December 14, 2023 - Day 348 - RePlay Review
Total RePlays: 11

Game: Last Call BBS

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 4, 2022
Library Date: Aug 14, 2023

Playtime: 30m (2h48m)

Last Call BBS is a Zachtronics game, and is the seventh game in this month's Humble Choice bundle, and the final bundle game this month.

I'm going to broadly group the folks reading this into folks who saw "Zachtronics" and went "huh?" and folks who saw it and went "ohhhh".

Most (but not all) of the Zachtronics games are variants of programming games.

Last Call BBS however, is a final labour of love for Zachtronics fans. The name is a double entendre, for this was also the last game by Zachtronics before Zach Barth closed the studio, and left programming (at least temporarily).

It's difficult for me to describe Last Call BBS, because it's a callback to an earlier time, before the web, before the internet was everywhere.

It's a pixel-art simulation of a computer from the late 80's-early 90's, that comes with its own simulation of a PDA ("Kids, when we were younger, we didn't have fandangled smartphones, we had "Personal Digital Assistants" with monochrome pressure-sensitive screens, and we had to learn a whole new way to write the alphabet, and we LIKED it! Well... we accepted it."

The game sets you up with a modem, allowing you dial into a BBS (Bulletin Board System), modem screeches and all, and download 8 different "pirated" 'warez'. Last Call BBS even simulates the download process, making you wait for up to 15 minutes for the "download" to complete, and then forcibly logging you off, in much the style of real world BBSes of the time.

There's almost a sense in which Last Call BBS feels like a Roman à clef, and that some of the stories in the game are Zach taking an introspective stock how how he "got here".

For all of the pixel art games I encountered (and complained about) this year, Last Call BBS is the one game that actually DID give me a sense of nostalgia for that era. It feels... earned, I guess.

As for the "mini-games" themselves, they appear to be inspired by many of Zachtronics hit games. In keeping with tradition for Zachtronics games, Last Call BBS contains two different solitaire variants.

I don't know how old Zach is, but I get the feeling that we lived at opposite ends of a particular era in computing that all but disappeared in the wake of the internet becoming omni-present.

There's a layer to Last Call BBS that may only be appreciated by those of us who lived through that period of time, yet still provides the kind of challenges that lead to an entire subgenre named for Zach Barth: "Zachlikes".

Last Call BBS is:

5: Excellent

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