Why I Love ‘Last Day of June’
Last Day of June is an emotional tale about life, loss, and lamenting the tragedy of time’s linear passage. Groundhog Day in its struggles against repetition, Last Day of June fights against the tension between free will and determinism, wishing beyond wishing that things could have been otherwise. With a short runtime of about three hours, Last Day of June manages to wordlessly tell a meaningful tale that transcends time periods and cultural affinities. Somehow, I feel closer to the game’s small handful of characters than most games achieve with hundreds of hours of writing. Last Day of June is a worthwhile experiment for storytelling in the video game medium.
There are plenty of things that make Last Day of June a special game – the art style, the writing, the music, the atmosphere, the time-loop nature of the storytelling, and so forth – but there’s one aspect of the experience that I think people will generally overlook when first playing: the little kid. One of the reasons I worry people will overlook the kid’s story is perhaps a personal projection, for I generally don’t like kids, especially in video games. And I worry that people will dismiss him similarly out-of-hand.
Part of my distaste towards video game children is an extension of my aversion towards them in real life. But video games have an insufferable tendency to cast these children characters with high-pitched nasally voices, usually repeating a squeaky line or two, and invariably disturbing the plot in a way that could have easily been avoided by any thinking adult. Miraculously, Last Day of June managed to circumvent and thereby overcome my distaste for children, and I’d go as far as to suggest that the little kid in Last Day of June is my favorite character in the game.
Is the Kid Responsible for the Tragedy?
I arrived at this massively atypical opinion about Last Day of June’s kid character gradually. The game begins on an idyllic lake, featuring autumn leaves and the orange skies of an oncoming sunset. We are introduced to a doting couple – who, it must be noted, feel like a blend of wood-carved and claymation character models – who sit lazily, legs dangling off a wooden dock extending into the lake. We have a chance to play as the male character, Carl, who can pluck off the petals of a flower or gift one to June, his partner, to put in her hair. June indicates that she’s cold through a non-verbal shiver, leading Carl to climb back towards their parked car and obtain a blanket for her. Almost immediately, the ominous rumbles of not-so-distant thunder scare them off back to the car for safety.
This setup of Last Day of June works wonderfully because it immediately shows these two characters in their ideal form: loving, caring, and looking out for each other. It’s this picturesque introduction to Carl and June that makes the ensuing plot so overwhelmingly tragic. This relationship was not on the rocks, at least as far as we can tell; if anything, this seems to be a high point in the relationship when the couple are making plans to have kids together. But this relationship could not – cannot – last, for the following scene plays out invariably and catastrophically as follows.
As Carl and June seek refuge in their parked car, they take the stormy weather as an indication to return home up the road. While driving into the rain, windshield wipers furiously whining back and forth, the couple sees a soccer ball roll out into the middle of the road. A little boy runs out into the road to retrieve his ball before it pops or gets lost. And, perhaps because of the last-minute emergency, perhaps because of the wet road causing them to hydroplane, the car screeches and brakes vainly, spinning off into a devastating crash. This car crash kills June and leaves Carl paralyzed from the waist down for the remainder of the game. Everything that happens in Last Day of June is in some ways a response to, or a preventative attempt to avoid, this car accident.
Returning to my shocking conclusion that this kid is perhaps my favorite character in Last Day of June, I must admit that my first response to the car crash scene was to condemn the little boy. Either this kid was ignorant of basic road safety, he was irresponsible with where he was playing, or he simply should have accepted that his ball was lost and given up. Any such explanation made the boy seem morally culpable for this accident. Somehow, I had grown instantly attached to Carl and June through the opening lake scene, and I, like Carl, wanted to find some “reason” that gave meaning and justification to this otherwise senseless disaster. The boy felt like an easy scapegoat for about fifteen minutes until the game put me in his shoes and I started to see the story with more greyness.
Digging Deeper: Seeing the Kid as a “Menace”
One of the interesting gameplay conceits on offer in Last Day of June is the magical ability to enter paintings, play as the characters in those paintings, and thereby rework aspects of the past – of the titular last day where June was alive. Throughout the course of the story, you play as Carl, the kid, the best friend, the hunter, and eventually the old man, roughly in that order. By framing the car accident and June’s resulting death in terms of a preventable action on behalf of this little boy, it seemed like the natural place to start rewriting past events to create a more desirable future in which June survived. Thus, when control of the little boy was given to me, I immediately knew that I needed to uncover a way to end June’s last day in a way where the little kid or his ball wouldn’t be anywhere near that fatal road.
