Last Valentine’s Day
(Yes, my personal shuffle gave me the two surreal choice-based games about getting over a breakup back-to-back—there wasn’t even a game I was planning to skip between them or anything. It’s also funny that both of them feature a PC who used to play the violin but doesn’t anymore.)
Last Valentine’s Day represents the experience and aftermath of a breakup as a time loop in which the PC relives the last day of the relationship over and over, passing from shock and disbelief through despair before finally reaching the point where he’s able to move on with his life. The world around him reflects his mental state—the weather, the condition of the park he passes through, and the lives of the people around him go from pleasant to miserable, then gradually improve again.
This externalization of the PC’s feelings serves as somewhat of a substitute for actual interiority—the specificity that I appreciated in The Gift of What You Notice More is missing here, and I don’t have a strong grasp of who the PC is, who his partner was, or why their relationship fell apart. But the evocative descriptions of the environment and the predicaments of the somewhat more distinctively drawn side characters help to ensure that the game sounds the emotional notes that it means to.
The game effectively captures the post-breakup emotional arc of a person who has been dumped unexpectedly; choosing to represent this as a Groundhog Day experience emphasizes the difficulty of moving past something like this, and the fact that choices don’t matter much makes sense inasmuch as this kind of post-relationship grief is, to a degree, something you have to just wait out. But I think the writing would have been just that much stronger if there had been a bit more distinctive characterization for the central (ex-)couple.