Last Day of June

It's easy to be charmed by this unusually simple, yet deceptively complex game. It's just that the pacing in Last Day of June can make for a fair amount of speed bumps where, perhaps, none were intended. Although tons of games have used time travel as a gimmick or selling point, its deployment here is far more poignant. It wants you to wonder, "How will doing this here change that then?" The stakes are relatively high, as your decisions affect whether a man is paralyzed and his wife dies.

But one of the main problems with Last Day of June is how directionless you can feel even when you're pretty sure you're doing the "right" thing. This is complicated by the fact that you jump into what other characters were doing on that same fateful day, though not necessarily in a straight line. Each character's actions are more like variables in an equation rather than a static result: If, as the young boy, you convince the old man to let you use his rope to make a kite, you won't be able to borrow that rope as the other neighbor to secure her moving boxes as she leaves town. Out of context, this sounds inconsequential, but if the boy doesn't cause the accident, she will. It's only after a fair amount of experimenting that you'll be able to figure out what to do and when -- and the more you play, the more factors you'll have to slide around and reconfigure. The lack of hints or even subtle suggestions means you'll likely be twisting in the wind longer that intended. But the gorgeous graphics and eye-catching lighting and unusual plot make Last Day of June worth sticking with, even if sometimes you'll be fumbling in the dark.