When it comes to indie titles, there really aren’t a shortage of slice-of-life narrative-type games. There are plenty of good ones, like Night in the Woods and A Space For The Unbound. A lot of times though, you need to be in the right mindset for these kinds of games, and luckily Until Then came at the right time.
The main thing that sets Until Then apart from any game before it is the fact that it wholly takes place in the Philippines. The game doesn’t exactly call out where. It uses bits and pieces of the environment to make you assume you’re in Manila–the nation’s capital which has its share of both luxurious areas as well as a bunch of slums. Like A Space For The Unbound‘s Indonesian roots before it, Until Then‘s story is relatable to just about anybody interested enough to invest in the game.
Just a quick forewarning here about myself: Take it for what it’s worth and call it a bias if you want, but I’m a proud Filipino-American. I took it to the next level in high school while I was the vice president of a Filipino club, joined a non-profit organization geared toward education of at-risk Filipino-American youth, and eventually became the president of San Jose State’s Filipino-American organization. I even parlayed this experience to work at Ayala Land, the biggest and most respected real estate developer in the Philippines. I may not have been born here, but I feel like I’ve paid my dues to represent pinoys despite the fact that I don’t speak any of the languages–though I understand Tagalog well.
Delicious Filipino food aside, animating a reflection in pixel art will never not be impressive.
So when I found out about Polychroma Games and Until Then, it’s been on my radar ever since, and while it has a few rough edges (especially in some of its minigames), the game easily surpassed every expectation I had–except for one admittedly meaningless annoyance.
Until Then tells the story of Mark Borja, a high school kid that gives off the vibe of being a good-for-nothing. He’s your run-of-the-mill teenager who’ll spend hours playing video games or mess around on his phone while not putting much thought or effort into school or who he wants to be. To give him a more unique persona, the main interesting fact about him is that he lives home alone because his parents work abroad as overseas Filipino workers (locals call them OFW), which is actually pretty rare. It’s not out of the ordinary for a child to have both parents working abroad, but usually in these situations they’re at the care of another relative or maid, but in this situation, Mark runs solo. Much like Filipinos in real life, he treats this like it’s normal and lives about his life. (This is going to be a common theme here).
Any lover of entertainment probably knows what’s going to happen here. Something happens causing the kid to turn his life around. Love? Loss? Both? It’s all here, complete with a helping of deceit, denial and living a lie. The kind of story the game tells and the way it accomplishes it is hardly anything new in modern media, but the way they pulled it off in a video game leaves a lot for the team to be praised for.
Its story revolves around a bunch of high school kids, and with all that comes petty drama and everything that goes in between, so it goes without saying that because there’s no voiced dialog in the game, there’s going to be a bunch of reading. Fortunately, it comes in all shapes and sizes. Characters are obviously going to be talking to each other in and out of school, but much of the communication comes from Mark’s group texts and him scrolling social media. The game also does a wonderful job with environmental storytelling, especially when things start to get a little haywire. Even still, the Filipinos in the game treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
Let’s pour one out for Mark Borja, who just got left on read.
The way the team handled communication, especially with Mark using his phone, was as clever as it gets. Unlike a lot of other narrative games, Mark isn’t a silent protagonist. He has more than his share of dialog, and it’s enjoyable to see how he goes about expressing himself both in person and online. For example, when he’s texting, you’ll see what’s obviously iMessage pop up on the left and while you have some agency to choose the things to text, you’ll notice him thinking as he’s typing–he’ll have a response typed up, and then delete it because he knows it won’t go over well. The authenticity in thought is impressive, and to make things even more interesting, the game does a great job of using “so and so is typing” at the bottom of the screen to really emulate the feelings of anxiety and excitement you get when you’re actually texting a person. Will you get left “on read?” Absolutely! Group chat sessions come up frequently, and it’s always a joy to see how they turn out. There’ll even be opportunities to choose to not respond to people, and you can bet they’ll call you out on it if and when they see you next. Some people confrontation, but the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
As far as social media goes, it’s Facebook in 2014. You can like, comment, and share on just about anything you see. It’ll be a mix of girls posting pictures to make themselves look good, bands posting about future gigs, and plenty of people talking politics and using hashtags to prove to their point. It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that because so many people in the Philippines (and the world) live in social media, Facebook is a big tool for the game’s world building. It’s also fun seeing what the game does when you like your own comments.
