The Final Station, due out tomorrow, is a story-driven, sidescrolling shooter in which ammo is as scarce as friendly faces. Taking place 106 years after an unexplained event called the First Visitation, society has been rebuilt around preparing for a Second Visitation. Trains are the links between towns that keep things running. The player takes on the role of a train driver as things start to fall apart, looking for survivors, keeping them alive, and trying to fulfill a mission that may be of vital importance to the survival of humanity.
Do My Best, the studio behind The Final Station, is made up of two people, Oleg Sergeev and Andrey Rumak. Sergeev originally envisioned The Final Station as a simple game to work on after the failure of his previous game project, a Zelda-like adventure game that was in development for two years. "We all have this nice idea of taking a train to go somewhere, romanticized by the Hollywood movies," he says. "And I wanted to recreate this feeling in the beginning. But after that our game moved into a different direction, became more intense, less about relaxing train travels."
The game has almost nothing in the way of cutscenes, instead relying on environmental and background storytelling to generate tension. "In the narrative, I always look up to Edgar Wright's movies, like Hot Fuzz, [in which] you can see all these mini-stories happening in the background if you look realy close," says Sergeev. "I'...