Cinematic platformer The Last Night will re-emerge next year
And not at the Game Awards, as rumoured
The Last Night was announced at E3 2017 to great excitement, before that excitement was cut short the same day by the re-emergence of pro-Gamergate tweets made by creator Tim Soret in 2014.
The cinematic pixel art platformer has been quiet almost ever since, but rumours began circling this week that it would resurface at the Game Awards later this month. Not so, says Soret. "It will be shown next year, not before," he told PC Gamer.
Soret's tweets from 2014 began being shared within hours of The Last Night's appearance at the Microsoft E3 conference in 2017. Soret apologised, and publisher Raw Fury stood by him while criticising the tweets. Later that same day, Soret apologised in person during the E3 PC Gaming show. "I am embarrassed by some tweets I made in the past. I want to apologize for those. They do not in any way represent who I am today, or what The Last Night is about," he said.
After that, nothing more of the game was shown. Last year, publishers Raw Fury announced that they'd agreed to part ways from The Last Night developers Odd Tales in 2018, and that full publishing rights had now been returned. This lines up with tweets Soret made in 2018 saying that they'd run into "massive business, legal & funding issues" they couldn't talk about, and that they were actively raising funds.
In his response to questions from PC Gamer, Soret said that the game's appearance at this year's Game Awards was "just a rumour", and that they had no release date to announce. "What we know is that for The Last Night comeback in 2022, we make it our mission to blow everyone away by the strength & originality of our proposition."
For all its pretty art, it's worth noting that it was never clear from those early trailers how The Last Night played. Its cyberpunk story of a "second-class citizen" in a gamified world where people are defined "by what they consume" - as described on its Steam page - also raises eyebrows over what the message of the game might be given Soret's tweets.
Or maybe he has grown, and maybe the game will be great. Interesting sidenote: The Last Night trailers in 2017 were released exactly a year after the coining of the phrase "milkshake duck".