The Last Night is a 2.5D platform game, where the player controls Charlie, a lower-class man living in an "era of leisure" where computers and machinery have taken over all menial work.

[3][4] They described it as "Blade Runner + delicious pixels", with heavy inspiration from cinematic platformer Flashback (1992), along with Another World (1991) and Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee (1997).

[8] In expanding their development, the team decided to create the game around the idea of postcyberpunk, in which the narrative focuses on a character "anchored in their society rather than adrift in it", a statement describing the genre made by Lawrence Person on Slashdot in 1998.

[12] Following the game's premiere during Microsoft's presentation at E3 2017, Tim Soret was noted to have previously posted statements around 2014 and since on social media that were seen as pro-Gamergate, and antifeminism.

He apologized for his past tweets while on stage during the PC Gaming Show the next day, stating "They don’t in any way represent where I am today or what The Last Night will be about".

Soret compared this approach to the movies Gattaca and Wall-E, neither of which he felt politicized the situation and further supported the belief that the tweets had been overblown by a few people trying to create a controversy to benefit themselves.