The Last Hour Of Fairfield

The Last Hour of Fairfield is a short survival horror made for the IGMC 2014, it's shorter than an hour and features 5 different playable characters struggling to get to to safety.
Going to safety meaning the rooftop of the local hospital where a chopper is waiting/coming to get you before the zombie-infested city will be struck by nuclear bombs. Yep, nukes, zombies, a hospital and a chopper.

I played through this game with 2 different characters, and needless to say, the majority of time will be spent in the same building with the same puzzles.
The differences are the afterstory you will get, different dialogue, and possibly meeting other survivors on the way.
As you make your way through the hospital, you solve find-the-key puzzles, enter a few codes and hopefully don't run into something nastier.

Now, this game relies heavily on atmosphere and survival to create its horror.
It starts out rather nicely, but it unfortunately goes downhill in both areas. The story that is being hinted at/told suffers from that problem as well.


Atmosphere


Thanks to the slightly disharmonic, creepy music, the early atmosphere is really good. Light is used well and we even have our wonderful "I don't grab shit out of a blood-filled toilet"-line. Here's hoping one character does, but I doubt it.

The hospital is filled with torn sheets, blood, appearing blood, intestines and other comfortable things making you slightly uneasy. Jump scares are rare and do their job.
The time limit does add to the atmosphere, but you are soon able to ignore it completely.


Do I want to know what happened to the patients here?

What seemed to be an important point was that there is an underlying story. There is something going on, and it's not just a coincidence that there are zombies everywhere.


Great. Another cult.

There are hints of religious cults, of experiments and you trying to put this together made it interesting to procceed and added greatly to the atmosphere created.

But soon this spell is broken as you enter a cleaner area with infected spiders instead of zombies and encounter a grande plot twist, villain and whatnot.
The places are supposed to get creepier, not the other way round.
It wasn't scary, jumpscares weren't present, either. I admit the spiders were worse to avoid, though, as the corridors are fairly small.
The ending then killed any atmosphere, any story and any interest.

The later part seemed rather rushed. Especially plotwise.
The hints were generally too clustered, the zealous-religious note was 3 or 4 text-boxes long - better keep many, small hints to keep you thinking. The plastered "repent" made no sense at all.

If you try to introduce a common theme - use it till the very end, otherwise it'll seem useless, and we don't like to have wasted time thinking about something useless.


Mechanics/Survival


The survival is far too easy. You don't level up in any way. You can find one piece of armor.
You get too many supplies and can avoid zombies easily, since you can escape from battles without any drawbacks. The escape-rates were ridiculously high, too. There was only one instance I did not escape right away.

The only difficulty you may encounter is at the endboss in case you have chosen a single character (our drinking chap, for example).
I needed several attempts simply because bad luck would kill me instantly. In this case I needed a fair amount of supplies, but even then did I have too many.
However, the previous parts were then far easier than with the other character, because this one got weaker and fewer enemies as opponents and was fast enough to strike first and avoids any damage as a result. (70-80% of the time)

But there are also a few nice touches to still put pressure on you, so the effect was not completely lost. You took damage from walking over shattered glass, for example.
While battles are turn-based standard ones, you can still see your health indicated as hearts at any time. This saves trouble of not realizing you are low health and helps you to always be reminded of this aspect.
"Ammo" refers to a mana-pool for any special ability, while we're at it. Our drunkard has a molotov cocktail while our army man fires a round of bullets hitting all enemies.

There are many zombies and foes on the hallway which you really should and can avoid. If you do not, you will slowly but surely notice the consequences of your supplies dropping. But, as I mentioned, you can do so fairly easy.

You will, of course, travel through all kinds of rooms in search of supplies and encounter zombies there.
The few puzzles are very easy and collecting keys is as well, as they shine brightly and as anything you need to do will be hinted at. It went all rather well.


Indeed there are.


Characters and thoughts

The characters had no real personality. Our drunkard had a little lighter dialogue, but that was it. Some jokes were repeated. What strook me very odd, though, is that nowhere is shown that he drinks at all. He mentions booze, but he isn't shown drinking. He doesn't act like he's drunk, and it appears just like a badly implemented character trait. If a character has to say he drinks repeatedly to get across he does, you can be sure something is not right.

Our general had little military references whatsoever. It was mentioned at the very start of the game, and that was it. Yes, he wanted to pick up more survivors, but there were none. He could have assessed the situation very differently from a military point of view and build barricades or similiar during your playthrough. But he didn't.



The aftermath was .. well, it was there. It was a nice touch to see what happens afterwards, but it was not satisfying, forced and did not make sense in the context of the game.



The main problem is that the different characters are supposed to give replay value and put together a coherent story. Unfortunately, the gameplay remains the same, the characters are rather bland and you do not acquire any story-relevant information.
The aftermath isn't really interesting, either. Especially since we do not care much for our characters and the twist we see here isn't reasonable.

The few indications of a cult being there are just indications of their existance. No purpose. No plans. No comprehensible motiv (we are not talking forced reasonings, you need to start from a thought) or what they actually are and do.
So we see them placed into the world, but without a purpose.



The indications of experiments were also loose and did not form a connection to anything.


The characters had no real say. They didn't change much, you didn't care much, and as such, the addition of multiple paths did not add much value to the game.
I commend the idea - I like playing the same games from a different perspective, but that requires actual differences and a picture that gets more and more colourful until it's been completed.


All in all

It was a fairly enjoyable game despite its flaws, but it may have been wiser to focus on a more coherent story rather than different characters. Neither ended up as polished as it could be, and that is very unfortunate.
The atmosphere was fairly good, but the last area really could see some improvements.