Virginia developer Variable State’s latest game, Last Stop, spins three different, interconnected but distinct tales of life in suburban London. The stories – Paper Dolls, Domestic Affairs, and Stranger Danger – carry the player from one genre to the next, from body-swapping comedy to noir to mystery and more, all with the undercurrent of something supernatural lurking beneath the surface.
Last Stop’s choice-based, episodic stories serve to offer different slices of life, tackling subjects large and small – though they can feel quite large for the characters – and offering charming and moving insight into the lives of its leads, John, Meena, and Donna. And while Last Stop’s overarching story goes to some unexpected places, it always keeps its urgency and drama rooted in what those characters are experiencing.
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It all amounts to a lot of moving pieces of stories not often found in games, and some surprising choices by both the developers and that players will be asked to make. IGN spoke to Last Stop’s co-directors Jonathan Burroughs, Lyndon Holland, and Terry Kenny about the process of building Last Stop’s story, its surprising ending, and more.
Building an Episodic Game With TV-like Pacing
Last Stop is episodic, but comes as a complete package – you won’t be waiting months from now to see its story conclude. And nearly every episode clocks in at the 15-20 minute range, giving the larger stories more the pacing of a season of a bingeable streaming show. Each of the three stories comprises six chapters, and players will have to complete a chapter of all three before moving on to the next (ie: finish chapter 1 of all three before you can start any story’s chapter 2).
That structural limitation was an intention of the developers to make sure players were always engaged with not just all three stories, but of the larger threads tying them together.
“We knew we’d have these parallel stories, and we were concerned that someone would start story A, play all the way through story A to the ending, and then go to the beginning of story B,” Burroughs explained. “And because we wanted the stories to overlap and to meet at the conclusion, we thought that would spoil the story. So there needed to be this chapter structure… [and] that provided the ability to set the pace at which you experience the whole thing, for it to be more like episodes of a TV show.”
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“The idea of having six chapters per story, that wasn’t a magic number we decided,” Holland said. “We had the story written, and then we were thinking, how can we divide these stories up? And at least two of them had very clear cliffhanger beats that happen at moments.
“[These beats] definitely were a part of the fabric of the DNA of the story to begin with.”
The interconnectivity binding the stories together grew as the leads honed in on the story, though.
“[Early on], there was a desire perhaps for the stories to be self-contained, like episodes of Black Mirror. One episode doesn’t necessarily relate to the other,” Holland said. “But we changed our minds on that. We thought it’d be more interesting to not do that. Then it was…like an exercise in restriction of, we’re not going to rewrite, not going to start from scratch. We’ve got these stories, we like them. How can we thread more character details that exist in one story and thread them through the other two stories?
“For instance, characters that might be unique characters in one story became the same character,” he continued. “Meena’s rival, Amy, in Domestic Affairs, was a separate person to Jack’s friend in Paper Dolls, but we made those two people. Then that actually made the Amy character more interesting because now she’s got two sides, two different lives.”
Part of the process of figuring out how the stories related to each other was the question of each story’s timeline, and how they don’t necessarily line up with one another.
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“The stories, and this is something that we decided to not really telegraph that much, aren’t necessarily in the same timeline,” Holland explained. “We did have this whole map, a grid of where each chapter was happening on what date. And it’s still there in the game, if you look at the mobile phones and they have the date, and you can see sometimes it goes back in time, sometimes it goes forward in time.”
But because that timeline isn’t always spelled out, Holland said the team felt “it looked like we were just bringing him back to life.” And though that character’s removal from the scene was a disappointment for the team, Holland believes it served the broader story overall.
“It was just a shame because we lost that moment to find more about that character, but it was worth it in the end. I think we did get lucky that we didn’t find ourselves in more situations like that.”
Playing through each story, you’ll make dialogue choices, explore a variety of locations, and occasionally interact via quicktime events or minigames while uncovering more information about the larger plots at play. It’s often in those slice of life minigames, like cooking a meal or chucking bottles into a trash can, does Last Stop offer some of its most introspective and endearing moments.
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“Those are things that we genuinely get excited about [developing], little things like the idea of having breakfast,” Kenny said. “Before JB and Lyndon went and recorded with the voice actors, we already had a pretty good sense of who we wanted the characters to be and what we wanted them to be like. We wanted [the whole game] to be engaging, and that would have to come from the characters,” he continued, noting that many of these scenes not only allow for plot points to progress, but allowed the team to find more places to showcase new sides of the cast.
“That [throwing bottles] scene is there obviously to serve as a setup for introducing the Handsome Man, but that chat and the interaction is there because we felt it’s important that you get to know these kids before you go off on this adventure with them.”
“It wasn’t that easy to do, but it’s the kind of stuff that is really enjoyable,” Kenny explained. “…It’s not something that you get to do in video games. And it’s contrary to what you think. Doing mundane stuff, from the practicality of making it, is fun by virtue of its novelty.”
