Red Stewart reviews Last Day of June on Nintendo Switch…
Video games have been a great platform to tell stories without dialogue. While experimental films have tried their hand at this genre, they lack one aspect of gaming that helps give the latter an edge in this department, and that is interaction. When players are able to interact, they can add their own choices, however limited, to the story, and that tends to make up for the lack of spoken words.
Games like Ico, Limbo, and Journey have all been successful entries in this field, and attempting to join those ranks is Last Day of June. Developed by the Italian indie developer Ovosonico and published by 505 Games for Microsoft Windows and PS4 last year, Last Day of June saw a 2018 release in mid-March for the Nintendo Switch. The question on everyone’s minds is, is it worth getting? The short answer is no, but if you’re interested in reading the long answer, continue below.
Last Day of June, which shall henceforth be referred to as June for shorthand purposes, tells the story of a presumably middle-aged couple that suffers a tragedy. To change the course of events, the husband learns that he can alter the outcome of what happened through manipulating past memories via art canvasses that his wife created.
It’s not a particularly original narrative, with it clearly drawing inspiration from The Butterfly Effect amongst other science fiction, but then again what is original these days? No, what matters is the presentation, and on that note June either way fails because of a couple of reasons: one, for a game without any dialogue, it’s surprising reliant on dialogue. Characters may not interact with words, but their babbling goes on as though they were having an Tarantino-type conversation. Take one of those old-fashioned Rare games or Yooka-Laylee and remove the text boxes whenever an NPC spoke and you basically have June’s premise.
The second is that it has a painful amount of tearjerker tropes, and that made its sentimentality feel more fabricated than genuine. It’s bad enough that the writers blatantly steal pointers from Up, it’s another that they don’t even do a good job copying what Up did so well. For example, Up’s protagonist Russell was unpopular for sure, but Pixar took the time to showcase that revelation over the course of the movie, where he turns from a seemingly annoying boy scout to a three-dimensional character. In June, you learn that the boy is unloved because the game hammers it in in his first five minutes of gameplay, with every single adult yelling at him. But don’t worry, in case you still didn’t get the point, the boy constantly emits a heart-tugging screech to indicate how sad he is by the whole ordeal.
But okay, story is technically only one facet of a video game. Even indie titles like June have more to them than what they market, so let’s delve into it all starting with the graphics. June admittedly has a unique art style going for it that I don’t think I have seen anywhere else. Character models look like wooden puppets, with a nice tannish gleam. Sadly, that demeanor also works against the models as the lack of eyeballs makes them seem unintentionally creepy and distant. The world, on the other hand, abandons this marionette-style in favor of a basic photorealistic aesthetic with your typical dirt roads, cobblestone paths, oak picket fences, and autumnal leaves.
I can’t deny that the environments looks gorgeous and well-made, but I can say that staring at them for a long period will induce a headache because of one fatal mistake on the graphic designers’ part, and that is the color palette. June veers between two radically different schemes: the past is decked with an oversaturated yellow-orange vibe while the present is dark blue. Like other aforementioned aspects in June, this is clearly a heavy-handed attempt at showing something, in this case the contrasting mood before and after the incident. The problem is the brightness/darkness can strain your eyes, and because most of the gameplay is based on interacting with natural parts of the world, it’s not something you can just speed through.
That brings us to gameplay, which, regrettably, there isn’t much of. June is, for all intents and purposes, a walking simulator cast through the perspectives of multiple characters. Don’t get me wrong, this is far from being a bad thing: I myself am a fan of several like Gone Home. But the thing to understand is that a walking simulator needs a solid story to make up for its limited gameplay, and June just doesn’t have that in my opinion. Other reviewers from professional gaming magazines have disagreed, so take everything I say with a grain of salt as it is just one perspective in a sea of many. There are limited puzzle elements, but they mostly manifest themselves as “move Object A to Location A.”
The one solid aspect that June does have going for it is its score, reportedly composed by English rock musician Steven Wilson, though I suspect there were more people involved. It perfectly captures the atmosphere, no matter which character’s life you are experiencing, veering between gut-wrenching to joy and romance. I wish the rest of the game had lived up to the music quality, but it is what it is.
Overall, Last Day of June is an admirable attempt at penetrating the over-stuffed indie market. I liked several aspects of it, from the uncommon art style to Wilson’s score, but those were brought down by limited gameplay, intense colored lighting, and a story that tried too hard to be bittersweet. It has all the traits to be a great game, but requires polish.
Pros:
+Unique art aesthetic
+Wilson’s score
Cons:
-Limited gameplay
-Over-melodramatic story
-Annoying character sounds
Rating: 4/10
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch
Red Stewart