The kid’s playable story sequence begins atop a spacious treehouse in which this kid has nestled a little mattress and some drawings. The boy descends from the treehouse on a hooked rope, surrendering the rope to the old man character, and wandering out into a cozy little village in which Carl, June, and the other characters live. While you are exploring, there are some quirky and cute little achievements for the kid’s character. One such achievement involves finding the boy’s soccer ball and briefly pretending it’s a basketball, shooting it at a mounted hoop, missing each time. Another achievement early on for the kid involves taking the same soccer ball and knocking down carefully planted vases around the various village yards. Both achievements feel natural and playful, the kind of activities a little unsupervised kid might genuinely try in the absence of anything better to do.
It was the moment that I unlocked the second of these two achievements, “Menace,” that I stopped to think. The word “menace” has an immediate connotation to the newspaper comic strip, Dennis the Menace, a youthful character who is known for importune activities but also equally the relationships that he seemingly exclusively has with pets and adults. It also conjures the fist-brandishing image of J. Jonah Jameson, whose lamentations about Spider-Man being a “menace” to the city. Both Dennis and Spider-Man are characters who get into tight situations and must grow up quickly. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me from the car accident scene alone, but it quickly became clear that the developers were directly steering my associations with this simple word, “menace,” as I playfully terrorized the town.
Psychoanalyzing & Sympathizing with the Kid
As I started thinking about the kid in Last Day of June, the visual language of the story made a few things clear — all of which opened my empathetic capacities for his character. One of the things that the visual language tells the player is that this boy has lost a friend and has since been by himself. He has no one his age to play with. As a result of that childhood isolation and loneliness, the kid seeks out playmates in anyone who crosses his path. He eagerly holds up his prized soccer ball to the hunter, who is busy shooting his gun after a thieving bird and shakes his head, rejecting the boy’s attempt to play. The boy makes the same plea to the best friend character, who gives less of a contextual response, but shakes her head in the same unaccepting way. Clearly these adults are people the kid looks up to.
The little boy responds in a way that completely broke my heart. He concludes that it’s the soccer ball, not the idea of playing with a kid, that these adults are rejecting. The kid zips off to retrieve a toy that will surely get the attention and stir up the excitement of these adults: his kite. He returns to the adults, reaching up with his scrawny arms to present this clearly improved plaything to the adults. And they reject him just the same. The little boy hangs his head, drags his feet and his kite, and trudges off dejectedly. Moping, he hopelessly glances at the old man character who is fast asleep in his rocking chair.
It was a scene that somehow emotionally impacted me as much or more than the car accident did, which is shocking given my aforementioned aversion to children, especially in games. It hit me because I have been this kid. I was this kid hundreds of times. I grew up as an only child and quickly had to learn to entertain myself. It’s something you get used to – being around adults, excitedly trying and failing to pry away their attention, and becoming emotionally self-sufficient as a result. But it’s something that no kid should be forced to deal with for prolonged periods because it’s debilitatingly lonely at times.
Clearly, the kid in Last Day of June has not been able to play with another kid his age in a very long time. While he maintains the spritely energy to menace the village, he is only doing so because he wants the adults to acknowledge him. He wants to take his agency out into the world of adults because that’s all he seemingly has access to, even in rejection. Looking around, these adults clearly do not have the time for him and so he creates his own time-passing activities – which, in the case of Last Day of June, results in the tragedy of the car crash.
The Kid’s Empathetic Arc
By the nature of the Groundhog Day time-loop of Last Day of June, there is a way to prevent the little boy’s involvement with the car accident. It involves stealing the rope back from the old man and using the boy’s soccer ball to dislodge a kite that has become stuck in a tree. The old man might not have the bodily strength to play soccer, but he can at least help the boy hold the windswept kite, giggling together in the sunset. But for the sake of bringing the boy’s empathetic arc full circle, this is not the first or natural conclusion to his story.
