The Last Night Is Flashback Meets Blade Runner In Pixel Art
Not over cyberpunk yet
Often game jams produce a lot of interesting ideas rendered in basic, barely-legible programmer art, but themes like the cyberpunk jam or the space cowboy jam seem to attract artists as much as game designers.
Case in point: The Last Night, made by brothers Tim and Adrien Soret. It's a "Blade Runner + delicious pixels". It's inspired by Flashback and games of its era. It is by implication a stealth game, though it contains no mechanics to support that so you have to shoot everything. It is three minutes long, beautifully drawn, and full of great music. Play it in your browser at that or this link.
Played it? Good. The Last Night won the overall and aesthetics categories of the cyberpunk jam, and it's easy to see why. I badly want a whole game set in this universe. Heck, I badly want a whole game set in the nightclub that centers the piece. Here's the track that's playing in there.
The Soret brothers put together the Last Night in six days, but their main project is Behind Nowhere. It's a pixel art action platformer, similarly inspired by Flashback but riffing also on Oddworld Abe's Oddysee and Limbo. It's a long way away - "Kickstarter campaign starting in 2015," says the website - but already looks great. Like this:
And since I was bored last night, I stitched together some screenshots from The Last Night to make this (click for better quality):
