I recently got my hands on a review code from 505 Games and Ovosonico for their mystery game, the Last Day Of June. This game reminds me a lot of the old point and click adventure games that you would play on your old personal computer but that isn’t a bad thing for this modern time. The Last Day Of June is a charming, yet sad tale of lost love. Let’s get right into it!
At the beginning of the game from the menu you’ll be able to set the controls and the language just the way you want it, just like most games. You’ll also be able to watch/listen to the credits for the game and the credits are one example of where the music matches the mood perfectly.
Steven Wilson, who is a well, known musician, did a great job with matching the music to the mood of each scene. Some of the guitar riffs that would make you think hard rock go perfectly with the scene!
The writing and the graphics fit The Last Day Of June perfectly as well. Although the characters don’t speak, they parlay emotion/feelings through some of the sounds they make and it’s easy to tell what’s going on. You might think that the writing for the game would be hard, relying on sounds/grunts but it wasn’t really. For example, you play as a little boy in one “chapter” and it’s pretty obvious when he’s happy and when something in the scene, like a dog not listening, makes him laugh.
I mentioned the graphics as well and they reminded me of a stop-motion animated movie. Each scene feels/looks like a movie and the illustrations match that feeling. You have to travel through a little town to move along in the game and it has that quaint feeling to it. Just by seeing how the town looks, you can tell it’s a small town where everyone in the town knows each other!
The gameplay is part mystery and part science fiction. Without giving anything away, you play the role of Carl, trying to discover what happened to his wife, June, on that fateful day. You will need to use your entire puzzle solving skills to figure out just what happened on that “Last Day” but each member of the town had something to do with it.
The science fiction part of the game comes into play when you’re given the chance to time travel back in time to that fateful day to try and prevent just what went wrong. Each character has an intertwined story so like I said, you will need to use all your puzzle solving skills to figure out what happened!
You will be able to go back in time and play as 4 characters that are in the small town. As I mentioned, each character had a role in what happened that day and it’s up to you to figure out what that role was as well as how to prevent it from happening. During gameplay, you’ll be able to collect memories that are strewn about the town. Collect these memories to view the various backstories for the different characters and if they have history with Carl and June. This information could come in handy during your adventure so I’d advise collecting all the memories.
To conclude, the Last Day Of June is a charming, yet sad tale of lovers Carl and June. You’ll have to use all your sleuthing skills to get out of this mystery/sci-fi thriller that plays like a classic point-click computer game. There are twists and turns around every corner and you never really can get a read on where the action is going to go next, perfect for mystery games! It’s these reasons that I’m giving The Last Day Of June for the PlayStation 4 a 9/10. I would like to thank 505 Games/Ovosonico for the review code.