In 2014, brothers Tim and Adrien Soret founded an indie game studio named Odd Tales and announced their first project, a cinematic platformer called The Last Night. More recently—as in, yesterday—the team announced a partnership with publisher Raw Fury and released a very brief, and very promising, trailer teasing a stylish journey through rainy, neon nights of a Blade Runner-flavored cyberpunk future.
"The Last Night is a 2.5D cinematic adventure game, forging ahead on the path established by the greats such as Another World, Flashback and the Oddworld series," the Last Night Wiki says. "Set in a rich post-cyberpunk world, the game is aiming to update the vision seen in Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, while establishing a new standard for immersive pixel art."
The Odd Tales website says the action will take place in a "2D cyberpunk open world," with "action and infiltration gameplay in the great tradition of cinematic platformers" and "a diverse, inclusive cast of complex characters to interact with through meaningful, branching dialogue." You'll drive cars, fly drones, hack into computers, argue with people, run away from them, and occasionally shoot at them in a "living, simulated world with dense crowds of citizens doing their own stuff."
The Last Night actually began as a very small, short entry in the 2014 Cyberpunk Jam (which, by the way, also gave us VA-11 HALL-A). That version is still playable on Itch.io, and even though it's very simplistic, it's also tremendously stylish. That doesn't necessarily mean the full version is going to be a good game, but it's a great place to start.
There's no word of a possible release date yet, or much of anything else for that matter: As Raw Fury alluded to in the trailer announcement, Odd Tales has so far kept its cards very close to the vest. But more information is (finally) on the way. "The story here is that The Last Night has been thriving behind the scenes all these years and now we’re preparing to show the world what Odd Tales is creating," it wrote. "Later this year when you see how far The Last Night has come, you’ll know exactly what we mean."
