The Final Station

Oh boy, oh boy, a game all the way from 2016, from before I even started this blog. It's about the 35th oldest game in my backlog. It's The Final Station! Honestly though, 4 years doesn't seem that long ago anymore, considering how long I've been playing games. If anything, I'm glad most everything left in my backlog is from 2016 and onwards, not older. But on to the game.

The Final Station is an Adventure game, if anything. It consists of hopping onto a train, using what little food and medkits you have to make sure any of your passangers don't die of hunger or blood loss while meddling with some knobs and buttons to keep the train going. And by fiddling I really do mean just pressing a few buttons in different locations every now and then. While you're not doing any of that, you can try to squeeze in some story by listening to (reading) your co-workers on radio for a few sentences of dialogue, listening to (still reading, there's no voices of any kind in this game) your passangers talk to each other, or reading station background information.
The other half of the game is when you arrive at a station, you conveniently have to find a code to unlock your train. (Why lock it in the first place, I will never understand.) Finding this code means running around a few buildings, talking to people, or trying to scrape more lore off of them or the notes on walls. Mostly though, the world has gone to shit and you have to be shooting non-zombies and taking what few survivors there are back to your train. Manage your ammo, click boxes to get supplies, and punch the not-zombies in the guts.

Honestly, when I first started it, I was expecting some sort of a simulation game? Taking care of my passangers, making difficult choices, fixing up my train. Well, that turned out to be trivial, and the majority of time was spent outside the train instead. And no, that part wasn't any deep either. A few enemy types, and just your run-on-the-mill pistol and fist. With limited ammo, each fight was a slog as you had to charge up your fist and wait for it to cool down between punching enemies. (Excuse me, what?) No upgrade system or anything either.
So what I hoped was left was the story? The lore? The atmosphere? Well, the latter more than the former. For better or worse, there were no walls of text. You had to piece together the story from sentences of dialogue and scraps on the walls. Even then it was scarce and loosely connected, with seemingly no storyline or goal. The atmosphere, while nice, couldn't save this game, I'm afraid.

So there you have it. The Final Station is a pretty lackluster Adventure game with a little bit of running and gunning (but mostly waiting for your fists to cool down). While I couldn't point to a better game of this type, I feel like both the idea and execution are lacking. So no, no recommendation. Go find something else entirely to play, this one's no good.