One Last Breath Review – Almost A Breath Of Fresh Air

One Last Breath is a short 2.5D puzzle platformer that is as pretty as it is terrifying, with visuals very reminiscent of Playdead’s Inside. You play the earth goddess Gaia, navigating her through a post-apocalyptic environment as she tries to restore life to an Earth ravaged by humankind’s decades of pollution and greed. I previewed it at Tokyo Game Show last year and was impressed by the thoughtfulness of the puzzles, but I’m not sure it works on the same level as a full release.

Pacing and tension are huge factors in whether One Last Breath works or doesn’t. That’s partly because it’s short enough to finish in one sitting – I did – but also because the game is very often a stressful, scary experience. The game’s world is full of weird, scary alien-like creatures that you can’t fight, so you have to avoid them, trap them, or outrun them.

They linger in the background of most environments, and sometimes they’ll spot you and start making a beeline for you. If they catch you, you’re done for. You know that feeling when you’re playing The Last of Us, and you can hear a clicker, and suddenly the music changes and you realise you’re in grave danger? It’s that, except with no weapons.

The closer monsters get to you, the harder Gaia breathes, and the louder the creatures growl. These encounters have great sound design, making the beasts all the more terrifying. The game can get very tense, but it feels great and engrossing. Moments of safety in which you solve puzzles feel especially satisfying in between periods of danger. Unfortunately, by the later chapters, these encounters get rarer and rarer, causing tension to fall off hard.

Being caught by these monsters or failing a jump while platforming both, naturally, lead to death. Gaia screams while she dies, and the sound is grating. That’s a problem, because by design, you will die a lot in One Last Breath. The game doesn’t explain controls or mechanics to you, instead allowing you to figure it out through trial and error. This works fairly well, especially since save points are well-placed so dying never sets you back too far. But hearing that blood-curdling scream every time I died started to set my teeth on edge.

The puzzles and platforming are adequate. Gaia’s powers let her control the environment at specific points, creating paths using trees or swinging across gaps with vines, and a new mechanic is introduced later in the game. The tactility feels good, especially playing on PS5 with a DualSense controller.

But there are plenty of flaws that become apparent as you play. One is that there’s lots of block pushing, which would be fine except it takes forever. Few things are more frustrating in a game like this than knowing exactly how to solve a puzzle with a single glance, but having to take a full minute to actually implement it because movement is slow.

Another big issue is that you don’t have to understand the game’s mechanics very deeply to solve puzzles. A lot of the time, I’m thinking, “Well, that object is probably there because I’m supposed to do this”. That block is placed there so I can push it to the tall ledge. That lever is there because I have to pull it. That switch has to be pressed. The game is pretty strong in promoting experimentation in the early parts of the game, but the puzzles feel more rote the longer you play.

This could be forgiven if the storytelling was strong, but it’s not. One Last Breath relies entirely on environmental storytelling, portraying a dilapidated world full of abandoned technology. Nature is reclaiming the world, but it’s clear that we’re looking at an Earth devoid of humans. You move silently through abandoned offices and homes, factories and lumber mills. You pass through a field, watching fire rain from the sky. It’s beautiful and bleak.

But why exactly Gaia is there and what she’s trying to do is unclear. We see that she’s obviously tied to nature through the gameplay and plot, but we don’t know that she is Gaia or that she’s trying to bring nature back to the world from the game alone. What we do see is that some sort of wood nymph got spat out by the earth and she ventured forth, but whether she’s just trying to survive or there’s somewhere she’s trying to get is unclear until the very end. When you finally get there, all there’s left to feel is dissatisfaction.

The game is also lacking some polish, though a lot of this can be fixed post-launch. Monster behaviour doesn’t always make sense – solving puzzles can sometimes involve removing the blocks that separate you from them, but they won’t immediately run to attack you. You can clip through animals passing by you in the world. Platforming is a little finicky at times. Achievements have misspellings, and I had at least one bug that made me have to restart from the last checkpoint.

Since the game is so short, I still think it’s worth a try. When the game succeeds, it glows, and gameplay feels seamless and interesting. You might bang your head against it a little, but the solutions are always common sense and it feels incredible to work through something on your own. Just be warned that you probably won’t find the game’s ending particularly satisfying, but if you can look past that, One Last Breath does have something to offer.

One Last Breath

Reviewed on PlayStation 5.

Released

March 28, 2024

Genre(s)

Platformer , Adventure , Puzzle

Developer

Moonatic Studios, Maniac Panda Games, Catness Game Studios

Pros

• Beautiful 2.5D art style
• Memorable environments
• Well-paced first half with lots of tension
• Doesn?t take long to finish

Cons

• Quality of puzzles is inconsistent
• Lacking polish
• Second half drops in quality