Gameplay-wise, unfortunately there isn’t much to talk about, but it’s a sidescrolling narrative adventure, and there’s hardly ever anything to say about those from a gameplay perspective. It’s a lot of mundane walking from one side to the other, interacting with whatever you see and enjoying what’ll likely be a sarcastic reaction before more tapping of the X button to get through dialog. For better or for worse, don’t expect much as far as point-and-click puzzle solving either. It exists, but it isn’t as reliant on it as A Space for the Unbound. At the same time, one reason why this absolutely works is there’s hardly any backtracking in your initial playthrough–more on that later.
So while walking around and talking to people during and whenever you get from point A to point B is hardly exciting, Until Then does mix up the gameplay a bit with the various minigames sprinkled in. You have your fair share of cringe content, like having to button up Mark’s shirt by dragging the button over to the hole to fasten it, or putting the right amount of change into the ticket machine at the MRT (what they call the subway in the Philippines). At the same time, you have more clever stuff like a fish ball poking game that relies on golf meter timing to skewer the meat just right, or a bunch of minigames you’ll find at the amusement fair. They all provide a much needed break from the action.
You don’t see lighting in a pixel game often, and you don’t see Jesus just posted on a wall like that either.
Unfortunately some of these activities are more enjoyable than others, and what’s really disappointing is that they really dropped the ball with the videoke (karaoke) and the piano. The videoke are pretty much the same as the Karaoke Bar minigames in the Like a Dragon series where you just have to time your button presses, and playing the piano is essentially Dance Dance Revolution with buttons. The problem is both of these are rather difficult, and the worst part is both the videoke and piano have trophies and achievements tied to how well you play them. I’m not going to Platinum Until Then because of this, and that really makes me sad. This was the annoyance I had that I talked about earlier. They just aren’t fun, and the fact that the videoke is limited to just “Auld Lang Syne” doesn’t help matters.
My grievances with my passion for meaningless achievements aside, I want to go back to what really makes this game special, especially from my Filipino standpoint. It’s both the direct and indirect nods to Filipinos and representation, even when we’re talking about the possible end of the world.
I already talked about the authentic feel the group chats and social media aspect have, and these are true to form considering the Philippines is actually one of the the world’s most active countries when it comes to social media usage. I also talked about the usage of change for the MRT machine, as well as the videoke machine. I even mentioned the street food. One thing I didn’t talk about was the garbage on the streets, despite civilization being advanced enough to have trains and carnivals. I didn’t talk about the slums or both the subtle and extremely direct denouncements of political corruption. All of this is here, illustrating both the real beauty and ugliness of the Philippines, and much like they do in real life–the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
Eventually you get to a point in the game where things go absolutely crazy. I mentioned that you go through just about everything. Mark has a crush, he moves on, he falls in love with some else. Then someone dies. And it isn’t just someone, more people die. It eventually gets to a point where the game goes from a slice-of-life narrative to one that’s completely sci-fi at left field, and it all works somehow. Despite all this, much like they do in real life, the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve noticed it by now. I keep saying “much like they do in real life, the Filipinos in the game just treat like it’s normal and live about their lives.” This whole concept is “bahala na.” It’s a phrase Filipinos use to say “whatever happens, happens.” It’s a whole thing you can read about here. For better or for worse, I’ve lived by it. It works because it allows me to focus on myself, but it also can be to my detriment because bahala na could very much be the reason why I don’t take something seriously. The fact that the developers so cleverly put this concept in the game is really impressive, and whether it was purposeful or not is something I’d be interested in knowing if I ever got a chance to talk to them.
