pauraque made a post about Until Then that tempted me into checking it out. I'm so glad I did; I loved it immediately. I can never resist a story about well-meaning teenagers with memory issues making bad decisions and having terrible mental breakdowns.

Until Then is an adventure game, set (and created) in the Philippines. It's a coming-of-age story about love and grief, letting go and being left behind. It feels a little like a blend of Life Is Strange and Night in the Woods.

Early in Until Then, the protagonist needs to plug a USB drive into a laptop. I tried to plug the drive in, failed, flipped it over, realised I was trying to plug it into the wrong place, moved to the actual USB socket, tried to plug it in again, failed, flipped it over again and finally succeeded.

Forget photorealistic graphics; this is true realism in videogames.

Beneath the cut: full spoilers for Until Then. As a heads-up, I get a little bit personal here.



This scene with Mark and Cath prom shopping together made me VERY CONCERNED that Mark playing Doki Doki Literature Club! earlier might have been foreshadowing. (I thought it was cute that DDLC freaked Mark out so badly. He doesn't want bad things to happen to his in-game friends!)

I find Mark's big crush very endearing. Bless this kid.

The realisation that Mark was trying to draw carollers to his house because it was the only kind of Christmas celebration he was going to get broke my heart a little.

In the first ending, I think I could probably have saved a lot of time by skipping tracks on the CD Cath burned, but I just didn't have the heart. She made this CD for us! I'm going to sit here and listen to every low-quality minute of it.

Cath speculating about the future on the CD absolutely wrecked my heart.

For a while, I was convinced that this particular 'looping back to save a specific person' narrative would conclude with 'actually, you can't save her'. You couldn't have prevented her death; you can't undo it. What happened to Cath was a tragedy, but it wasn't your fault, and it isn't your responsibility. All you can do is let go, stop replaying it endlessly - what if I'd paid more attention, what if I'd run faster, what if I'd been with her - and move forward with your life.

I still think 'you can't save Cath' would probably have been more narratively and thematically fitting, but I like Cath, so I can't say I'm sorry she was rescued in the end. Even if it also kind of devastated me, because the specific circumstance she was rescued from was exactly how I lost a friend of mine. It was weird to see one of the what-ifs that had haunted me play out on the screen.

I couldn't have saved Cath. But, in the world of Until Then, Cath lives on. I'm glad she and Mark and Ridel still have each other. (And are Cath and Mark living together in the epilogue? That's cute.)

Having Mark and Nicole on dates in the same café with different people at the end was kind of a masterstroke. I kept waiting for them to catch each other's eyes and it kept not happening! It's a fun place to leave the story in the player's hands and go 'okay, now tell me what happens next'. Reminds me a little of Your Name, a film I cannot think about without becoming severely emotionally compromised. I suppose they don't remember the previous loops by the final timeline?



I recommend Until Then enthusiastically to fans of games like Life Is Strange, Night in the Woods, Oxenfree and possibly Higurashi: When They Cry: anything linear and story-focused with minimal gameplay and maximal Teenagers Having a Bad Time. It's available on PS5 and Steam; the gameplay mainly just consists of walking and talking, with occasional minigames that you can win or lose without affecting story progression.

If you'd like a little preview of how Until Then looks and plays, the animation YouTube channel New Frame Plus features it for a couple of minutes in the video 'The Best Game Animation of 2024', starting around 12m10s. It's a real gem of a game, and I think it should be better known!