The art of the allegory is important when it comes to expressing ideas and concepts to people who are unwilling to listen to direct information. By wrapping up a hard truth in the guise of a clever tale or something that can be adjacent to a more familiar world, you get people to draw parallels themselves and make connections that might not be effective if you hammered it in a blunt fashion. However, it’s deeply essential that the allegory does not get too tangential or obtuse: this leads to confusion, misdirection and, in the extreme, taking away the wrong information. One Last Breath, a horror puzzler from Moonatic Studios and Manic Panda Games, does its best to deliver an important message, but it can get a bit lost on the way.

Parkour!

The player takes on the role of Gaia, an avatar of Mother Nature who has been spawned in hopes of fighting back against the horrific way that humanity has affected the planet. Your mission, if you can figure this out, is to move forward through a hellscape of man’s own creation, outwitting the desecrated and the diseased as you fight your way to a better tomorrow for everyone. The damned will try and stop you, the wretched landscape will sicken you, and it will take all your valor and determination to make it out the other side, for a better tomorrow for everyone.

If you’ve had a chance to enjoy some of the other horror puzzler titles from yesteryear, you have a decent idea of how to move forward in One Last Breath. I would connect it most closely to Inside from PlayDead, though there are quite a few things that are different. Gaia has only three buttons: jump, crouch and interact. The interactions can take on several facets, from toggling power switches to ripping off boards from barricaded doorways. Gaia will also use her abilities at select areas to trigger natural powers, such as causing roots to grow or retract, and generating a vine to swing across a gap. All of these things are given to you with zero instructions or vocal assistance whatsoever, so feel free to get comfortable with screwing up and dying several times in the process.

When you get murdered you turn into the green energy from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Having played both Limbo and Inside, I will say that the puzzle aspect of One Last Breath is significantly easier than either of the PlayDead titles, and I don’t consider that to be a demerit. The developers clearly made a call to focus more on the visual aspect of the game in lieu of gameplay, and that’s in an effort to allow the players to notice more details of the world around them instead of just impending dangers. While you might not spend nearly as much time figuring out how to move a platform or activate a switch, you will, instead, get a chance to see all the burning crops, lifeless banners, and cold, soulless machines that make up a lot of Gaia’s world within the game, which I feel is important.

Players will be able to figure out most of the puzzles quite easily as long as they’re playing in a docked mode. While the graphics look good on the big screen, some details needed to take a hit in this Nintendo Switch port, especially when done in handheld mode. There’s an inherent murkiness once it’s shrunk down, and I think that’s a result of trying to maintain the fidelity of what the game is expressing while not properly accommodating for the more limited power of the Switch’s graphical capabilities. While a lot of regions will be perfectly visible, there are times where you’ll be trying to figure out one particular point (like where a ladder might be) and it won’t be immediately visible or recognizable, resulting in lost time. It sucks, because One Last Breath lends itself well to handheld play.

It takes way too long to see where I am, where the monster is, and then to figure out if this is a problem.

Also, yes, get ready for some cheap deaths. Early on in the game, you’ll have all the classics: monsters running at you from out of nowhere, traps on the ground you won’t identify right away, and rolling logs that dare you to try and outrun them. This is sincere advice for anyone picking up One Last Breath: running will be the solution. Far too often I tried to jump over things or crouch and hide, and I almost always got eaten instead. The reloads are also a bit slower on the Switch, so don’t waste your time waiting for death to make the most out of you: just do your best with what you have and pick up the pieces as fast as you can. If the first time didn’t work, JUST RUN.

It’s a shame that the graphics get a bit too gunky in handheld mode, because I actually quite enjoy One Last Breath. A lot of times, with games that purposely don’t give any narrative direction from the beginning, I’m left scratching my head as to what, exactly, I need to be worried about. When I’m just being killed by some faceless entity and I don’t even know why I’m in this particular dark woods, I get confused and frustrated. Me, the player, wouldn’t be in this place under any circumstances; I need a phone call from my dead wife to orchestrate such events.

So the atmospheric direction of One Last Breath is what really brings things into focus for me. Instead of being a game of constant dread and fear, it’s a realized world of loneliness and sadness. I look at the different aspects – the discarded cars, the fluttering banners, the abandoned homes – and it’s depressing. It’s the feeling of a wasted empire, a lost world, and it’s one that Gaia steps through with her own heavy heart. While humanity may be poisoning the planet, it’s still their home, and to watch someone destroy the one place they can exist is truly heartbreaking. While, yes, the game goes through good runs of survival and trying to keep you on your toes, the melancholy painting of light and sound makes me ache to do something more.

“Eh, this just happens sometimes.” – Californian rangers, every damn year.

My one and only major complaint is that the lack of instructions can prevent you from getting the true ending. Very early on, you’ll find one of ten “secret” locations that you need to interact with in order to unlock the best ending of the game. But there’s no indication that you’re supposed to rip something off the machine you find there, and I didn’t discover it until I was at the second location, and, by then, it was too late. One Last Breath is not designed to move backwards, and players who fail to interact with this singular location in the first three minutes of the game will be rewarded with disappointment after several hours playing through.

Still, it’s an engaging and interesting play. One Last Breath will test your reflexes and your fortitude, and potentially your own constitution for bearing the weight of guilt. This unapologetic and direct accusation of the pollution that plagues this world may not have a solution, but it certainly has a memorable presentation, and it compels me to keep playing all the way to the bittersweet end. Give an indie title a chance to hit you in the heart instead of your mind. While the horror titles of the year slowly roll out, why not take a moment to pick up something that may scare you in a different way? 

One Last Breath is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5 Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of One Last Breath was provided by the publisher.