Last Train Home

Last Train Home sees the player take control of a fictionalised Czechoslovak Legion on its journey across the Trans-Siberian Railway, commanding the Legionnaires in pausable RTS combat encounters and managing them and their resources aboard your commandeered locomotive. This is a well-known historical episode for some, including, presumably, Brno-based devs Ashborne Games, and serves as a fascinating setting.

Unfortunately, the game's deficiencies drew the bulk of my attention. The combat is not bad per se, and is reminiscent of the Company of Heroes series or Dawn of War 2. However, it is largely concealed by the stealth META. See, since injury and death risk jeopardising your entire run, you are strongly incentivised to complete as much of a given mission as possible in stealth. The stealth feature is, unfortunately, underdeveloped, boring, repetitive, and pain-staking, making missions feel like a major drag. The management of the train, on the other hand, lacks flavour and is similarly repetitive.

I played along for a short while to follow the story, but this aspect seems to be the worst offender. This is historical fiction done wrong and it does the setting a disservice. The Czechoslovak Legionnaires are heroic, moral, and charming; they stop to help some villagers with their errands to earn their trust, which seems rather contrived considering their objective is to get the hell out of there. The Bolshevik Reds they go up against are comically evil, committing atrocities and genocide for no discernible reason, with all of their soldiers pressed into service against their will.

I believe that, in creating historical media, the devs have the responsibility to be balanced, to show us the humanity of the Bolsheviks as well as their inhumanity. What we have instead is a mythologised good-vs-evil narrative mixed into real history in such a way as to lend it weight; I worry that people may come away from this game thinking that the Bolsheviks did actually ambush the Legionnaires in Moscow, for example. It oversteps what is appropriate for the 'fiction' part of historical fiction, whilst maintaining the 'historical'.

All in all, I found the game quite jarring. It's not terrible and you may well enjoy it more than I did though.