Adventure Gamers - Forums

Iznogood - 11 March 2016 05:10 AM

The main problem I have is that there is no subtitles on the spoken English,

Yeah, that’s a concern for me too.

Haven’t tested it yet (still not sure if I’ll be able to participate in the challenge), but I found this: http://www.gog.com/forum/the_last_express/any_way_to_get_subtitles
Someone posted a download link for the engsub, and it’s still active.

Thanks, I have only briefly tested it, but it seems to work.


Anyway I was stuck for the longest time / had reached a dead end between Munich and Vienna.
I had gotten the invitation to the concert, but when I showed up at the appointed time the room was simply empty, and no matter what I did then I simply couldn’t do anything I hadn’t already done. Instead I was just aimlessly walking up and down the same corridors for hours with absolutely nothing new happening, until I finally got an end-game in Vienna.

Auto rewind also didn’t help one bit, and only left me walking the same empty corridors once again

But after rewinding several hours back, I suddenly managed to trigger all sorts of new things and finally it seems like I’m back on track, and can actually attend the concert now.


Not really sure what to make of the game so far. It has an interesting concept and is intriguing enough to have kept me playing so far, even when wasting hours on a dead end. But the fact that it is also so very easy to miss important story triggers, and having to replay large parts of the game, in order to get back on track, is not something that I will count as positive.

And I’m done, I’ve reached the end of the game

Now many of you are probably thinking “well that was fast”, but a touch of insomnia has allowed me to play this in two marathon sittings, with little sleep in between ... Okay I also have to admit that I kind of cheated and consulted a walkthrough on several occasions

I really would have like to have completed it on my own, and I did put in quite an effort to use the walkthrough as little as possible. The problem was however that I constantly kept missing important trigger events, which not only led to countless deaths, false game-overs and auto-rewind, which is fair enough, but also kept leading to dead-ends where no progress could any longer be made, and the only option (I could find) was to manually rewind several hours, and then replay rather large sections.

And even though I didn’t mind replaying large sections, then I also wanted to make sure that I only had to do it once per section, so I used a walkthrough to make sure I knew what I had done wrong / missed, so I didn’t kept reaching the same dead-ends over and over again.

To me it seems like the whole design philosophy behind this game, is very much based on the manual rewind. That you are suppose to always screw up on your first attempt, and then use the experience you gain from you mistakes, to get it right on a second or third attempt - Or perhaps it was just me that kept missing key trigger events?

Either way, one trick I did learn, perhaps a bit too late, was to write down the time codes whenever I triggered key events or found something important, and then rewind to these good-saves whenever I got stuck, and try something different.

Apart from this, the game grew on me the longer I played it.

The whole idea of having each of the NPC’s being controlled by an AI, and going about their business regardless of whether you are there to witness / trigger it or not, is a brilliant idea that adds a lot of atmosphere to the game (though I suspect also the reason for the dead-ends).

The whole eve of WW1 theme with all the political / historical implications, and the setting on the orient-express also works very well. Though in some ways I think that they kind of overdid it, and that it would have benefited from a bit more focus instead of bringing every single conflict at the time into the game. I mean pretty much every single passenger on the train is either an agent from some of the major nations or rebel organisations, general villains or in some other way mixed into the whole political situation.

The fact that there also are many paths through the game, and you won’t get the full story / don’t need to do everything in a single playthrough, also adds to the charm of the game. I for example never understood / missed large parts of the whole Firebird story, which made the ending a quite a bit confusing.

Even the rewind idea is not bad, though I kind of think it relied too much on this.

All in all, once I had gotten used to the game, and understood how to actually play it, I quite liked it. I am even contemplating starting a second playthrough, to find the things I missed, and perhaps even intentionally screw up in other ways.

wilco - 13 March 2016 07:46 AM

I seem to have hit a bug maybe, in the first night something happens to the Count because his daughther is thanking in the morning for the help but I did nothing, maybe I should have done something?

Perhaps you should have, but I don’t think it is critical, even though it is an important scene you have missed.

I believe there are quite a few moments, where the game will assume that you have done or witnessed something, even if you haven’t. More a case of not being able to keep track of all possibilities I believe, than an outright bug. 

wilco - 13 March 2016 07:46 AM

I ask because the conductor said he lost the master key in the event and I got nothing, should I have the key by now?

I wouldn’t worry about that part - you are not the only one on the train with an agenda

wilco - 13 March 2016 07:46 AM

That stratsbourg nightmare sequence also got me.

I seem to have hit a bug maybe, in the first night something happens to the Count because his daughther is thanking in the morning for the help but I did nothing, maybe I should have done something?

You mean you went back to sleep after your nightmare? Why didn’t you go see what all the commotion was about? 

I ask because the conductor said he lost the master key in the event and I got nothing, should I have the key by now?

No, but now you know someone else has got it.

wilco - 13 March 2016 09:16 AM

I was in Anna’s chamber having a gun pointed at me when it started, I tried to do other stuff

I’ve never tried other stuff instead, but I’m going to now!

So I tried to do something else instead of going to the Count, but there’s nothing to do.

Quote of the Day: Mr Whitney is well-known as a champion of freedom and justice in countries other than his own. (August Schmidt to Anna Wolff) 

If Schmidt introduced you to Anna Wolff, you can talk to her in the smoking car after dinner. In case he has not, here’s the dialogue.

Robert: Are you reading about Madame Cailleaux?
Anna: Have you read it?
Robert: Just a guess. It was either that or Rasputin, they don’t seem to write about anything else.
Anna: Don’t you care about Rasputin?
Robert: Sure I do. I like him. Just when you think he’s dead, he pops back up again.

wilco - 13 March 2016 12:52 PM

Also, am I the only one that keeps going into bathrooms by mistake?!? I can’t tell 2 doors apart…

No I also did that quite a few times.

Anyway, I just read through the original Community Playthrough of the game, and there was a lot of interesting comments, though too necromantic to comment on now. But there were also some references to things I never experienced in the game myself, or at least things that I didn’t notice.