Ovosonico built Last Day of June around a single, unbearable idea: that saving the person you love might cost you everything, and that the universe will not let you off the hook. The game arrived on PlayStation 4 and PC in August 2017, then reached Nintendo Switch in March 2018, published by 505 Games. It is a puzzle adventure told in third person, and it asks its question plainly — what would you do to save the one you love? The answer it gives is not comforting.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Carl, June, and the Lake
The setup is a couple named Carl and June. A car accident kills June and leaves Carl in a wheelchair. That is not a twist the game saves for later; it is the ground the whole story stands on. Carl begins to explore memories of his life with June, and he solves puzzles in an attempt to change the sequence of events that led to her death.
The game is based on Steven Wilson’s song Drive Home. That origin shows in the way it treats grief as something with a shape, not just a mood. The camera stays close. The pacing stays slow.
Six Characters, One Day
The structure is where Last Day of June earns its keep. The player first controls Carl on a date with June at the lake, on the day leading up to the crash. Then the game moves back to the day before, and the player controls June at their house, then Carl shortly after. It returns to the lake date, then to Carl in the house at a later date, where he finds that June’s paintings can be touched.
Touching a painting lets the player take control of other characters from the day of the accident. Across the game the player alternately controls six of them, in chronological order:
- Carl
- June
- The Kid
- The Best Friend
- The Hunter
- The Old Man
Each one holds a piece of the sequence that put June in the car at the wrong moment. The player reshuffles small actions — a delay here, an interruption there — and watches the day bend. Then it snaps back.
The Crash Keeps Happening
This is the part that will decide whether Last Day of June works for you. Carl prevents the initial accident, and another event causes the crash anyway. He changes events multiple times, and every attempt still ends in the accident by different circumstances.
The game refuses to hand over a clean win. As the player fails to prevent June’s death, new paintings and characters unlock, letting the changes grow more complex. The loop is deliberate: fail, unlock, try again, fail differently. It is a puzzle game where the puzzle is grief, and grief does not have a solution you can slot into place.
Some players will find that repetition honest. Others will find it a grind dressed as a theme. Both readings are fair.
The Sketchbook and the Swap
The finale lands the idea the whole game was building toward. Carl finds a sketchbook made by June that lists her own attempts to save him — not the other way around. The rescue he thought he was performing was never one-directional. She had been trying too.
He realizes he cannot change what happens. The crash is inevitable, and somebody will die on that day. So Carl goes back to the day of the crash and swaps seats with June. He dies in the wreck. She lives, along with their unborn child.
The game ends with June visiting Carl’s grave, which sits on a pretty hill facing the lake.
That last image does more work than any puzzle in the game. It is quiet, it is earned, and it does not pretend the sacrifice was a victory in any ordinary sense. Carl got what he wanted. He is still dead.
What Last Day of June Gets Right
The game’s strengths are its restraint and its willingness to follow its premise to the end. It could have offered a loophole. It does not. The inevitability is the point, and the sketchbook reveal reframes the entire story without contradicting anything that came before. That is disciplined writing.
The weaknesses are structural. Replaying the same day with small variations is the core mechanic, and the game leans on it hard. The puzzles serve the story rather than standing on their own. If the emotional throughline does not grab you, there is not much else holding the thing up. The third-person adventure framework is competent, not inventive.
It is also short, and it knows it. Last Day of June would rather land one clean blow than wear you down over twenty hours.
The Switch port in March 2018 gave the game a second life on a platform that suits its intimate scale. It is the kind of story that plays well in a single sitting, handheld, in the dark.
Where it sits against its peers matters less than what it does with its own idea. It takes the time-loop rescue fantasy — the one where love conquers causality — and rejects it. Carl cannot outsmart the accident. He can only choose who walks away from it. That is a harder, sadder story than most games in this space are willing to tell, and Last Day of June tells it without flinching.
The published critical score sits at 7.6 out of 10 across nine outlets, and that feels about right. It is not a game without faults. The repetition wears, and the puzzle design will not satisfy anyone looking for mechanical depth. But the ending reframes everything, and the ending is what you will remember.
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