Getting back on track and speaking on purpose, I didn’t delve too deep into the game’s plot because of the way the game is purposely paced. It took me nine hours to roll credits on Until Then. That said, that’s not where the game ends.
Gaslight me for spoilers all you want, but in order to take in the full Until Then experience, after the credits roll, the game asks if you want to continue. When you do that, the game essentially starts over. From here, it essentially becomes a required New Game+. Why is it required? Are you getting a new ending? Are there big changes? Yes. Yes to all of it. And then when you beat the game, you have to do it again. One more time.
Having to beat the game three times to get the full experience is going to turn off a lot of people, and I totally get it. I’ll say this though — the 17 hours I took to do all that was absolutely worth it. For the sake of getting this review out by the time the embargo lifted, and I didn’t, I binged the game and this is not something I recommend. Every required playthrough of the game felt different, and at the same time, it felt like one story. I just feel like if you space out your playtime a little bit, it would be a lot easier to appreciate the experience. Until Then will be compared to A Space For The Unbound and Life is Strange a lot, and those are fair comparisons, but in all honesty as someone that’s done it all except platinum it — Doki Doki Literature Club is the comparison. As far as beating it, NieR Automata isn’t a bad comparison either, especially considering the fact that every repeated playthrough will be shorter than the last. If telling you all this gets me in trouble, bahala na.
Polychroma never came out and said it, but there’s definitely some Doki Doki Literature Club DNA in Until Then, and I’m not talking about this parodied screenshot of a game being played.
Until Then is impressive in so many ways. The pixel art is stunning and its clever use of color to emulate lighting really puts the visuals in a class of its own despite looking like so many other titles. The music in the game also enhances every moment–the soundtrack definitely helped bring a tear to my eye during this one Christmas scene. Even with all that, what Until Then does best is tell its story through the authenticity of its characters. There are times where it overstays its welcome in the 15-20 hours it’ll take to experience everything, but I’ll take the careful attention to detail over pointless cuts any day.
I’ve wanted this game ever since I heard about it, and it seems like I waited forever, but it was absolutely worth the wait and I’m so glad I was able to play this game to its fullest extent. Polychroma Games made something special, and I believe they’ll be a studio to look out for. I just hope the Platinum in their next game is easier to get.
When I found out about Polychroma Games and Until Then, it’s been on my radar ever since, and while it has a few rough edges (especially in some of its minigames), the game easily surpassed every expectation I had.
When it comes to indie titles, there really aren’t a shortage of slice-of-life narrative-type games. There are plenty of good ones, like Night in the Woods and A Space For The Unbound. A lot of times though, you need to be in the right mindset for these kinds of games, and luckily Until Then came at the right time.
The main thing that sets Until Then apart from any game before it is the fact that it wholly takes place in the Philippines. The game doesn’t exactly call out where. It uses bits and pieces of the environment to make you assume you’re in Manila–the nation’s capital which has its share of both luxurious areas as well as a bunch of slums. Like A Space For The Unbound‘s Indonesian roots before it, Until Then‘s story is relatable to just about anybody interested enough to invest in the game.
Just a quick forewarning here about myself: Take it for what it’s worth and call it a bias if you want, but I’m a proud Filipino-American. I took it to the next level in high school while I was the vice president of a Filipino club, joined a non-profit organization geared toward education of at-risk Filipino-American youth, and eventually became the president of San Jose State’s Filipino-American organization. I even parlayed this experience to work at Ayala Land, the biggest and most respected real estate developer in the Philippines. I may not have been born here, but I feel like I’ve paid my dues to represent pinoys despite the fact that I don’t speak any of the languages–though I understand Tagalog well.
Delicious Filipino food aside, animating a reflection in pixel art will never not be impressive.
So when I found out about Polychroma Games and Until Then, it’s been on my radar ever since, and while it has a few rough edges (especially in some of its minigames), the game easily surpassed every expectation I had–except for one admittedly meaningless annoyance.