The boy encounters the hunter’s dog, which, while the hunter is distracted by the bird at which he inaccurately shoots, is unattended. Thus, the boy decides to play with the hunter’s dog. Back and forth, the boy and the dog toss the ball between each other, gradually moving closer to the road with each pass. The dog obviously doesn’t know any better, shaking its head back and forth, flinging the ball sideways instead of directly back to the boy’s feet. Soon, the dog flings the soccer ball off a roadside overlook, and it rolls into the middle of the road below. The boy, whether instinctively responding or simply not looking both ways, sprints out into the road to collect his ball before something bad happens to it – his only plaything that isn’t in some way tethered to these ignoring adults – and the rest of the crash plays out accordingly.
Within the span of an hour or so, Last Day of June achieved a complete volte-face of my opinion towards children – or at least this child – in video games. Instead of casting curses up towards the heavens, wondering why June had to die in such an arbitrary and preventable manner, I was looking inwards, wondering why my first response to June’s death was to seek someone blameworthy. I wonder if the developers intended to orchestrate this tide of emotional change or if it was simply a byproduct of some clever storytelling mechanics – perhaps a mixture of both. As a result of my experience on the emotional pendulum, swinging from annoyance towards forgiveness, my approach to the remaining characters in Last Day of June was completely altered.
It’s almost common for certain video games to present an unreliable perspective to the player, making you feel or think one way about a character or situation, only to present additional compelling facts that complicate or entirely change your initial perspective. I don’t think Last Day of June was trying to trick me by pulling out the epistemic rug at the last narrative moment, but something to that effect happened. Whereas I was completely callous and stubborn with my dislike of children, I instantly felt protective of this kid, not only wanting to steer him away from any causal relation to the car crash, but also wanting to connect him with someone with whom he could develop a meaningful relationship. Kids might be annoying, but that’s usually the fault of neglectful adults. Last Day of June’s kid reminded me how and why those causes of annoyance manifest when kids are lonely, bored, and unattended by people who explicitly care for them.
I won’t go as far as to suggest that each of Last Day of June’s characters had the same emotional impact and effect on me. And there are some obvious problems with the time-loop structure of the game, namely the forced rewatches of various scenes as you go back in time to restart the proverbial last day once again. But though Last Day of June‘s narrative heights felt very front-loaded, emotionally speaking, the back half of the game, specifically the final plot points involving the old man, had the hair standing up on my neck and arms – in awe of the storytelling delivery.
Some Things Cannot Be Changed
Last Day of June is one of those rare games where I feel the need to explore other people’s experiences with the story immediately after playing. But there isn’t a lot that has been said about it, unfortunately, at least in the general places I tend to spend time consuming gaming discourse. A quick glance through YouTube yields a widely watched Jacksepticeye playthrough, while most mainstream gaming websites feature exclusively (low) scored reviews. It’s kind of stunning to walk away from a powerful gaming experience, still freshly feeling the flowing emotions, only to realize that its critical reception was largely underwhelming or muted. For lack of a better place to turn, I opened Metacritic and saw Last Day of June resting like the boy’s soccer ball at a middle-of-the-road score, and it disappointed me.
Sure, Last Day of June is not perfect, but the reasons reviewers commonly cited while dismissing large swatches of its story don’t sit well with me. It’s a heartfelt game that makes great use of its characters and setting, even if it spins around itself one too many times. On the other hand, I’ve also sat down with some friends, Jacob McCourt and Michael Ruffalo of the Left Behind Game Club podcast, excavating some of the more compelling reasons why so many people simply did not share my enthusiasm for Last Day of June. The recording of our discussion will be releasing the day of this article’s publication, which you can listen to here.
Last Day of June can easily be consumed in one sitting; I finished 100% of its achievements the same afternoon. I never felt like the game risked overstaying its welcome, as it graciously abridged some of its scenes when I went back to replay certain character sections. In fact, I felt like Last Day of June was nearly a perfect length for the type of storytelling it wanted to grapple with – namely the vain, hubristic attempts to rewrite and reclaim the past.
I have not experienced the sort of irreconcilable loss of an accident or tragedy that this game explores, so the lesson Last Day of June presents a player like me isn’t entirely straightforward. But at the same time, I have not lived a perfect life devoid of regrettable mistakes either. I completely sympathize with the urge to search for reasons behind a sudden and untimely death, to earnestly imagine the myriad alternative ways fate could have dealt its hand. As unlivable as it may feel at times, Last Day of June ends on a note of hope, something that contravenes much of its inherent messaging. But I think it earns this ending, because Last Day of June doesn’t offer a fairy tale to the player. It knows with a stoic certainty that, despite everything one might wish, some things cannot be changed.
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