*To note- This game was supplied to me for review by the developers*

The pain of loss is hard for anyone to bare. In The Last Day of June, indie developers Ovosonico take a respectful and touching attempt to try and portray that loss through a beautifully made video game.

The Story

The story is the core of The Last Day of June (TLDOJ) and is possibly one of the best on the Nintendo Switch. You play as Carl, a normal guy who is tragically dealing with the death of his love June. After a trip to the lake, Carl and June’s car is forced off the road resulting in June’s death and Carl needing to use a wheelchair.

June was a painter and in their house are portraits of characters from the pair’s neighbourhood. After June’s death Carl gains the skill to enter June’s paintings, reliving the last day of June’s life through his neighbours. Through the neighbours’ memories, Carl must solve puzzles and change June’s timeline, hopefully avoiding the actions that will lead to the accident and prevent her untimely death.

An example of this is a boy running out into the road to fetch his ball. This action causes Carl and June to swerve their car and crash. To avoid this, the player must find a way to stop the boy playing with the ball. However, solving one memory is not enough to prevent the accident, as every member of the neighbourhood has a domino effect on June’s death.

I really don’t want to say much more about the story as I don’t want to spoil it. However, what I can say is that this story is intense, doing a respectful and admirable job of dealing with the heartbreaking pain of loss. As a platform I feel that the Nintendo Switch is lacking story driven games. TLDOJ’s story shows how video games can be ‘grown-up’ and serious, filling that gap in the Nintendo Switch’s library.

The Game

The main gameplay of TLDOJ is cycling through the different neighbours’ memories and trying to solve the different puzzles to avoid June’s death. This mechanic is really well done, teaching the player slowly how all of the events of the day are connected. The puzzles were quite challenging and it was interesting to see the relationships between Carl, June and their neighbours. However, I do think that the puzzles lacked direction, which added to the challenge. The game doesn’t explain to you that making decisions that would seeming lead to June’s death are ok.

What I mean by this is that some puzzles later on in the story might need an item that another character has. However, as the player doesn’t know what the later puzzles will be, it makes it unclear that a seemingly obvious solution should not be used straightaway. An example of this is with the Boy. Instead of playing with the ball you get him to play with a kite that needs rope, which there is only one of in the early part of the game.

The next memory is of the Best Friend. She also needs the rope to stop the accident. Because I had already used the rope for the Boy’s kite, I thought there must be another for the Best Friend to find. Therefore, I basically spent a long time walking around the level looking for more rope, thinking that if I used the Boy’s rope, he would play with the ball again and cause the accident. What I found out later was that the Best Friend should use the rope because she sees the Boy in the road first, beeps and he runs away before Carl and June drive past. It’s a very trail and error way of beating the puzzles, which is ok. However, I would have liked a bit more direction from the developers that preventing the accident with one character does not mean their puzzle is solved.

Art and Music

TLDOJ has one of the most striking and memorable art styles I’ve seen in any video game. The character models look morbid with their giant heads and skeletal like faces. Nevertheless, mixed with the bright and vibrant colours the characters come to life. The whole game looks like a moving oil painting!

The animation is extremely well done. Especially considering that the characters have no real facial features. The animators from Ovosonico did such an excellent job of portraying emotions through the gestures and movements of the characters, fitting and magnifying the tone of the story.

Finally, the music was wonderful in TLDOJ! It added perfectly to the atmosphere of the game from beautiful sounding acoustic guitar melodies, to hard rocking electric guitar riffs.

Problems

TLDOJ’s story ranks it as one of the best on the Nintendo Switch, however, what let’s TLDOJ down is a lot of it game features. For starters, the game was framey in some places, especially towards the end of the game where a lot happens on screen. In addition, in handheld mode the game had that look that many games get in handheld mode when they haven’t been optimised fully for it. The game looked like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens of the camera, making everything look blurred and the colours look dulled. In docked mode this wasn’t a problem, nevertheless it made me only want to play at home and not on the go.

In addition, there is no voice acting or text in the game. The story is delivered through the wonderful animation of the characters and their annoying mumbling language. The language reminded me of old platforms from the 90’s and for me, was totally off putting. By the end of the game I got used to it, but still wished they hadn’t put it in.

Gameplay wise I thought it was a huge oversight that players couldn’t switch between characters in a memory. Instead you had to end the day and watch the same cutscene repeat itself. I think this would have made the game flow better, instead of having to end the day every time you needed to switch between characters. It would have helped if you could skip the end of day cutscene, but there was no option to do so.

Furthermore, I think the game should have ended five minutes before it did. There was a perfect, perfect point where the game should have ended. It had me in tears and I just wanted to sit and think about the game as I expected the credits to start rolling. However, there was a sort of epilogue that I felt didn’t need to be there after this perfect ending point. The epilogue’s main purpose was to confirm something about the story that I thought was quite obvious. I thought it took a little away from the end of the story, which was a shame.

Summary

To conclude, The Last Day of June is a beautifully crafted game with a mature and heartbreaking story that will leave an impression on anyone who plays it. I’ve thought about it a lot since finishing and have told everyone I know who likes games to check it out. What lets The Last Day of June down is its lack of direction. I feel like if there was more of a focus on the actual game parts of TLDOJ then it would be a 10 out of 10. However, because of this lack of direction and other smaller problems, it is brought down from being a masterpiece to being good or great- which still isn’t too bad!

Therefore, I give The Last Day of June by Ovosonico my rating of

If you like story-driven games why not check out my reviews of Oxenfree or Old Man’s Journey

So what did you think of my review? Have you played The Last Day of June or will you be picking it up because of the review? Let me know over on Twitter or join the conversation on Discord.

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