Tom’s Last Adventure (PC)

Precision platforming is a delicate genre. The satisfaction that comes from playing a precision platformer arises from overcoming the tight tests of skill, and while some frustration is expected, it should come more from the player coming up short rather than a design element that doesn’t work well. Tom’s Last Adventure is a short but challenging precision platformer but unfortunately a rough one, and in a genre where even a slight hitch can throw off the game feel, it can’t quite afford to have little niggling points.

 

Tom’s Last Adventure takes the fanciful idea that pets are little angels sent to us from Heaven and makes it a more literal reality. Tom the cat is drawn to Earth as something within calls him to seek out a little boy to adopt him, but the path out of Heaven is a surprisingly dangerous set of trials, even the level called Cat Heaven not free of deadly hazards. Tom’s Last Adventure mostly takes place in spaces where the walls and floor are pure black and dangers like spikes, barbed wires, killer surfaces, and lasers are all a stark red for good contrast. The shadowy locations do have a bit of fun with the visual design though, particularly by having shadowy creatures, disembodied limbs, and even the faces of witches appear out of the floors and walls, but they are mostly decor even in the level where a bunch of dogs might have gotten you nervous about what Tom might have to deal with. Some simple piano music underscores the action, a bit ominous at times but not likely to rankle or really stand out. Moving through these spaces will cause some simple sentimental text appear about the special relationships humans have with pets with an emphasis on how even going through hardships does not dull the potential connections you can have with an adopted pet, with these angelic trials perhaps an abstraction for the rough lives a regular cat may have before it reaches an animal shelter. It’s not aiming to be too deep with these little bits of text though, but viewing it in such a manner can at least make you less curious why leaving cat heaven can involve deadly trials where your death counter will eventually hit the hundreds despite there being fairly few levels.

Tom the cat has some pretty basic standard abilities for getting around the single-screen stages and their incredibly hostile layouts. A double jump and a midair dash are your main moves, although the game doesn’t teach you every detail about them like how dashing off a platform to start a jumping challenge won’t use up your single midair dash before you touch solid ground again. These will never let you down, but the game’s unique elements are the star powers and these are where things get a touch rickety.

 

Floating in the air are diamond-shaped stars to grab, Tom able to carry one at a time as they alter the coloration of the star that trails behind him to help make it clearer where the all black cat is in this fairly dark world. The white star is a pretty simple one, activating it briefly altering nearby platforms in some way. This mostly manifests as making a platform appear where there previously wasn’t one or making a wall of darkness briefly disappear, the player needing to move before the platform fades away or the darkness seals back up. The white star is mostly harmless, almost feeling like a way to keep you sharp on performing midair maneuvers and keep you moving quickly, although its relationship with other powers can eventually lead to some disharmony. The blue star though is similarly fairly safe whenever it appears. Grabbing it will grant you an extra aerial jump, basically a means to extend some midair maneuvering sections, although if you don’t get the jump spacing right, you may need to press a button to force a restart of the level since stars do not reappear after they’ve been used. It’s a bit too humble to ever be irritated by the blue star even if you misuse that extra leap, although since Tom’s Last Adventure does have a few stages that expect an uninterrupted sequence of actions with little time to rest on stable ground to figure out the next step, the blue star may be part of a chain where you’ll get bothered by any disruption.

Those sequences with little wiggle room are most harmed by the last star color though: green. The green star is also, funnily enough, perhaps the defining mechanic of Tom’s Last Adventure, put to use fairly often for most of the game’s more involved or creative platforming challenges. The green star lets you hurl a green dot, and when it makes contact with a surface you will teleport over to it. You can also activate the teleport early to appear in midair, introducing a timing element to some of your throws. However, the green dot is quite difficult to pitch consistently, mainly because many of its key uses are for slipping past an array of damaging red objects by just barely timing the throw right to get through. If Tom’s Last Adventure had you try to do it at the top of your jump height or maybe have the player utilize background details to help figure out the height at which they need to throw while jumping, the green star tossing could have been a better implemented system. However, there are a few moments where it feels like nailing the exact timing on when to throw while jumping is just going to be trial and error based on eyeballing it. Tom’s Last Adventure doesn’t give you so much room to play that throwing the ball becomes second nature, and when one of those guessing game pitches emerges at the end of a chain of time sensitive actions, it becomes frustrating that your throw was just a tiny bit too high or low when you were expected to do it while falling or pressured by other elements like the fading platforms.

