Last Day of June (PC) Review

After losing his wife, June, to a horrific accident, Carl is stuck in a state of grief. Unable to accept the reality of his situation, he gravitates towards a line of thinking that so many know all too well: "This didn't have to happen". This leads to him diving into the memories of various members of his neighbourhood, each of whom played an unwitting role in the catastrophe. By diving into their memories and making changes to their actions, Carl begins to chip away at the calamitous factors that all seemed to conspire against him and his wife.

Of course, just one change isn't enough. Getting a young boy to fly his kite instead of playing fetch with a dog may keep him uninvolved with June's accident, but may in turn limit the actions of someone else, bringing about the same conclusion in a different way. Thus, it becomes a matter of diving between the memories of various townsfolk and seeing how their personal outcomes affect the bigger picture. It's an interesting concept, and one that provides a surprisingly intimate look at a small community. Despite the game only being a few hours long, it's easy to become well-acquainted with the cast's history and their plans for the future.

Perhaps the game gets a little too familiar with its setting and characters, though. Every time Carl dives into someone's memory, an unskippable cutscene plays to re-establish how that person's day started. Similarly, the only way to exit a memory is to end the day and witness the outcome: even if it's one you've seen ten times. The game does attempt to abbreviate some of these, but it rapidly becomes tiresome when you have to jump back and forth between multiple stories to experiment with the outcomes. It turns June's emotional gut-punch of a death into a minor inconvenience: something to twiddle your thumbs through so you can keep tweaking the sequence of events. It's an odd choice too, considering the game's short length. It's a game that could easily be completed in a single sitting, so forcing the player to sit through the same cutscenes over and over feels like redundant padding more than anything.

At least the game's nice to look at during these scenes. Last Day of June uses a heavily stylized aesthetic, looking a bit like a Tim Burton film by way of Pixar. Characters have large heads, skinny frames, and indistinct facial features, yet feel unique and personable all the same. Environments look like watercolour paintings, utilizing post-processing to give everything a dream-like quality. Even the voice acting, which consists solely of mumbles, grunts, and the like, manages to convey the subtleties of each character's emotions as they evolve throughout the experience. All of this is backed by a soundtrack that mixes an assortment of styles into a cohesive whole, complementing each scene in which it's implemented.