Last Stop on the Atari VCS was a few waves when it was first released as it was hyped around being a first-person horror title on the Atari VCS, which is a first for the console, and also because it was the first title to be created using Unreal Engine 5 on the platform. Both of these factors certainly made Last Stop stand out and got the game relatively impressive hype within the small but dedicated Atari VCS fanbase.
It’s taken me a while to jump on board the train of Last Stop on the Atari VCS, as I found life and other projects were getting in the way of me having time to dedicate to gaming over the latter half of 2025. But thanks to a sale on the Atari VCS store, I did manage to get Last Stop with a small reduction in price.
Unfortunately, at still around £10, I wish I’d waited for a larger discount, as the game didn’t really live up to my expectations. To be fair to the game, I didn’t really know what to expect going on. This being a horror title, I purposely avoided spoilers, and other than a few screen shots and the blurb on the VCS Store, I didn’t know what to expect going in.
The game is best described as an attempt to capture the vibe of the Silent Hills teaser demo called P.T (as in playable teaser) that was released near the start of the PlayStation 4’s release. That PS4 demo became legendary for being a mysterious demo that people struggled to work what it was and how to complete it, only to discover that they were playing a teaser of a new Silent Hill game directed by Hideo Kojima, worked on by Guillermo Del Toro, and starring the Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus. This was all before Konami fell out with Kojima and the project was cancelled.
P.T’s cancellation has cemented it as one of gaming’s great ‘What ifs’ which is also largely based on how mysterious the demo was even before being cancelled. When playing P.T, you had almost no information on what was going on in the demo where you would seemingly endlessly loop through a single corridor and then notice small and spooky changes each time. All players knew was that the atmosphere was great, and it begged for you to learn more.
Roll forward to Last Stop on the Atari VCS, and the game clearly has taken a huge amount of inspiration from P.T. Instead of an endless corridor, you move through an endless set of near identical subway train carriages. As you go through them you notice strange sounds and will see flashes of disturbing imagery. This can include the appearance of blood, people, and even monsters.
I’ll talk about the monsters for a moment here, as although the game is undoubtably horror, it is in no way survival horror, as there is no way to die in Last Stop. This is in my opinion the game’s biggest flaw as once you realise you’re never in any real danger, the jump scares become just loud noises.
Monster wise, you do get some creepy zombie like dead people, some Silent Hill like faceless and somewhat detail-less beings with what look like nails sticking out of them. There are also baby dolls and what you can only assume are people tied up in sacks with blood dripping down.
One thing that is weird is that most of the enemies lack animation, but a few do have animation. I think this may be telling about when the game was made and that they went with ghostly like apparitions and weeping angel like appearing frozen out of nowhere moments to avoid too much animation.
As you go through the game, you’ll also have to interact with various things which will help you progress. I hesitate to say that it’s puzzle solving, but more that you have to interact with certain objects in a certain order to trigger the game to progress.
An example of this would be that there are frequently candles that you have to blow out. Blowing out all of the candles in the carriage is usually all you have to do to make the game move on, which is a shame, as if you had to blow them out in a specific order, or blow them all out within a set time limit, it would give the game some much needed puzzles or challenges to tackle, rather than just interacting with everything to trigger the next event.
You frequently find a torch, which even in the game’s short run time gets a bit tired that you have to keep picking up the same torch over and over. At one point you find a battery, and I think the game would have been better if you’d found the torch once, and then just had a battery indicator to show that sometimes you needed to pick up an extra battery.
The whole game can be beaten in around an hour. The first time I beat it I did so in just over an hour, and that included me getting stuck at one point where I didn’t notice that you had to press a button on an intercom because I didn’t have the volume up enough to notice it.
The second time I beat the game I did so in under forty-five minutes and this time it included me getting stuck at a photography-based level just because I wasn’t standing quite close enough to the thing I was meant to take a photo of.
The game is annoyingly specific in that you need interactive objects to be absolutely centre screen for you to be able to click on things.
I’m not sure if you can play with a mouse, but that may make clicking on interactive objects easier. The controls for the game are also very slow. Your character walks really slow and whilst this is to add tension, there isn’t any as soon as you realise that you can never die and don’t need to run away from anything.
I expect the game could be speed run in around half an hour, or maybe even significantly less if you really wanted to rush through.
I may be tempted to speed run it again, but this would mostly be out of interest for making a video. Just for casual play, I think I’ve played it about as much as I’m going to.
Graphically, the game is both good for the Atari VCS, serviceable generally, but poor for what it is trying to be. Human characters that appear look really dated.
The game does a good attempt at being the Atari VCS version of P.T, but where as P.T was a free demo, where you knew it was just a tiny teaser for a game that you’d expect to be much grander when it did release (if it hadn’t been cancelled) in the case of Last Stop, the game is crazily short for the money, and when you consider it is the full game and not just a teaser, it is very lacking in terms of gameplay, graphics and especially story.
I know from the blurb that this is about a train journey, and I gather from the ending that maybe you are playing a character where all the craziness is in their mind, but whilst P.T was intentionally vague, there is no real explanation or rhyme or reason for why the things you see happening in Last Stop are happening.
Conclusion
I thought this game was cool as the first real horror experience on the Atari VCS, and it has some nice ideas in there, but it feels very far from a finished game. The gameplay is painfully slow, despite the game having very little to do and a very short runtime.
In a sense it’s hard to review a game like this, as I admire it’s ambition, and whilst it does deliver on a good atmosphere, and some of the graphics are decent for the platform, it’s hard to overlook how it just feels like you slowly walk from interactive item to interactive item to trigger the next scary monster appear and then rinse and repeat without any build of story or sense of accomplishing anything.
What would you rate this game?
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