Release Date: February 23, 2017
Publisher: Joe Richardson
Developer: Joe Richardson
Time Spent: 3 Hours 6 Minutes
Four Last Things is a video game that I feel like I am very much the target audience. I love Hieronymus Bosch. I love Baroque, Classical, and Romantic era music. I love point-and-click games. I love Monty Python. My mother longingly refers to me as her "little heathen" (or you know, a fallen Catholic). The goal of the game is pretty simple, to commit all seven of the "Seven Deadly Sins" and then be absolved. There is an actual story as to why you have to commit these sins, but that is the straightforward explanation as to why you are doing what you are doing. In classic point-and-click fashion, you accomplish this by talking to people, picking up items, giving items to people, and performing tasks.
One of the things that I greatly appreciate about Four Last Things is that the game never got too big (looking at you "Dropsy"). The majority of the game is played on 10 screens, some that scroll to encompass multiple screen widths (nothing vertical), and at the most, I might have had eight items in my inventory, including a piece of paper/velum with which sins I had already committed and which ones I still had left to do scribbled onto it. This is to say that the game never felt overwhelming as some point-and-click games end up being and with the exception of one solution (that actually led to two sins), the game never felt too complicated. That being said, I did have to look up a guide for three of the sins and I will get into those in the P.S. to try and be as spoiler free as possible here.
I have made the executive decision to talk as little as possible for the rest of the article because a large part of the game is experiencing it as you would experience a comedian. It would be like trying to write a paragraph about why a particular joke is funny to the writer. Like, how and why I found "1997 Toyota Corolla" so hilarious in Tux and Fanny. And because I played this game on the Steam Deck, I only have pictures and no videos (I have not figured out how to make that a possibility yet), and like a good joke, there is often a dialogue of set up and separate dialogue for the punchline. There I go explaining a joke. Like I said I would not do.
Four Last Things is full of these moments and while it did take me just over three hours, a person who is better able to parse point-and-click puzzles better than I could probably finish the game in less than half the time. My biggest complaint about the game is that there is no manual save option and I noticed that the game would only save after specific events like when you picked up a new item or successfully sinned; which means that there are technically a pre-determined number of times the game saves. And that is really the only negative thing I can think of about this game. A lot of the puzzles were well thought out and there was plenty to do that kept me entertained that was not directly related to the act of sinning, and the game coming in at about 2.5-3 hours was the perfect length as there did not feel like there was any padding for padding sake. Good thing there is another game in the same vein available immediately with another on the horizon.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. From here on out, there will be a partially specific spoiler for a couple of the sins. Most of the sins could be committed within a couple of steps, like talking to one character who leads you to another character where you get an item, then you go back to the original character and commit the sin. One sin in particular required a lot more steps than any others in the game, an item that I did not know was even an item as it blended in with the rest of the back/foreground, and another object that I did not know that I could interact with. Essentially, you had to use a jug (item I didn't know existed) and fill it up with ale (from a cask I didn't know you could interact with) and give it to a drunk guy who then walked away from you, who you were supposed to follow into a different screen to collect his urine (before he stopped urinating) to then give to a doctor as a sample who then allowed you access to three jars, one of which you were supposed to use on another character. This was the only puzzle/sin that was this complicated.
Another puzzle (or was it the same puzzle???) required you to talk to a character and after choosing a dialogue option that distracts them (they move their head away from you), you have to drag a specific object from your item menu onto a somewhat small target before they look back, maybe fewer than five seconds. If I were playing on a computer, this likely would not be a problem as my hand/mouse dexterity speed and skill is decent enough, but playing on the Steam Deck's touchpad, I made this attempt five or six times before getting it to work. And that was only after four or five attempts with the wrong object and the dialogue went by too quickly for me to read to know that I was using the wrong item.
Lastly, there was another puzzle/sin that required you to have a portrait drawn by a blind painter with various dialogue options describing yourself. If you described yourself wildly incorrect (Homunculus/ Light Hair Light Eyes/ Riding a Horse/ in full plate armor), the painter would tell you that they could tell when you are lying and they refuse to paint your portrait. If you give them your correct description, they paint your portrait, but only once. Had I not looked up a guide for one of the two sins I needed help on, I would not have known that I needed to use the blind painter and get him to paint someone else who was not your character even though they are lying.
But this is all just me complaining about apparently not being intelligent enough to figure out either of these puzzles as I tend to overthink things
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