Last Train Home

Last Train Home
https://hby.itch.io/last-train-home

Last Train Home is a short and spooky creepypasta story game. It’s free to play in your browser, and it takes about five minutes to complete. You play as a salaryman who finds himself on a near-deserted commuter train in the dead of night.

The first half of the game is set in three train cars and the two walkways between them, each of which is occupied. With the doors at either end locked, you move between the three cars and talk with their occupants, befriending them by completing small tasks.

This is all well and good until the lights go off, at which point you’re left to fend for yourself in the darkness with nothing more than a cigarette lighter and the eerie flashes from outside the windows to illuminate your path forward. Where is this train going, and how do you get off?

Just as the United States is home to countless urban legends surrounding cars, from vanishing hitchhikers to cursed highway rest areas, there are all sorts of urban legends about commuter trains in Japan and South Korea. “The last train” is a common motif in cautionary tales warning midnight passengers against accidentally boarding the wrong train or even, heaven forbid, falling asleep and missing your stop as the train continues hurtling into the night.

In contrast to the pristine coziness of trains in East Asia, there’s a New York style grunginess to the cars in Last Train Home that renders the environment unsettling and uncanny. The lighting and sound design are nicely creepy as well. There’s not a lot of text, but each line manages to be subtly unpleasant. There are no jumpscares, just a pervasive atmosphere of creeping dread. The catharsis at the end of the story is lovely, but you’ll definitely have second thoughts about running to catch the last train after playing this game.