“Headphones
and dark environment recommended,” the game tells you in the
beginning. Listen to that advice; it’s worth it! The
Last Door by TheGameKitchen
is a simple yet creepy little horror point-and-click adventure,
heavily inspired by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Philipps
Lovecraft. Its strong point definitely is the creepy atmosphere,
thanks to some good writing, great music, excellent sound design, and
pixel art which leaves more to the players’ imagination than it
shows while still being explicit when it needs to.
Of
course, you can do most of the tasks in another order. But I tried to
keep the backtracking to a minimum, and there is still a lot of it!
Controls
Classic
point-and-click adventure: Left-click somewhere to make your avatar
go there. (Prepare yourself for some seriously slow walking.)
If an object is usable, the cursor changes when you move the mouse
over the object. A magnifying glass mean you can look at something, a
hand means you can use it or pick it up. Most stuff is only usable
after you have examined it, so don’t forget to click some things
twice! Your inventory is displayed in the bottom of the screen. To
advance in dialogues, just click anywhere in the game screen.
Also, there are some “accessibility options”: To enable a
dyslexia-friendly font for in-game dialogue and descriptions, press
1. If you do that, the letters are “clean” and not pixelated,
which makes them easier to read, but they don’t fit into the game
that good anymore. You can add written descriptions of sound to the
game by pressing 2. To go in and out of fullscreen mode, simply press
3.
Prologue
In the
prologue, you control Anthony Beechworth, whose letter gets the whole
thing going. Not much to do here, except commit suicide. Yay!
First,
you have to pick up the rope to your left. Then, click on the
chair to your right to put it up. Click on the beams on the ceiling
to hang the rope. Click the rope again to make a nosse. Then, climb
the chair, and click it again to hang yourself. Congratulations, your
first player character is dead!
It’s
october 1891 and our hero, Jeremiah Devitt, gets a letter from
Anthony, only saying “Videte ne quis sciat.” It’s
an old code the friends used back in their time at boarding school.
Anthony must be in trouble, Jeremiah deduces and,
being the good horror game protagonist that he is, he has to find out
what the mysterious letter means and what made his friend kill
himself. So, we travel to Sussex to visit Beechworth Mansion!
Beechworth Mansion
After
a short intro sequence, you are now in front of Beechworth Mansion.
Click the door to enter it; there is nothing you can do out here yet.
You
are now in the entrance hall. On a small table to the left of the
door you can find a farewell note from the servants who seem to have
left the mansion in a rush. Exit the entrance hall to your right and
enter some kind of living room. There is a matchbox in the cabinet
next to the gramophone. Take it! Anthony won’t need it, anyway.
Now, go through the door in the middle of the room. In the hall,
enter the first door to your left to reach the kitchen.
Inside
the kitchen, you can take a piece of cloth fro the stove to your
left. It’s a little hard to see, but Jeremiah will pick it up if
you click anywhere on the stove a second time. Unlock the door to
your right. It leads outside the house where a murder of crows eats …
something. Jeremiah is too afraid to go anywhere near the birds, so
there is nothing to do here, yet. Go back to the corridor.
Go
right. Between the second and the third door, there is a crooked
picture. Let’s correct that! Click it until it falls down and
reveals a rosary hanging on the wall. Take it. Now go through the
third door. You are inside the maid’s room. Time to steal her
stuff! Pick up the lamp on top of the drawers. Read the diary on a
table in the bottom left corner of the screen. A cat? But there is a
cat’s bowl under the window! I wonder if that’ll come in handy
later. Sadly, the window won’t stay open when you open it. Use the
rosary for its intended purpose: to keep a window open. Go back to
the corridor.
The
door to your right is padlocked, so you have to explore other parts
of the mansion. Go back to the entrance hall and up the stairs to the
left. Apparently, Jeremiah is also afraid of the dark, so light your
lamp with the matches. The first door is locked, let’s carry on.
The second “door” is a hole in the wall, covered up with planks.
That’s always a good sign in a horror game! Go through the third
door into the bedroom.
Time
for some pixel hunting! There is a silver key on a small table at the
head of the bed that is literally thwo pixels big. Take it. You can
use it to open the padlocked door in the downstairs corridor. What
are you waiting for?
Once
you have unlocked the door, you can enter the basement. Pick up the
colorful square to your left. It’s a record: The
Carnival of Venice by Paganini. Walk
left until you reach a huge boiler. To the right of it, there is a
crowbar that you have to pick up. Now, let’s play our record! Go up
the stairs, through the corridor, into the living room, and put the
record on the gramophone. Click the gramophone again to start it. The
music freaks me out. Leave the room! As soon as you leave it, a
record scratch can be heard, and the music stops abruptly. Go back
into the living room to see what happened.
All
the crows are now in here, sitting around, staring at you all
Hitchcock-Birds-like.
Creepy. Go into the kitchen and leave the house through the door you
unlocked earlier. The birds are gone, there is only one crow lying in
a pool of blood left. Apparently, it is what the other crows were
picking apart earlier. Poor, dying crow … Pick it up. Don’t look
at me like that, pick it up. O god, listen to its wailing. You have
to get rid of it! Go back inside the house and into the maid’s
room. Put the helpless crow in the cat’s bowl, you cruel bastard.
This will attract the cat. You can hear it meowing when you leave the
room, but you have to take care of something else first.
Go
into the upstairs corridor, and remove the planks in front of the
boarded-up room with the crowbar. Go inside to find out why it was
boarded up. Examine the dead woman (Anna, Anthony’s wife) on the
bed. Her fingers are clutching a note. Read it. The woman drops a
hairpin. Pick it up. Make sure to read the letters on the floor
before you go through the door to the left. Examine the leftmost
portrait, the one leaning against the wall under the window. The
paint around the head of the stuffed lynx in the picture is fresh.
How is that possible? Go back into the corridor and enter the
bodyless bedroom to the left. Use the hairpin on the balcony door and
enter the adjacent room through its window.
Note
the stuffed lynx on the left. You can read a note on the writing desk
and some torn out pages on a table at the bottom of the screen to
find out that there was clearly something wrong with Anthony. Next to
the pages, there is a hammer; on the floor in front of the door to
the right is a can of thinner. Take both with you. Examine the
trapdoor at the top of the ladder. It needs a golden key. Exit the
room via the door to the right and enter the basement.
The
cat has enjoyed the meal you gave it (you monster) and now waits
behind the wall to the left, meowing. Break down the wall using your
hammer. Ah, the classic cat scare! There is some strange stuff in the
chest behind the wall, but Jeremiah will only pick up the knife. Go
all the way upstairs again, through the boarded-up room and into the
portrait room.
Use
the thinner on the cloth, then use the cloth on the painting beneath
the window to reveal that the original lynx had an open mouth. Leave
the room and go into the study to the left of the corridor. Use the
knife to pry the lynx’s mouth open and reveal its secret: a golden
key. Take the key and use it to open the trapdoor.
In
the attic, you find Anthony’s body, still hanging from the ceiling.
Read the letter in his pocket. Be prepared for one last crow-related
jump scare. Chapter 1 of The Last Door
ends here. Congratulations, you just earned 15 Kongregate points and
the badge Don’t Leave Me Hangin’!
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