Playing A Game Last Call BBS PC

I'm not just feeling down about Last Call BBS because it's "the last game from Zachtronics." I'm also down about it because it isn't very good.

Last Call BBS does knock one thing out of the park: retrocomputing nostalgia. Its low-res fictional desktop environment, curiously clicking around to explore settings and files, the false tones of its modem dialing in, waiting forever for a game to download, being baffled by that game's total lack of instructions...

The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.

Last Call BBS is a virtual desktop that functions as a minigame collection; instead of working through progressive stages of one overarching game concept, you'll install and play eight different games from the titular BBS. You might suspect that this unfocused design could result in multiple only-partially-baked experiences, and well, you wouldn't be wrong.

Of its eight minigames, there are three that resemble typical Zachtronics fare, but all of them are unambitious in scope and frustrating to play:

  • "20th Century Food Court" sees you architecting assembly lines and chaining logic elements to craft and deliver food orders. It's a promising idea - as proven by other similar games - but with frustrating mechanical controls and no narrative integration, early puzzles don't suggest any payoff except more fiddly tedium. (Just look at some of these spaghetti solutions.)
  • "ChipWizard Professional" goes all the way down to the metal, as in, etching silicon to fabricate transistors and implement logical operators. Laying out elements the right way is needlessly meticulous, manipulating PCB layers is glitchy, and the non-game theme is overwhelmingly dull; this felt way too much like a fake version of an electrical engineering course.
  • "X'PBGH: The Forbidden Path" is about cellular automation. I think. Between its deliberately arcane interface and its discomforting Giger-esque presentation, I just couldn't tolerate this one for very long.

There are more, non-programming minigames, too:

  • "Dungeons & Diagrams" is a neat grid-solving puzzle game, which I did enjoy for a bit, but started feeling pretty samey after a dozen or so screens (of ... 64!?).
  • "HACK*MATCH" is an arcade falling-block-swapper clone, with the impenetrable difficulty you might expect from a schmup-themed action puzzler.
  • "Kabufuda Solitaire" and "Sawayama Solitaire" each evoke a different take on solitaire card games -- just like the tiresome solitaires from previous Zachtronics titles.
  • And finally there's "STEED FORCE Hobby Studio," a cozy and pleasant - but extremely brief - clicking game where you assemble mecha models out of digitized part sheets.

Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.

It certainly doesn't help that, much like real-world pre-Y2K software, many of the minigames are an absolute chore to control -- even after reading and re-reading their (authentically) terse instructional guides.

As I think back on 10+ years of Zachtronics game experience - from my first taste of SpaceChem's delightful sci-fi concurrency puzzles; through their experiments with 3D space in Infinifactory, with smaller scale in TIS-100, with high-level abstractions in Shenzhen I/O, and with stronger storytelling in Opus Magnum; to a grand culmination of these works in Exapunks, and then Eliza (2019)'s promising foray into a new genre - man, these games were so strongly, fondly memorable.

Molek-Syntez may have been a step back from some of its predecessors, but at least it was mechanically substantial.

In some interviews about shutting down, Zachtronics folks express feeling bored of making their traditional games -- which is fair, they've been doing it for a while. I'd say Last Call BBS shows just how bored they got.

Better than: Glyphs Apprentice
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, Silicon Zeroes, ... or any of the Zachtronics games I linked above.
As endgame celebrations go, not as good as: Mass Effect 3: Citadel

Rating: Meh