Creating Last Stop’s Last Stop
Spoilers ahead: Come back to this portion of the story once you’ve beaten Last Stop!
Last Stop’s story eventually goes to unexpected places, quite literally. The three disparate yet intertwined stories of Variable State’s episodic, choice-based adventure game come to a head in some surprising ways, paying off both the deeply personal, grounded stories of its protagonists and the more supernatural underpinning of the plot.
The three co-directors of Last Stop spoke to IGN about crafting that ending, making sure to always stay true to the characters at its core, and how the culmination’s unexpected twists came to be.
SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR LAST STOP’S ENDING (and the whole game, really. Turn back now if you don’t want to be spoiled!)
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Last Stop’s last stop is Cold Harbor, an alien world that all three protagonists – John, Meena, and Donna – find themselves venturing to through very disparate means. From the body-swapping, green-eye glowing handsome men, and more, players are aware throughout each story that something otherworldly is at play, but Cold Harbor itself, and the revelation of this alien world, is a surprise that comes in the lengthy, final chapter of Last Stop.
But in earlier plans, players would have gotten a taste of the desert planet long before John stepped through a portal thanks to the Vape Lord, Meena was plunged through another for work, and Donna was taken there by the Handsome Man.
“For the longest time, there was a very different prologue, which I think introduced the location that the story ends up in right at the front,” Burroughs explained. “That was the first thing you’d see in the game, and introduced some of the inhabitants of that world, and some of the crisis that was going on there, and then we came back to London. I think we felt that was perhaps going to give people whiplash or be too peculiar from the outset. We were content to leave that reveal to be the epilogue that it is in the final version.”
But even with the changes to the prologue, the amount of Cold Harbor players would get to see and learn about, was a big question the developers had to tackle.
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“At one stage, it was really going to be completely out of the blue,” Kenny said. “When we went back [to crack the ending], we felt like we had to thread it in, we had to try to get it into the story more. It made a lot more sense to do that.”
“More was added as the game developed, in the characters like the Vape Lord and in the Tube Station Stranger, this idea that there’s this community of people living in London, there’s this hidden world just out of reach within the city itself,” Burroughs said.
Players interact with these characters throughout each story, and eventually make their way to Cold Harbor, a place where the characters don’t speak the alien language, don’t know the customs of the culture they’re walking into, and generally have very little idea how to behave, other than like themselves, when there. And while Last Stop’s epilogue gives you a sense of how this world operates, it eschews any huge exposition dump to act as a Cold Harbor history course. But that doesn’t mean the co-directors didn’t think through what this world would be like.
“We had much more lore about Cold Harbor at the end, and this into how many times we rewrote the ending. I think we got bogged down in the science fiction of the alien planet that they end up at, and what that’s about, why it’s there, what the culture is, what the backstory is, who certain individuals are there,” Holland explained, noting at one point they had larger plans to focus on two characters from that world whose own story would play out and then intersect with the ending of the three Earth-based characters.
“We ultimately thought people, are they going to be invested in these three characters? That’s where you’ve spent most of your time. We tried to minimize the amount of explanation about what this place is, and just had it be more about something has happened to these people, they’ve got to get through it,” he continued.
“We became very happy once we let go of the idea of trying to explain, having to do a ‘Welcome to Cold Harbor,’ and here’s where it is in the galaxy and all that stuff. We really embraced the idea that it would just be thrust upon the characters,” Kenny said.
Holland explained how the team hoped the final version of how the prologue and epilogue play out offer players a balance between focusing on the earthly stories of these three characters with the supernatural trappings hanging around them to accentuate the mystery.
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“The prologue [in the final game] was introduced to set up this idea of this portal, after we ditched the initial prologue,” Holland said, noting the team waffled on having a prologue at all before deciding “now we do need to front-load the fact that, straight off the bat, we’re saying, this is science fiction. Okay, now we’re going to drop you in for a few hours into something that’s maybe not science fiction. But hopefully, that’s still bubbling away, so when we do try to explain why these events have happened, and it is to do with this other planet, that doesn’t totally seem like it’s just come out of nowhere, that there is some sort of setup.”
Regardless of the amount of lore, science fiction, and Cold Harbor itself made it into Last Stop, the developers wanted to ensure that the excitement of these otherworldly ideas complemented and enhanced the human drama unfolding throughout the three adventures.
“We came up with the character traumas, and then they were really dialed up to 11, or they were set in motion by the supernatural element,” Burroughs said. “In all our early conversations, the threading of those two and the balance of those two was something we were always talking about. And we were always checking ourselves to make sure one didn’t overwhelm the other, or that they didn’t depart from one another sufficiently that there’s an incongruity there.”
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Jonathon Dornbush is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. Find him on Twitter @jmdornbush.
