Last Day of June ★★★★☆

Where can you buy?

• Available on GOG
• Available on PlayStation
• Available on Switch

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Explanation to Negative Feedback

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Depressing Groundhog Day

Even having to repeat the best day of your life would wear off in excitement after a while and become a depressing loop due to the appeal of it having worn off, but having to repeat the same day knowing you’re trying everything you can to save the love of your life from dying over and over in a car wreck is just brutal.

Yes, he’s upset when it happens, but when he finds out he has a chance to change what happened, and every time he changes the timeline of what happened and wakes up and she’s still not there makes you understand the hopelessness he feels after a while.

It’s a game about loss in the most tragic sense, and it does teach us a depressing lesson that you can’t turn back time and make things better from your perspective.

Fate’s cruel.

Though perhaps the end to Last Day of June dulls the blade a little bit and isn’t as cruel.

Creepy looking characters

Something about the characters and their lack of eyes reminds me of the Coraline film. And the fact that sometimes clay figurines don’t exactly have eyes fitted into their sockets–such as with everyone we meet in this game (animals included).

I think the animals are the creepiest though.

It’s like…they’re still cute and all but…they have no soul.

The eyes are the key to the soul, and they have none.

Repetitive

The game requires you to go back and forth between characters you’ve already done to switch the paths that they might be on at the moment, in order to move forward with the character you’re currently trying to change the path of.

For instance, if the boy is holding the kite at the start, you won’t be able to get past the best friend section without the bad end happening.

You don’t have to play the characters out fully when you go back to an already completed scenario, but you still have to watch certain scenes (though short) that you can’t skip, and if you keep making mistakes and keep having to go back, it can become a little annoying.

Town isn’t wheelchair friendly

You never think about how wheelchair friendly a place can be until someone’s actually in one, and not only is our town not wheelchair friendly, with its many steps you can’t traverse up or down or many gates you can’t get through (though that’s the same even if you’re standing), but our house is two stories, meaning we can’t get to the second floor.

That’s a little more depression added into the game, if you ask me.

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Explanation to Positive Feedback

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Choices have consequences

Maybe some of you won’t think it’s a choices matter game and maybe some of you will. It’s not like you have a multiple choice option on what you want to do, like in As Dusk Falls, for instance, but you still do have to make appropriate choices in order to progress the game.

It’s not like you can stick to a bad choice, because the game won’t allow it.

But I still enjoy the fact that these choices do matter in the sense that even if you’ve gotten as far as the hunter, you still have to return to the boy even if his choice you’ve currently gotten him on is the good one. You’ll need to switch it to the bad to progress the hunter and make appropriate choices for some progress to happen.

Clay-like graphics

It’s not Claymation, I don’t think, but it’s similar to it if you like the Wallace and Gromit series, or even remember Gumby if you’re old enough (hell, let’s throw in a Mr. Bill as well to really show my age).

Not a lot of games implement this style of graphics and I think that it’s really fun. Creepy, but also a fun style to play around with.

Emotional storytelling

I mean, at some point in the game you already know it’s emotional as f*ck, but don’t worry, it keeps getting emotional as you get to play out the different characters and see their side of things and how their actions cause you even more grief.

If I were in the main character’s shoes, I’d be so mad at everyone in this town for what they did to cause The Bad Thing to happen.

But then when you get to the point where you can no longer blame then, you can only blame yourself for not making a possibly better decision for a possibly better outcome.

You’ve got the best friend who’s in love with a married man. You’ve got the boy who just wanted to play. You’ve got the hunter that wanted his father’s medal back. Then you have the old man whose gift kind of…just made everything worse.

It’s a short game, but it’s a lot to take in.

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Links Worth Checking Out

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• Nothing here