The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen (Charles M Ball)
Played on: 5th September
How I played it: Downloaded, ran the .gblorb file through Windows Git
How long I spent: 1hr 40 for a good ending, 85/85 points, 5/11 achievements
What I like about the blurb of The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen is that it looks like it’s going to be a historical simulation a la 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, right up until the content warning hits you with “supernatural horror”. It’s a great concept, setting a horror story on board an old paddleboat – nowhere to go unless you can outswim anything that’s coming for you. But I think it’s the historical side, the setting and interaction, where Last Voyage shines.
The quick summary is that as we do a spot of historical research on our great-great-grandfather, we get ourselves whisked away to the Warsaw Queen, the boat where he and every other passenger are about to meet their ends in a horrific fire. So we’ve got that hanging over our heads, but we can still make time to explore the Queen, which has been implemented with much attention to detail. Quite a few rooms are unused as far as I’m aware but exist in-game because they’d be vital to the operation of the ship. Our fellow passengers seem to be reasonably period-accurate too, and move around the ship of their own accord between story beats, helping the Queen feel like a living place. It’s not entirely historically accurate – an apologetic foreword addresses the absence of representations of slavery and racism in the work. At least it’s infinitely preferable to the traditional Lovecraftian approach to racism.
That bit above is in spoiler tags because it’s a tip-off to what’s really happening on board the Warsaw Queen, so we may as well talk about the story and the writing. This has a fairly standard structure for a horror puzzler, where your investigations and research and general nosiness slowly reveal a darker truth. You may get an inkling of what flavour of horror you’re in for during the first few scenes. Last Voyage is pretty straightforward in that regard, but many of the NPCs wandering the ship have their own side stories which you dip in and out of – the card-sharp who you can catch shaving his deck, for example, or the unscrupulous showman who’s keeping an alligator in the cargo hold. Juggling the stories provides a constant flow of little bits of intrigue and keep the game bubbling along even when there’s not currently much momentum in the central story.
There is a lovely twist on the formula, though, which is that we are not exactly on board the Warsaw Queen. As a guest in this time period, we find that we can’t see our reflection in mirrors, and other passengers don’t seem to acknowledge us unless they are forced to. There’s a puzzle partway through where we interfere in a backroom card game and are apparently acknowledged as a compatriot, only for another character to be thanked for the interference shortly thereafter. Are we a fellow passenger or a ghost? This can be a small issue in one or two spots – for example, it’s not clear why the lieutenant will stop us going to the pilot house but not the crew quarters directly next door, an inconsistency which makes our quantum state look more like a puzzle contrivance than a paranormal occurrence. Outside of that, however, I think our spectrality is a very clever idea. We may or may not be at risk of perishing on the Warsaw Queen, but either way we can only take on the role of horrified observer, knowing what’s going to happen and seeing the dominoes starting to fall and desperately trying to stop them.
Stopping them falling is a little bit tricky, as it happens. Last Voyage’s puzzle design is, again, straightforward but nicely put together. The puzzles are generally the medium-sized dry goods type, where we hunt for everyday objects and then use them in fairly natural ways. This is completely fine, and probably the best choice for a historically grounded game. There are plenty of optional puzzles and other things to do, which don’t directly contribute to your goal but which net you a few achievements and are pleasing in their own right (I liked being able to free the alligator, and also quite enjoyed the predictable bad ending you get for freeing a hungry alligator without due preparation). The in-game hint system is solid but could do with a little more sanity checking – when I got stuck and used the hints, I got hints for two different puzzles, one of which I couldn’t access until I solved the puzzle, and I mistook them for two hints for the same puzzle, leading to a great deal of confusion until I tried the walkthrough instead. (It was my fault, by the way – I’d missed an inventory item in plain sight.)
I always worry that a review like this is demining with faint praise, calling things straightforward and simple. I didn’t mind any of that at all in Last Voyage. Games like this are always welcome to me, classic puzzle boxes with a good concept and good detail work around the edges.