Elegant PS4 puzzle adventure Last Day Of June, from the creator of Murasaki Baby, lands on PS4 today

Last Day of June is an interactive story of love and death, as you enter and explore Carl and June’s life. The question I came up with when I conceived the idea was whether video games (an art form I’ve been devoted to for years) can be a medium as strong as – if not more than – movie or music, in the matters of dealing with complex, but universal, themes such as love and mourning. It was a full “yes” to me; video games can mix the suggestions of animated scenes, audio and music, while enhancing their effectiveness thanks to the immersive experience they offer.

Last Day of June was born from the emotions “Drive Home” – Steven Wilson’s song and Jess Cope’s music video – triggered in me. This piece of music art hit me so hard I had to pursue the desire to evolve its history, re-shaping it according to mechanisms and perks of the video game medium.

I was willing to transform a video game into an emotional experience, both for me and my audience.

To achieve this goal, I tried to combine Steven Wilson’s musical expressiveness with the poetry of Hajo Müller’s characters, skillfully re-adapted by Adam Oehlers for the video game. This way, we could define a new expressive standard, fitting our needs.

Our first choice in this direction was a big bet: designing a speechless, eyeless, purely emotional communication. Nonetheless, once players have gone through the whole experience, we believe they will be able to appreciate even the finest details and emotions of each character, without having heard a single word from them, or having ever seen a single facial expression.

This was made possible thanks to the heavy work done by the whole team, which following my initial idea, was able to bring it to life, creating an emotional gaming experience, and as well an impressionist art expression, with beautiful visuals and settings.

All of this was needed to trigger the empathy required to infuse a spectrum of emotions, through the story of each character. We wanted to deal with the theme of loss and death from the point of view of all the people who are, in some ways, witnesses and partakers; and, through their emotions, show that a video game can become an artistic and expressive form equal to other conventional media.

Video games, therefore, aren’t children of a lesser god; they are conversely able to recreate complex feelings, exploiting the full potential of such cross-media experiments.

With Last Day of June, thanks to Steven Wilson’s musical ambience, inspired by the deep emotional load of the characters designed by Hajo Müller and animated by Jess Cope in the original music video, we tried to bring Carl and June’s story to a new level. Involving the players directly, asking them to enter this world, to discover their emotions and to live them through the story told with this unique approach, we wanted them to think about the answer to the question: “What would you do to save the one you love?”

Today, when the game becomes available on PlayStation Store, I will finally be able to collect your views.