[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Last Labyrinth through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Systems: PlayStation VR, Meta Quest 2/3, Steam VR, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: November 13, 2019
Developer: AMATA K.K.
Time Spent: 6 Hours 31 Minutes
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From what I was reading on the Meta reviews about Last Labyrinth, I was a little wary about how well the game would function on the aged Oculus Quest 2 (I deadname here because I bought the system when it was still the Oculus Quest 2, before the Meta rebranding of 2022. First, a bit of context. In Last Labyrinth, you play as a person strapped to a wheelchair, and your primary method of control is by pointing your cursor/head at an object, and either nodding or shaking your head when your companion asks if you want something done to/with the object. Most of the negative reviews talked about your companion not recognizing your head movements, and even though the game has been out for six years at this point, I was afraid that something in the Quest 2 wouldn't recognize the less HD head movements. With the exception of one room (I'll get into that later), I never experienced any problems with the companion being able to recognize my head movements. It could also have been that, having read those reviews, I was very deliberate and over-exaggerated my own nods more than I would have done in real life. It's a video game after all, and nothing was time sensitive, so why bother trying to nod quickly?
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The premise for Last Labyrinth was pretty unclear from the start, but still very intriguing. You play as a person strapped/chained to a wheelchair with your hands also chained together. With you is a young girl of indeterminate age who only speaks, I presume (and I apologize if I'm wrong), a fictional language based somewhat on Japanese. The mechanic, since you cannot talk (because of hardware limitations) and you cannot understand your companion, is to point at the objects you want her to interact with, and to either nod or shake your head when she walks over and points at an object. You hold a device that lets you point a laser beam at objects, a lever, for instance, and when your companion walks over to the lever, she'll stop and point. That's when you either nod if you want her to pull on the lever, or shake your head if you accidentally told her to interact with the wrong object.
The performance on the Quest 2 was fine. The game itself is six years old at this point and the Quest 2 is five-year-old system so everything is a little antiquated. There were times when the visible world/screen would shake within the visor, but that never seems to come across in the gameplay videos. I never experienced any motion sickness and the fact that you play as an immobile person in a wheelchair meant that you could take in the whole room, look around meant that it was easy on the stomach. The downside though is that you're not able to move around to try to get a better look at the puzzles and the different mechanics in each room. But that's a limitation that's baked into the game, so I can't really complain.
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The game is made up of single rooms that contain elements of a single puzzle. Once you think you've solved the puzzle, there's a final button/lever to operate, and you then watch to see if you solved the puzzle, or you both die. Thankfully, after the first time you're forced to watch you and/or your companion die, the game allows you to skip the sequence by pressing the A button, rather than sitting through what is sometimes a lengthy sequence of events that look like they were rough drafts of devices from the SAW series. From one perspective, it's nice not to have to watch a long sequence when you know you're about to watch a child get their head sliced off by a guillotine or crushed by spinning columns of spikes. The other is that you don't have to spend 90 seconds watching your companion die, yourself die, and a final atmospheric death sequence of a goblet filling up with blood because you didn't solve the puzzle correctly. Last Labyrinth may not be a perfect game, but including this type of functionality is when you know that a developer at least somewhat respects your time playing their game.
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Depending on what you're looking for out of a VR game, how you personally play VR games, and how quickly you're able to solve the puzzles, the gameplay loop could either be perfectly paced, or could be very short and reptative. The game is somewhat broken up into two sections. In the first, which is made up of six puzzles spread out betwee three rooms, the puzzles are relatively easy to complete with only the first train puzzle causing me some grief. That being said, some of the puzzles do require a bit of trial and error especially on the initial playthrough as you soon realize that you need to often need to wait for lights to turn green before pressing the final button in the room to set off the final mechanism or put into motion the final step that opens the door, or sets off the trap in the room and kills both you and your companion.
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In the second half of the game, there are now nine new puzzle rooms and the introduction of Animal Shogi, a simplified version of the Shogi, an early board game akin to Chess although significantly more complicated as the game progresses. I had never played either Animal Shogi or standard Shogi before so the first time playing took me a while to figure out what the rules were. With very few exceptions, I lost on purposed because during these final moments of path I was taking through the various puzzle rooms, you were playing against either your companion or the hooded figure who seemed to be the one responsible for your predicament. If you won a round of Animal Shogi, your companion would either be injected with a syringe of green fluid or a gun would be pointed at them as in a game of Russian Roulette. Given the implication that if I won more rounds of Animal Shogi, that would mean the likely death of my Compansion, who by all accounts was a young girl. So rather than be responsible for the death of this child, I sacrificed myself in the hopes that whatever rules the hooded figure was playing by, that they would let my Companion live.
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The end of each sequence of puzzle rooms, be it in the first of second half of the game, was a primary source of confusion for me. There were times when we would solve all of the puzzles and make it out alive. We would be out on the cliff and some event would happen. My companion would fling her red ribbons into the wind, or she would throw the pointing device I was holding into the ocean, or she would slip and fall off the cliff. In the second half, there were times when it would only show my Companion in a field of flowers, seemingly fine with the world, while others would have the hooded figure climb up the side of the ciff and drag my Companion back down the cliff face like some kind of Michael Meyers figure who wouldn't die. At the end of each of these sequences, the screen would fade and you would "come to" again in the starting room with a new tchotchke around the pull string on the lamp.
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Apparently the meaning behind the game was utterly lost on me, even with the two scenes when you woke up in a hospital room with a window view of the ocean and recognizable cliff face. The frequent respawning at the end of each puzzle sequence was an obvious indicator that the story being told wasn't as straighforward as two people stuck in a series of rooms with escapable puzzles, but I couldn't quite figure out what that story was supposed to be. Throw in the chalice that fills with blood every time you fail a puzzle (thankfully only the first time) and the Sefirot from the Kabbalah and it almost felt like there was purposefully too much information given to be able to make sense of. And then I read on the Steam Discussion page someone's explanation behind how they interpreted the game and endings and it truely makes complete sense now; so thank you Earthplayer. From what I could tell, I did not experience the "true ending" because there were endings I didn't see as there are either four or six possible endings for the Animal Shogi game involving syringes, I think depending on how many times each person wins and looses. Do I think the ending and meaning was a little obtuse? Very much so yes, but not to the detriment of my enjoyment of the game. Had Earthplayer's explanation come out of left field, then I would simply dismiss it, but a lot of what they wrote makes a lot of sense and does connect most of dots that I had questions about. I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles and at the halfway point when the hooded figure started walking towards me and I knew I couldn't do anything was genuinely terrifying.
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Overall I had a mostly good experience with Last Labyrinth. My fears based on reviews I'd read about the game not registering head nods was mostly unfounded, although there were times when my nods were not recognized. There were moments of frustration with puzzle design, although thankfully a walkthrough from Composer LOST was comprehensive to help me through some of the harder to comprehend solutions (looking at you weights puzzle, torch and rope puzzle, escape room puzzle, light projector trio puzzle, and the laser and box puzzle; about 2/3rds of the puzzles from the second half of the game). And kudos to AMATA K.K. for a fun and novel approach to a VR horror-puzzle game.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. I also genuinely appreciated a lot of the steps AMATA K.K. took towards not making the game potentially offensive regarding watching a child frequently die in horrible ways. Never actually seeing your Companion/daughter die (as in seeing her head cut off, or her dangling body from being hung) was a nice consideration, although there are plenty of moments when you see her die either off screen, or in a way that doesn't leave you looking at a mangled and bloody corpse. Additionally, I appreciated that in the few instances where you're literally shot in the face, that the screen cuts to black before you see and/or hear the gun go off.
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