 

Green star tossing can also be done upwards, something that does expand its use cases some but also introduces another point of failure. If you use a controller’s analog stick for movement, your efforts to move through the air while throwing the green dot might register as a diagonal and cause an upwards throw by mistake. There are definitely moments where you need to swiftly change the buttons you’re pressing as you fall, especially as portals are introduced that can rapidly shift the directions you’re dealing with, so even the slight slip-up of the game misreading intentions can be disheartening. Weirdly though, when you die, sometimes the game doesn’t clear your powers properly, meaning occasionally you will respawn and immediately hurl the green dot you were too slow to utilize before. Mostly this is harmless and not really exploitable since levels are designed to be cleared in a rigid way that the deadly surfaces enforce, but it might cause an accidental death. While you can beat Tom’s Last Adventure no matter how many times you die and the game does just reset the level rather than having any greater punishment for failure, there are achievements tied to beating the game with very few deaths, even one for not losing more than 9 lives. Between the poorly defined moments for throwing green stars and the almost harmless star retention glitch though, it feels like aiming for minimal deaths is a recipe for that kind of frustration you won’t want from a difficult precision platformer.

THE VERDICT: The shadowy designs of the challenging stages in precision platformer Tom’s Last Adventure give this simple and short game a memorable look, but the defining mechanics hit a little hitch when it comes to realizing the difficult action. The Green Star, so often key to the game’s trickiest maneuvers, often must be used at slightly arbitrary points in midair to just barely slip through tight gaps, and with some levels asking you to string together multiple quick and precise actions, the failure point being from having to guess when to throw the green dot leads to a player more often relieved they’re past an exhausting problem area rather than feeling like they conquered a satisfying test of skill.

 

And so, I give Tom’s Last Adventure for PC…

A BAD rating. While at first Tom’s Last Adventure does feel like it throws you in the deep end a little too quickly, most of the basic mechanics do work well enough you can clear the early stages without as much fuss as when the Green Star makes its debut. The timing needed to use the Green Star reliably is too ambiguous and inconsistent, the player sometimes needing to do it while rising, falling, or even needing to stand at the exact right distance or else it will fall short or hit the barriers making for the tight gap you need to slip through. This is before you even factor in moments like trying to throw it to land on a moving mine cart that again has little wiggle room or much training done to acclimate you to the idea, although it is funnily enough one of the areas where you can sort of make your own way forward if you get skilled at activating the Green Star’s teleport early. Some levels do feel like a mid-level checkpoint would help mostly to break up some challenges so you can learn them rather than throw yourself against them over and over until you have felt your way through the timing required to succeed, but this is thankfully the main stumbling point of Tom’s Last Adventure and not one that always arises. Some stages where the Green Star is more reined in or other stars take greater focus can be cleaner skill tests with less ambiguity. Tom’s Last Adventure is very short even with its difficulty, I cleared it in less than two hours because there aren’t that many stages, but with its somewhat simple visual direction and the movement challenges feeling like they can be iterated on well, Tom’s Last Adventure might have benefited from some shorter stages to bulk up the offerings and give you some training for its trickier bits. A few tough gauntlet levels aren’t a bad idea, but they would be more interesting if they were special rather than the typical offerings.

 

The real miracle of Tom leaving heaven to find a home on Earth is that he managed to do so with barely any training. The obstacles to getting out of cat heaven can sometimes be interesting tests of skill, but the green dot throwing goes from an interesting movement tool to the main source of deaths as its demands are too specific. Standing in the right spot or getting the midair timing perfect don’t feel like rewarding tests of your abilities and the game expects a strong performance from the get-go, Tom’s Last Adventure sometimes offering a fine enough platforming challenge but more often you’ll likely wish you’re playing a better precision platformer that properly conveys how to act and gives you the room to execute it.