial and political conflicts.
The author of the story manages in record time for players and readers to put themselves in the situation, empathize with the character and fear for a future that does not seem so unreal. It will take a few minutes before you can feel the sweat on your hands
In these small selection what O’Brien lets take is all of the “gameplay” of The Last Survey. It’s seven or eight, not more if you get to the end of the story. Because it cannot be so if you choose the “wrong” path. I put the word in quotation marks because I believe that anyone should be able to tell this man what comes out of his soul in such a situation, regardless of whether he reaches the end of the story in this passage or whether he has to start over. It is, if anything, an obligation to go back side by side and without running (because if you run it throws you out of the game), failure to do so mandatory replayability
Nor should it be interpreted as an adventure of finding your own ending while they are trying to sell it, because one path or the other only distracts a few paragraphs from the text and then leads back to a quiet, probably very descriptive point of the essay. That or it will result in an abrupt shutdown. But there are no roads as such.
Very interesting short story, written with a fine pen – and an educated Englishman who calls for a high level and several visits to the dictionary – to spend a while in front of the screen realizing that the world is going to hell. Oh, and how pressured you to tell or save your ass. Because someone has to say that. In The Last Survey, it’s you. Or not.
