Last Day of June

Steven Wilson is very artsy and emotionally moving, but he's also been very paranoid of new technology. Xbox is his god, after all. So I get the impression he signed on for Last Day Of June as much for its straightforwardness, and how much it apes his Drive Home video, as he did for its emotional potency. So even though Last Day Of June is still okay, it is definitely punching under its weight in the way a small indie game really should not be. That said, it does adequately twist the original tale of accepting grief into something more structurally satisfying, although it leads to an ending with a really dark undertone that I don't think Ovosonico were prepared to handle. Imagine saying The Last Of Us 2 is too depressing...

The actual game is okay but kinda tedious. There's a neat unfolding time travel element that deftly explores the compartmentalization of grief, but navigating it through play can be a bit of a chore. And although the art direction is cute, it's not cute or immersive enough to carry the experience.

Brief time loop adventure where a man tries to “undo” the death of his wife by changing the actions of the other characters. Even though I liked the overall mood and Steven Wilson’s mellow soundtrack, I was waiting for a more emotional payoff at the end.

Last Day Of June is apparently “based” on Steven Wilson’s Drive Home song. The music video has the same main characters but they are made out of paper rather than the modelled style and pastel painted worlds in this game. The soundtrack even comprises of instrumental versions of many Steven Wilson tracks.

The freaky eyeless characters are like something Tim Burton would create. Although the pastel look is extremely arty, just like pastel paintings, the visuals are a bit blurry, so you often can’t clearly see more than a few metres. It can be quite frustrating, especially in the night sections.

At the beginning of the game, you play as Carl who is by the lakeside with June. It’s a slow start because I found it unclear where to go. There’s no dialogue in the game, and so all communication is done via gestures and simple noises like laughs, ahh, and hmms. It’s not a problem once you get into the game, but I struggled at the start. I didn’t pick up on June’s shiver and Carl quickly pointing to the car, so I wandered around picking flowers.

Soon after Carl returns with a coat from the car, it begins to rain, so they drive back home. However, they are involved in an accident which leaves Carl paralyzed and June dead.

As Carl, you venture into June’s art studio where she has painted the town’s citizens. Carl looks at the painting of a boy, and this is when you get introduced to the main gameplay. The first time you play as a character, you see how they cause June’s death. You then “rewind” the memory, and change the events in order to attempt to save June. However, as much as Carl tries, he wakes up frustrated that his actions are leading to the same end result. June is still dead, but a different event caused the crash.

The way the character’s stories tie together is really cool. So to stop the second person causing an accident, you need to revert your changes to the boy’s story in order to acquire a certain item. In this new timeline, the boy doesn’t cause the accident because the second person will now stop them.

You need to revisit the characters multiple times, but it’s not as tedious as it sounds. You are placed in a more convenient location, you don’t have to resolve “puzzles”, and gates that you have opened stay open. This mechanic works across the stories, so you may open a gate with one character so the other character can reach a different area. You can easily get to the correct spots to find the “End The Day” prompt, but maybe they could have streamlined this further to a menu instead.

The kid can use his ball to knock over plant pots. This is sometimes used just like gates are, and others give you access to collectable “memories”. The memories can only be collected by the corresponding character, so this gives you something to do when you rewind a timeline.

I think the story is a bit open to interpretation. Is the time manipulation a real thing, or is it just Carl’s imagination and how he is dealing with grief?

The time manipulation is really clever and it’s an emotional story, and very arty presentation. It’s a short game that can take 3 hours if you don’t get stuck too much. I really enjoyed it, but sometimes felt frustrated by the limited visibility.