The Final Station – Review (Switch)

In The Final Station, you’re never quite entirely sure what is going on, but it also doesn’t matter because you’ll enjoy the ride.

Set in a future world where multiple variations of zombies reign supreme, The Final Station is a much deeper game than it appears to be on the surface initially. You’ll conduct a train and make sure it continues to run while catering to the needs of a bunch of very chatty passengers. In between train rides, you search different towns for more survivors, ammunition, and a secret code that lets you leave the station.

Every town is full of secrets and tidbits of information. You’ll want to find out as much as you can in order to try and piece together the story. The story is a downfall of the game. It’s not that it isn’t good, it’s just slow and hard to follow at points. You’ll also have the opportunity to find out some more information from passengers on your train, but they shut their mouths pretty quickly when you enter and exit areas of the train. Keeping the passengers happy and alive for their journey will net you some upgrades though.

There’s something simply uninspired about The Final Station, but that doesn’t make it a bad game. The themes that run throughout your experience are deep, but they may be too deep. It sometimes seems pretentious and unapproachable. Adding to the difficulty of getting into the underlying narrative is the fact that there is simply no direction. I don’t like games to tell me exactly what to do, but I’d rather they not make me stumble my way in to progression. There are occasions when you can gather pieces of information about how to proceed from in-game characters, but by the time you find out it’s almost already too late.

The graphics are done in a pixelated fashion and, for what they are, are quite good. They’re a bit more detailed than many games of the same art style, which makes it a nice change of pace. The enhanced style allows there to be more variation in the look and feel of different types of characters. Accompanying the graphics is a phenomenal soundtrack. The music and sound effects add to the creepy post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the game.

Overall, The Final Station is about a five hour journey through a bizarre future on a train with some zombies mixed in. The gameplay is fun, but only for a little while as it quickly becomes redundant. However, if you don’t mind a little redundancy, it’s a fantastic experience full of twists and turns that you may or may not understand.

We played this game on the newly released Nintendo Switch version, and it was a great platform for it.

Recommendation: If you are into 2D horror games with a bit of an exploration component, The Final Station may be just the right thing for you. Strap in for a few hours of repetition at the end, but we think you’ll still enjoy it overall.

This game was provided to Handsome Phantom by the publisher for the purposes of a review, but that fact did not influence the reviewer’s opinion.

Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.