The Haunted Hoard: One Last Breath (PS5)

One Last Breath is a side-scrolling platformer that hopes tone and atmosphere can keep the player happy for the few hours it lasts. Most of its efforts were put into the background environments of the areas you explore, the hope being the player can mistake visuals for subtle storytelling, but when you start to near the end of the adventure, you’ll start to wonder if it had said much of anything beyond what you see in its first few minutes.

 

One Last Breath tells almost none of its story with words, although if you look at its store pages or marketing, you’ll learn the character you are playing as is named Gaia. Leaving the safety of nature to press into the world that once belonged to humans, Gaia finds it almost abandoned. There are forests and wildlife to be sure, but the humans who once inhabited the cities are gone and instead, mutated humanoids with too many arms and high aggression lurk in the ruins of civilization. It can, at times, feel a bit hard to get a good feel for when this apocalyptic decline began. The cities are in disrepair but not to the point you’d expect if they’d been overrun by the mutants for a while, and some effects of human pollution are still ongoing to the point it feels like the decline of humanity might have happened days ago. On the other hand, enough time has passed for plants to grow over structures and there’s no evidence that humanity’s fall was swift since there are no remains to be found.

Trying to figure out the story told through the background though is what One Last Breath is banking on, so raising questions with potentially unclear answers is likely meant to get you thinking about how the world ended up in the state it is. It’s fairly clear the game is going for an environmentalist message, although it does break its normally wordless messaging a few times with signs that help give you something more solid to grasp onto. For example, it seems a company called EvoLife played a role in the world’s sorry state where wind farms are burning and toxic waste seeps into the water, but the EvoLife signs you find speak of how environmentally friendly the company is, the message perhaps being that one should be skeptical of a company’s claims they are truly operating as conscientiously as they claim. On the other hand, a few white boards found in the facility that aren’t clear enough to read even in 4K resolutions might be hinting at something more conspiratorial, but whatever the deeper intent is, it’s still not strong enough thanks to very little true environmental storytelling. There are some striking backgrounds even if graphically some come up short and they all hammer home more the broad idea of humankind’s potentially disastrous effects on our world and ourselves should we not carefully consider how we exploit Mother Nature’s gifts. However, it’s not really haunting when it so rarely builds on the initial presented theme save for perhaps when you notice some of the mutant creatures are almost becoming the environment in a few places.

 

One Last Breath really needed its subtle storytelling or themes to be solid and compelling, because it offers very little else. The side-scrolling platforming in this short adventure is often very basic, walking right, jumping gaps, and pushing blocks making up most of you’ll be doing. It takes an unfortunate amount of time for these actions to start feeling like they have actual substance, the early puzzles not really having the room for much consideration and instead the attempts at excitement come from some poorly conceived attempts to add some danger. Most peril in One Last Breath comes from brief chases, a mutant or some other danger coming at you from behind and instantly killing you should you not escape it in time. These chases are often very basic and should you fail you are often just put back at the start of them, but the game loves the idea of having you just barely make it away so you will often die unless you happened to have a running start. Sometimes you need to jump during these, even the landing important to make sure you don’t lose speed, but most of the time it’s hold right and hope it works out. This can be complicated a touch by the game’s occasionally poor camera angles that make it so you didn’t notice to escape you need to do something like crouch at the ending, the player not able to afford the delay in realizing it wasn’t an opening you can just walk through.

One Last Breath does try to concoct some situations beyond bland running to add some more interactivity, such as walking between active saws or even introducing a new monster type that is sadly easily overcome every time you encounter it once you know the simple trick to avoid its instant kill attack. Eventually, Gaia will be able to utilize some special abilities, such as making roots grow, using a vine to swing across specific gaps, or carrying a small shielding plant for a bit to avoid toxic gas. These can start to make you do a little bit of puzzle solving, like areas where making some roots grow into ramps to cross might block off other areas so you have to figure out the right order. The shielding plant you might need to figure out where to place it to make sure the poisonous air is properly blocked, but these ideas don’t get explored too deeply and the simplicity of the puzzles makes most of them not just forgettable, but not even that difficult so they aren’t adding more substance to the game for long. A bit more interesting are ten hidden areas off the otherwise very linear path, these requiring a bit of an eye for secrets and allowing you to see an alternate ending should you find them all. On the other hand, One Last Breath sometimes has glitches like the game’s normal ending getting frozen on one image and sillier slip-ups like a point where Gaia kept climbing up a ladder well after the ladder itself ended. In fact, the hardest puzzle in the game for me to solve was not because of its substance, but because Gaia would not walk through a door, the game’s 2D movement not always lining up properly with its 3D environments. Because of this, One Last Breath is not even going to be a clean but short trek to see the sometimes well done background visuals.

THE VERDICT: A bland typical environmental message can at least lead to some moody and grim backgrounds in One Last Breath, but it doesn’t exactly add much meaning to a very short and uninspired platformer. Outrunning mutants is never tense, just annoying, and the puzzle solving is very basic, the game not really finding interesting uses for your small set of abilities. A little glitchy and mechanically shallow, One Last Breath bet it all on its dark tone but also barely wants to explore it, most of the answers it does deign to share not fleshing things out so much as piling on more of what you already knew or guessed right off the bat.

 

And so, I give One Last Breath for PlayStation 5…

A TERRIBLE rating. One Last Breath wants to be like Inside, a similarly dark platformer that leaned heavily on its implied story-telling, but here there wasn’t enough effort put in to making meaningful moments. You do get a few moments at EvoLife that maybe suggest something greater and there are small implications that seemingly sustainable resources may have unexpected impacts, but it gives you crumbs that don’t feed your curiosity enough. Even before you start the game you likely immediately know the broad strokes of its messaging and One Last Breath wants to coast on presenting the negative impact of human development over and over, and not with the grace or immersion of a game like Endling: Extinction is Forever. It gives you some neat locations to look at here, some macabre sights to try and add to the environmental horror, but if they weren’t going to tell a deeper tale, it really needed the action to try and immerse you or make up for the thin plot. Instead, One Last Breath thinks outrunning monsters is going to be its ace in the hole when it comes to trying to portray a hostile world, but since you often overcome those chases through retrying after a few deaths, it’s not exactly building immersion or even interest. Its best use of the monsters are in some of its simple puzzles, like where you need to make sure to block a path a mutant would take, but that often just adds a step or two to an interaction that still isn’t asking much of you to figure out.

 

It’s hard to say exactly how One Last Breath should have adjusted its design, perhaps it would prefer strengthening its narrative with more to learn from its world or maybe enhancing ability-focused puzzles to be deeper. It’s a question on if the story or gameplay should carry more of the experience, and usually it’s easier to identify which angle improvements should take due to clear focuses. One Last Breath feels like it didn’t want to put much thought into either angle, hoping the absence of direct narrative moments would make things more mysterious while the chases lack any thrill and the puzzles are weak logic tests. Too vague to be recommended on plot and too frustrating or empty to recommend on gameplay, One Last Breath’s one last hope is its art, and that’s not quite enough to make it worth your interest.