The Last Gas Station

It’s disconty meets Gravity Falls highly recommended

good

I once again wish Steam had an "okay" or "only buy when on sale" rating. The Last Gas Station looked extremely promising to me. I'm a huge fan of cozy management games in general, so adding anthropomorphic animals, pixel graphics, multiplayer, and a spooky mystery on top? Count me in. And at first, the game is a lot of fun. Unlocking new parts of the station and figuring out how everything works gives you a steady sense of progression. Unfortunately, once you reach the mid and late game, it really starts to drag. The minigames seem fun at first but quickly become repetitive. The game's answer to this is eventually letting you automate most of them, which sounds great in theory. The problem is that automation doesn't free you up to focus on new or more interesting mechanics. It just leaves you with nothing to do. You end up literally standing around waiting for the day to pass so you can go to sleep, wake up, and repeat the process. Then the game seems to realize that everything is automated and gives you an incentive to switch the machines back to manual because automation increases your electricity costs. So now you're encouraged to go back to doing the same repetitive minigames the game previously let you automate. The game doesn't know which lane it wants to be in. The story also feels shallow, which is disappointing because the devs clearly put a lot of work into the game's mythos. There are local legends, paranormal events, nightmares, and all kinds of strange things happening around the station, but you don't really get to experience much of it beyond small snippets. Most of the individual story threads have anticlimactic endings that left me thinking, "Wait, that's it?" One of the biggest examples is the game repeatedly telling you that you're not supposed to go outside at night. That sounds like a great setup for a horror mechanic, except... nothing actually happens if you do. I eventually realized I could wander around outside without really worrying about it, which completely killed the tension that warning initially created. The story also completely lost me at one point when it suddenly started pushing this weird argument about electric cars supposedly being worse for the environment than gas cars. One character goes on a several-minute rant about it, and the topic comes up more than once. Another character will basically tell you that guy is crazy and call you a sucker if you agree with him, but that honestly just made me wonder why the game spent so much time on the argument in the first place. It felt strangely out of place in a game about running a spooky gas station. All in all, I did enjoy my time with The Last Gas Station, even when it got grindy. There's a genuinely charming game here, and I really like the art, atmosphere, and basic concept. I just don't think there's enough depth to justify the $14 asking price. I bought it for $7 on sale, and that feels like a much more reasonable price for what the game gives you. If Steam gave me a "mixed" or "buy on sale" button, that's what I'd pick.