Review - Last Day of June
How do you cope with the loss of one you love? Last Day of June, a recent game developed by Ovosonico, follows the story of a man who has lost the person that matters most to him. In the process, the game develops a story that is short and well thought out. There are some issues with the gameplay, but The Last Day of June certainly impressed me.
The gameplay revolves around taking control of one of a few different characters. Each character can move around and interact with elements within the environment to solve different puzzles. To change between characters, the main character would remember the past and become one of the characters. The main puzzle mechanic is that the player must maneuver each character into the right decisions to change the past. Honestly, it really is that simple. When you delve into the gameplay elements of Last Day of June it ends up being a simplified version of a point and click adventure with some time travel elements.
While the mechanics were simple, they were not terribly engaging. The puzzles themselves were easy to solve. To an extent, this was a matter of game design. It was clear that the developers made certain that the player could move from one plot point to the next so as to not have the player stuck without story elements. I’ve often railed on other games for being too difficulty focused, but in this case there didn’t seem to be enough difficulty. It was, most often, just a matter of seeing where one was supposed to go and the rest was the routine of getting there.
What really pulled away from the gameplay was the lack of player impact upon the events within the game. It became obvious very quickly that the only actions that mattered in any day were the ones that the developer specifically wanted the player to do. To clarify, only the outcome and a few puzzle solving elements persisted between playing one character after another. This was a massive missed opportunity. By having so little of what the player did as each character matter, the time travel elements almost ceased to exist. The time travel became a pretext for what was actually a single level puzzle with the player controlling four characters with specific abilities that could assist one another. What would have been nicer, and would have made the time travel an integral part of the game mechanics, would have been to have fixed time days and have the player’s movements recorded for each character. Regardless, effectively ignoring the time travel elements in the game mechanics was certainly unfortunate.
Now, let’s move to the bread and butter of this game: the narrative. This is a very good story. It focuses on the main character’s struggle to cope with the loss of a loved one. Instead of using this as a pretext for gameplay, that became the integral theme for everything that occurred. Every character in the game is spurred by some loss that they have had to deal with, from a boy losing his friend to a son who succeeded too late to impress his father. The consistency and potency of Last Day of June’s theme was on par with what would be seen in most other mediums of storytelling.
In addition, the character’s actions reflect the realities of their past causing each character to exist as a unique entity instead of a simple archetype. The backstory of every character, including the protagonist, is revealed slowly throughout the gameplay either through collectibles or simple story progression. As the player better understands the backstory of each character, actions that once appeared to be random, out of place, or stereotypical take on a new light. A character’s love of flowers might seem like a generic caricature, but ends up being an homage to a tragedy. What is even more interesting is the way that the main character’s backstory is expressed. Instead of just telling what has occurred, the game places ghosts of events that occurred between the protagonist and their lost love. In this way, the game expresses the deep pain of the characters loss as the world where they once lived together is permanently marked by the memories of their life together. To put one more nail in the coffin on this point, the protagonists state within the game is key as well. He is in a wheelchair from the moment of his tragedy thereby creating a physical metaphor of the protagonists crippling loss. To put it simply, the character development was done very well thought out and little was put in just for the sake of it.
While the story was quite good, it did suffer when one considered its storytelling mechanics in relation to it being a game. There was nothing about the method with which Last Day of June expressed it’s story that was specifically gaming. Every event could have been told through film with little to no loss to the viewer, especially given the fact that the time traveling was so underutilized in the gameplay. Giving the game a greater focus on story through gameplay or changing the format so that the fact that the player acts within the game world reveals more of the themes within the story would have taken this game from being a good story to a potentially brilliant example of what gaming can bring the table narratively. As is, Last Day of June is a good story that could have been told in other mediums just as well.
As an aside, the way that Last Day of June dealt with achievements was very interesting. The title of each achievement was not some generic “got to level two,” but instead expressed the mood of the scene wherein the achievement should be popping up on screen. It even went to the extent of alerting the player to scenes that would occur after the credits at the end of the game. It was certainly an interesting use of what is otherwise a throwaway element of most games.
Overall, The Last Day of June is a brilliant story with gameplay that is hampered by giving the player limited choices. The time travel elements of the gaming narrative were under utilized in the game’s mechanics due to the fact that only a select few of the player’s actions with each character have any effect on the actions of other characters. This led to a feeling of simply following the developer's prescribed path while playing. With that being said, the story was very well done. It included surprisingly consistent themes of loss and disempowerment that were expressed through both narrative and gameplay elements within the game. While the narrative does not embrace its medium of gaming, it at least succeeds at being a story on par with those of other mediums. This is definitely a game to check out. It will be an easy play, but the story will more than easily make up for the failures of the mechanics.
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