Last Time I Saw You is a coming of age story set in the 1980’s in a rural Japanese village. You play as Ayumi, a 12 year old boy who is being called into the spooky woods by an equally spooky girl in his dreams. From there, adventures involving curses, typhoons, and plenty of yokai ensue. It’s not the most original concept at face value, but there are enough interesting twists to make it worthwhile.
Starting with gameplay, this is basically an adventure game. There are some very basic enemies you need to whack with your baseball bat and some equally basic platforming segments, but death is never a real threat and you’ll spend 95% of your time walking around and talking to people. Most of the game’s scenes aren’t very big, but they make up for it by changing over the course of the story and having lots of secrets and quest items to find. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s enough to keep exploration entertaining.
Of course, this is the kind of game you’re almost certainly playing for the story. By and large it doesn’t do anything too surprising, but it does have some smaller elements like showing your parents and discussing WWII that are rare in games set in Japan. There are also some fun scenes where you get a bunch of choices in a row almost like in Oxenfree, but I don’t think these actually change anything significant about the story. It’s all pretty good without doing anything to really jump to the next level. I had a good time with it and there are some well-written moments, but I’m unlikely to remember much of this in a year.
The one area where Last Time I Saw You does managed to stand out is its graphics. It reminds me a lot of a Vanillaware game in its styling, and some of the backgrounds get close to rivaling the incredible set pieces from Muramasa. There are some occasional minor issues where it’s hard to tell whether a particular bit of the art is meant to be part of the background or not, but that aside, it’s hard to criticize anything about the presentation. It’s a beautiful looking game.
Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, a game in which both the story and gameplay are pretty good without being memorable is also pretty good without being memorable. I had a good time and don’t regret making the effort to do almost everything, but I don’t think anyone needs to rush out and play it. I had my expectations set a little too high by the game’s decision to bundle with A Space for the Unbound and Until Then on Steam, both of which are games I gave perfect scores to. This is a good game with some clear thematic similarities to those titles, but it doesn’t achieve quite the same heights.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: 8-9 hours
Price: $17
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For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041