Solving a room requires guiding Katia to a button or lever to lock in your answer, as it were, and I’ll be damned if those aren’t some of the most stressful moments in gaming this year. Memorization puzzles, physics puzzles, light math puzzles… Last Labyrinth demands a lot of the player. Nope! This game is absolute hell! After you hit the first credit roll (yes, this game very much does the Nier thing,) you’re chipping away at puzzles that feel like Rand Miller’s wettest dreams realized in tangible form – like the Myst creator envisioned dozens of tulpas and they’ve all been made physical and we’re forced to suffer them all. There’s nothing quite like watching a ten-year-old get strangled to death to make you feel like a real piece of garbage. It’s one of the most absolute crushing defeats I’ve felt in a video game, in all my years of experience with the medium. You have mere seconds to guide Katia to a switch, or to use your laser pointer to blind the attacker, before they get their hands on her and choke the life out of her right in front of you.

While the puzzles themselves are stellar in and of themselves, the absolute best moments of this game happen when the player and Katia are trapped in a room with a masked assailant. There are no second chances, no ways to escape – you’re boned, plain and simple.

When you fail a puzzle, you’re helpless as Katia gets eviscerated and you await your swift and almost certainly painful death. It is, in many ways, the best disempowerment fantasy I’ve experienced in quite a while. Last Labyrinth eventually begins to answer these questions in a roundabout sort of way, but not before stripping the player of every last ounce of agency and autonomy. But who are you, exactly? What is Katia to you? And who put you both here? Players must guide the child, Katia, through a series of increasingly perilous rooms in hopes of eventual escape. The only thing they can do to communicate with a mysterious little girl is nod and gesture with a laser pointer. The unseen player is strapped to a wheelchair, their limbs bound and mouth seemingly gagged. Last Labyrinth presents players with a simple setup.

Last Labyrinth for windows download