Pictured: Torch (the robot), Randy (the woman) and Rinaldi (the rock creature).
Last Chance in Xollywood is a sci-fi Visual Novel with RPG elements made in Ren'Py by Willy Elektrix AKA Andi Hagen, together with Shea Kennedy. It's set in the far future of year 2099, and you play the part of an extraterrestrial movie director who's trying to make it big in Xollywood, the galaxy's most important film-making hub on Ingress, an orbital city home to hundreds of different alien races. The goal of the game is to make a movie titled Love Dies Screaming: there are many ways to reach it, depending on your skills (artistry, budget management, connections, etc). and the relationships you build with crew and cast members.Just like Willy Elektrix' previous games, Alien Squatter and Superstorm Melon Date, it is a satirical and humorous look on the current state of the world, seen through a sci-fi lens full of bizarre alien creatures, advanced technologies, psychic powers, mutants and other even weirder stuff.
The game was released on Steam
and Hagen's Itch.io page in September 2023 as a free game; later on, the Special Edition DLC added two new chapters and another playable character in addition to the selectable 3 (Zink of Rubycon, Orchid Primo and Manxy Five). It is also inspired by Hagen's own Xenopolitan tabletop RPG set on an alien metropolis.
The soundtrack for the game was composed on synthesizer by Doffu, featuring collaborative tracks with musicians Subwaytacoman, Dot Matrix Girl, and Rhythmi.
This visual novel provides examples of:
- Alliterative Name: Janos Janutolo, the playable character added in the DLC.
- Art Imitates Art: A funny example with alien tycoon Garfield Sphynx Sr. (one of our possible investors), whose previous husband bought Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and turned it into a portrait of Garfield◊.
- Bait-and-Switch: Discussed between Randy and the player character regarding the film's advertisement, putting in the ads for Love Dies Screaming a famous actor that however is not going to star in the film itself.
- Crapsack World: If you're not part of the elite, life on Ingress is not especially good, what with the constant riots, protests, pollution, grime, inequality, drones and robots going haywire, muggers, scammers and so on.
- Creator's Oddball: In-universe, Last Chance usually churns out No Budget Z-grade exploitation movies, but they once made a film titled Police on Trial, a documentary dealing with police brutality and social justice. Randy made it after her twin sister on Earth was shot for a speeding ticket.
- Double-Meaning Title: The player character is getting their last chance of making it big in Xollywood, and they work for a studio named Last Chance, also owned by a woman named Randy Chance.
- The Empath: Jarl the Polarian is an alien who can tell how others feel with his antennae; this, combined by the fact that he's the studio's janitor and a cockroach-like being who spends an inordinate amount of time inside the walls and air vents, means that he knows almost everything about everyone who works with him.
- Explosive Breeder: One of the playable characters, Orchid Primo, seems to be this: he used to be a porn actor and wants to switch to film directing in order to feed his 23 kids and give them all a chance for a better future.
- Expy Coexistence: In the future Hollywood still exists and thrives, and is defined as Earthlings' equivalent to Xollywood.
- Functional Addict: Greemu the sound designer, a bird-like alien, is this, for a certain degree of "functional". She has a messy personal life, so she vapes all the time, takes uppers to get through the day and drinks a lot to help her sleep at night. If we choose to talk with her at the wrap party, when the movie is completed, we can talk her into doing something about her addictions, though she says "not all three at the same time".
- Gender-Blender Name: The boss of Last Chance is a human woman named Randy.
- Hartman Hips: Randy's portrait shows that she has truly enormous hips.
- Hold Your Hippogriffs: A variant. The text always uses phrases like "ocular organs" and "appendages", for example, in place of "eyes" and "hands", but it's justified since all the playable characters are alien beings. Also inverted since they sometimes use human expressions but don't really know what they mean: one character says "The grass is greener", and the other will say "What is grass?".
- Horrible Hollywood: More like, Horrible Xollywood, but Earth's Hollywood too is shown as not being much better under the superficial glitz and glamour.
- Humans Are Average: Human culture, food and entertainment are seemingly fairly popular in Ingress, though the way they are talked about by the characters implies they are nothing really special. Earth is also mentioned as being a "third-rate planet".
- Insufferable Genius: Rinaldi the scenographer and set designer is great at his job, as the fact that he makes great sets for Love Dies Screaming with Last Chance's minimal budget shows. However he's also very self-important, and the reason he works for such a small studio is because he burned a lot of bridges in Xollywood. One of the ways we can get a better relationship with him is to help him find a better job.
- King Incognito: A very curious example. Jarl the janitor was born as the princess of his hive of alien insects, but he didn't want to deal with his family and the pressure of becoming the hive's queen, so he abandoned them, changed his gender and identity, and was hired by Last Chance as a humble worker in order to learn how movie production worked, since he didn't want to get help from his planet's royals.
- Klingons Love Shakespeare: It is said that the Federation of Planets in general likes Earth-produced movies, though they're implied to be seen as lowbrow, easily-consumed trash. (And given Last Chance's track record, aliens are not totally wrong...)
- The Movie Buff: Jarl is this and possibly also an Unabashed B-Movie Fan. He wants to get a job in movie making and/or movie directing because he loves movies of all kinds, and throughout the whole game he will reference all kinds of bizarre alien flicks and compare whatever happens while working on Love Dies Screaming to them.
- Mushroom Man: Maz Zay Paz and his sister Uz Zay Paz (and by extension all members of their race, the Zoberonians) are apparently this, though it's not referenced much outside of their portraits.
- Older Than They Look: One of the playable characters, industry veteran Manxy Five, is this: her bio states she is 117 years old, but she just went through her third rejuvenation process.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Defied by Maz, our movie's star, who comes from Zoberon, a planet of warmongering aliens that have no real concept of entertainment outside of fights to the death. He is mostly interested in being an actor (and wants to dabble in comedy, too) and hopes that working in the film industry will make Zoberonians realize that there's more to life than fighting. His sister Uz as well uses her fighting expertise for being Last Chance's stunt coordinator.
- Shapeshifter: Two alien races being able to shapeshift are mentioned in dialogues as being held in high regard in Xollywood, because their abilities are invaluable when one needs to replace actors. Though one of them gets paid much less because... they smell bad.
- Special Person, Normal Name: The Technopath psychic famous cinematographer alien lady is named... Vanilla. It is a pseudonym, she used to be known as Goldie St. Isle before being blacklisted from the Hollywood industry.
- Technopath: Vanilla the cinematographer uses her psychic powers to control and move the camera drones and spotlight drones around the set, since she's a worm-like alien with no hands or other appendages.
- Token Human: Randy is the only human character in the main cast.
- Used Future: On the surface, Ingress seems glamorous enough, but the majority of the population lives underground. Last Chance is found in a decaying, mostly abandoned mall.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: A downplayed example in the second-to-last chapter, where the production of Love Dies Screaming wraps and the narration details what the crew does immediately after. Then the final chapter where several years have passed comes, and the narration talks about all the characters' whereabouts, and whether you still are (or were, in the case any of them have passed away) in good terms with them. There are different lines of dialogue, and different achievements, in the event your relationship stats with any of them were particularly good... or particularly poor.
- You No Take Candle: At times Uz the stunt coordinator seems to talk like this (and is also a Malaproper), because the universal translator isn't really good at translating her dialect. This causes her some grief, since people usually already look down on her for being from Zoberon: a backwater, war-mongering, "fifth-rate" planet.
THAT'S A WRAP!
