EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket Review. A walking simulator for streamers, but not for players

Most modern indie horror games are mediocre entertainment in the spirit of "walk around, read some notes," played mainly by streamers and YouTube Let's Players. This genre essentially serves as a starting point for many developers, since creating such projects doesn't require special knowledge or significant financial investment. Steam is literally flooded with these kinds of horror games, but only those featured in a popular blogger's video have any chance of success and attracting at least some audience. EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket is one of those games. It's a standard walking simulator with a mishmash of different settings, trying to scare not with classic jump scares, but with clumsy game design and uncomfortable environments.

The only thing that can really hook you in a quality walking simulator is the story. And in this aspect, EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket is unlucky. The story here is not only unintriguing from the start, but overall looks like a collection of clichés from everything found in the indie horror segment. The plot begins with a guy waking up at home, while his wife off-screen reminds him that today is the anniversary of his father's disappearance. He goes to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror, after which he suddenly finds himself in an abandoned amusement park.

Despite the game's cover and screenshots with amusement rides, don't expect EMOTIONLESS to be a horror about killer clowns or a freak circus like in the fourth season of American Horror Story: Freak Show. No, in the game this location only serves as a setup for the story, since the protagonist's father ended up somewhere underground, which means our hero is destined to descend into underground catacombs that, by a random twist of fate, once belonged to Nazi squads. Yes, that's how abruptly the setting changes. And believe me: this is just the beginning.

Walking through monotonous and gray corridors, the brave hero ends up in the sewers, which, due to the lack of decorations and unique textures, are actually a bit creepy, and in a very unconventional way. You know, there's this creepypasta on the internet — "the oppressive atmosphere and growing horror effect of the Source engine." Well, the sewers in EMOTIONLESS are a literal recreation of what thousands of players felt while exploring unfinished maps in Half-Life 2 Beta and other deserted locations from similar unreleased projects.

Not only is the sewer a "trypophobe's nightmare" (fear of clusters of small holes or indentations) with unusual geometry and huge empty spaces, but it's also so dark and uncomfortable that walking through it and looking for valves to shut off the water was genuinely creepy. Of course, we were more afraid of falling through the floor or getting stuck in the environment, but more on that later.

After the Source-like horror, the setting changes again — this time to something we've seen in Scorn. That is, Giger-esque (Hans Giger) objects, classic xenomorphs, and unsettling art. And all this is mixed together, just imagine, with objects of Ancient Roman art and other cultures. At the same time, the environment has nothing to do with the main story, which is revealed through audio recordings left by the protagonist's father, and all sorts of junk like a rubber duck, touching which for some reason lets you hear the iconic phrase of James Doakes from the TV series Dexter.

After the space adventures, our hero returns to the park, but this time in winter, to head into a new setting — abandoned catacombs with ancient structures. So, what’s the point: the game has no clear style, and all these abrupt transitions from one setting to another are disorienting. Not only were the locations created without obvious level design skills and with deliberately stretched-out gameplay, but they’re also quite creepy simply because they look like placeholders for an early alpha build. We honestly wasted a lot of time just trying to figure out where to go to progress the story.

Oh, and there are also a few puzzles in the game, as well as lockpicking and hacking terminals. The latter, by the way, are completely copied from Fallout 3. The puzzles themselves are a mixed bag. For example, we actually enjoyed the challenge with the collapsing floor, where the player has to remember the correct path marked on the underside of the bridge. And of course, there are sliding puzzles. Twice, in fact. Everyone loves sliding puzzles, right?

For a number of reasons described above, it’s hard to call EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket a standard indie horror. In the end, it’s just a typical walking simulator with vague game design. For example, in the park there are a couple of fences you can walk behind and simply fall off the map. Some objects can only be activated from a specific position, so we spent five minutes wandering around a locked room before realizing we had to crouch and extinguish a candle. It’s easy to wander around the map in circles, not understanding what the game wants from you due to unclear landmarks. Yes, in some places you’ll get hints from sounds and lights about where to go, but this only happens in a couple of locations. The rest is just aimless wandering through corridors in search of some deeper meaning.

There are quite a few indie horror games that, despite having no budget, still look decent. EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket isn’t about visuals. Maybe it was a conscious choice by the developers to make the game “empty” to create a sense of anxiety, but at least in the later locations you can see some work with art and environments. In other words, the first half of the project feels like an unfinished alpha version, and the second half — a half-baked beta.

As for performance on PC, we can’t say — we got the console version. And on PS5, the game runs terribly. Just imagine: a game with a minimal number of objects, a couple of repeating textures, and completely broken lighting manages to run at an unstable 20–40 frames per second? But that’s a fact. On the last level, the FPS dropped so low that we didn’t even realize what happened before the ending.

There’s not much to say about the quality of lighting and shading. Everything is buggy and unpleasant. Textures flicker. Light passes through objects and walls. In the sewer pipes, there are yellow-orange splotches, as if there’s a sunset happening on the other side. Most locations are painfully dark, and there isn’t even a brightness slider in the settings. What’s more, in the final levels we lost our flashlight (or maybe it just bugged out), so we ended up running through dark corridors hoping to stumble upon a story trigger.

There are just an unbelievable number of bugs. We fell through the map three times. We couldn’t use the rides in the park, because when activating a puzzle, the protagonist would literally get stuck in the object, and after restarting, the game would start from the very beginning. One story script simply didn’t work, and we got a softlock that couldn’t be fixed by reloading the level. Thanks to the poorly thought-out geometry, we eventually managed to walk through an object blocking the way and finish the game.

The sound design in EMOTIONLESS is so amusing that it’s hard to describe. We played with headphones, and the protagonist’s footsteps sounded as if someone was walking right behind us. In other words, the positioning is completely broken. It was especially creepy in the snowy park, where it felt like the character was being followed, but it turned out to be just poorly configured snow footsteps playing with a huge delay. Contextual sounds that are supposed to warn or notify the player about a story trigger also work poorly or simply don’t work at all. Add to this constant rustling, whispers, giggles, banging, and other noises — and by the end of the game, you’ll genuinely start to go crazy from paranoia. Although, this is just poorly executed work by the developers, not an intentional feature.

EMOTIONLESS: The Last Ticket is a typical streamer product — it’s interesting to watch someone else play it. The game is genuinely unnerving with its uncomfortable environments, paranoid and buggy sound, and level design reminiscent of unfinished Source engine maps. But we definitely can’t recommend actually playing it yourself. At least not until the developers fix the bugs and improve performance. By the way, “EMOTIONLESS” means “without emotion,” and that’s exactly how we felt after finishing this project.