After playing a cursed card game, a group of classmates wake up in a nightmarish reflection of their hometown known as The Nightmare. As they make their way through their school, they find themselves being pursued by a horrifying supernatural force, able to set deadly traps all over the school and manifest itself in the form of different Fiends out for their blood.
Though the player playing as the Fiend is outnumbered five to one, their biggest advantage comes in the form of Predator Mode, which allows them to move through the school unseen, keep tabs on the students' locations, set traps to split up and disorient the group, and choose a Fiend to spawn as to move in for the kill. With the Fiend able to spawn in anywhere from smashing in through a nearby wall to crashing in from the ceiling through a skylight, nowhere in East Side High is safe. However, the Classmates aren't completely defenseless - they're able to arm themselves with a wide array of improvised weapons, from lead pipes to jury-rigged flamethrowers and thermos grenades. If the Classmates want any hope of escaping the Nightmare alive, they'll have to complete objectives, use the unique talents offered by their roles to their advantage, and stick together.
The game was funded on Kickstarter on December 7th, 2014, and originally released on December 18th, 2018 for PC on the Discord Store, with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions said to be in the works.
The game was eventually re-released on December 10th, 2019 on Steam, almost a year after its initial launch.
The game was shut down in late 2021 due to Elastic Games going bankrupt, but was acquired by Undaunted Games and re-released via Steam once more as a free-to-play title on May 4, 2023. In March 2024, Undaunted Games announced a sequel to the game titled Forest Hills: The Last Year, which will feature most of the same mechanics and gameplay and set to release in June 2024. What will happen to Last Year after Forest Hills releases is unknown.
Last Year provides examples of the following tropes:
- Asymmetric Multiplayer: Five players play the Classmates, while the sixth plays the Fiend.
- Barrier-Busting Blow: The Giant has the option to spawn in by smashing through a wall, instantly killing any Survivor unlucky enough to be caught nearby.
- Batter Up!: Obviously due to taking place in a high school, baseball bats are available weapons. Cricket bats are also an available option.
- Blinding Camera Flash: Scouts on the Classmate team can briefly blind the Fiend using the flashes on their scanners.
- The Brute: The Giant, a towering hulk able to smash through walls and snap spines with his bare hands.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: The Nightmare is full of creepy messages scrawled in blood.
- Death from Above: The Slasher can ambush the kids by dropping in from the skylights, planting his axe blade in their faces for an insta-kill.
- Eye Scream: The Strangler's executions usually involve a pair of scissors and his target's eyes.
- Friend to All Living Things: Sam owns a pet rabbit and is friendly to all the rats skittering around the Nightmare.
- Genre Savvy: Troy's seen the most horror movies out of the classmates, making him the strategist of the group.
- Homemade Inventions: Due to regular lethal weaponry being hard to get in a school. The students have to make their own from the materials and supplies already available in the school.
- I Let You Win: Before the escape sequence starts, a common strategy for the Fiend is to make a suicidal charge against the Classmates to get killed and switch to another Fiend more suitable for defending the gate.
- Improvised Weapon: Most of the Classmates' basic weapons, such as baseball bats, hockey sticks, and metal pipes are these.
- Also applies to the Strangler, as he uses a pair of rusty scissors.
- Jump Scare: All of the ambushes are this: whether the Slasher's jumping in through a skylight, the Strangler's pulling you into a vent, or the Giant's smashing through a wall, or the Spider bursts out of the ground you won't receive any warning and you will die instantly.
- Kill It with Fire: Some weapons the Classmates can use include flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails.
- The Little Detecto: The scanners given to the Scout class, which can detect whenever the Fiend's nearby, even in Predator Mode.
- Mighty Glacier: The Giant, who has the most health out of all the Fiend by far, but also moves the slowest. He can charge at the Survivors, though.
- Offscreen Teleportation: As long as the Fiend is out of the survivors' line of sight they can disappear and reappear anywhere they please.
- Sentry Gun: Technicians can build these out of nail guns, tripods and cameras. They'll shoot at the Fiend whenever he's within range. However, they'll shoot at each other. This is fixed in the Steam release.
- Sinister Minister: The Father, the new Fiend in the teaser for Chapter 2 of Last Year, appears to be this.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Scouts can craft Shotguns, which can deal 80 damage at point blank. That being said, they only carry 2 rounds, come with a steep Scrap cost - and landing hits on the Fiend is harder than it looks.
- Trap Master: The Fiend can place bear traps, rig trapdoors, and plant poison gas around the school to disorient the kids and set up for an ambush.
- Two Girls to a Team: Amber and Sam.
- Would Hurt a Child: Downplayed, since the survivors are all presumably in their mid- to late teens, but the Fiends (and by extension, the force that trapped them there) are more than willing to murder them in various, often brutal, ways.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Downplayed. Classmates occasionally remark that they've been inside the rescue closet for what feels like hours when rescued.
- You Will Not Evade Me: One of The Strangler's special abilities is a chain that they can drag survivors away with.