Until Then tells the story of Mark Borja, a high school kid that gives off the vibe of being a good-for-nothing. He’s your run-of-the-mill teenager who’ll spend hours playing video games or mess around on his phone while not putting much thought or effort into school or who he wants to be. To give him a more unique persona, the main interesting fact about him is that he lives home alone because his parents work abroad as overseas Filipino workers (locals call them OFW), which is actually pretty rare. It’s not out of the ordinary for a child to have both parents working abroad, but usually in these situations they’re at the care of another relative or maid, but in this situation, Mark runs solo. Much like Filipinos in real life, he treats this like it’s normal and lives about his life. (This is going to be a common theme here).
Any lover of entertainment probably knows what’s going to happen here. Something happens causing the kid to turn his life around. Love? Loss? Both? It’s all here, complete with a helping of deceit, denial and living a lie. The kind of story the game tells and the way it accomplishes it is hardly anything new in modern media, but the way they pulled it off in a video game leaves a lot for the team to be praised for.
Its story revolves around a bunch of high school kids, and with all that comes petty drama and everything that goes in between, so it goes without saying that because there’s no voiced dialog in the game, there’s going to be a bunch of reading. Fortunately, it comes in all shapes and sizes. Characters are obviously going to be talking to each other in and out of school, but much of the communication comes from Mark’s group texts and him scrolling social media. The game also does a wonderful job with environmental storytelling, especially when things start to get a little haywire. Even still, the Filipinos in the game treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
Let’s pour one out for Mark Borja, who just got left on read.
The way the team handled communication, especially with Mark using his phone, was as clever as it gets. Unlike a lot of other narrative games, Mark isn’t a silent protagonist. He has more than his share of dialog, and it’s enjoyable to see how he goes about expressing himself both in person and online. For example, when he’s texting, you’ll see what’s obviously iMessage pop up on the left and while you have some agency to choose the things to text, you’ll notice him thinking as he’s typing–he’ll have a response typed up, and then delete it because he knows it won’t go over well. The authenticity in thought is impressive, and to make things even more interesting, the game does a great job of using “so and so is typing” at the bottom of the screen to really emulate the feelings of anxiety and excitement you get when you’re actually texting a person. Will you get left “on read?” Absolutely! Group chat sessions come up frequently, and it’s always a joy to see how they turn out. There’ll even be opportunities to choose to not respond to people, and you can bet they’ll call you out on it if and when they see you next. Some people confrontation, but the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
As far as social media goes, it’s Facebook in 2014. You can like, comment, and share on just about anything you see. It’ll be a mix of girls posting pictures to make themselves look good, bands posting about future gigs, and plenty of people talking politics and using hashtags to prove to their point. It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that because so many people in the Philippines (and the world) live in social media, Facebook is a big tool for the game’s world building. It’s also fun seeing what the game does when you like your own comments.
Gameplay-wise, unfortunately there isn’t much to talk about, but it’s a sidescrolling narrative adventure, and there’s hardly ever anything to say about those from a gameplay perspective. It’s a lot of mundane walking from one side to the other, interacting with whatever you see and enjoying what’ll likely be a sarcastic reaction before more tapping of the X button to get through dialog. For better or for worse, don’t expect much as far as point-and-click puzzle solving either. It exists, but it isn’t as reliant on it as A Space for the Unbound. At the same time, one reason why this absolutely works is there’s hardly any backtracking in your initial playthrough–more on that later.
So while walking around and talking to people during and whenever you get from point A to point B is hardly exciting, Until Then does mix up the gameplay a bit with the various minigames sprinkled in. You have your fair share of cringe content, like having to button up Mark’s shirt by dragging the button over to the hole to fasten it, or putting the right amount of change into the ticket machine at the MRT (what they call the subway in the Philippines). At the same time, you have more clever stuff like a fish ball poking game that relies on golf meter timing to skewer the meat just right, or a bunch of minigames you’ll find at the amusement fair. They all provide a much needed break from the action.
You don’t see lighting in a pixel game often, and you don’t see Jesus just posted on a wall like that either.
Unfortunately some of these activities are more enjoyable than others, and what’s really disappointing is that they really dropped the ball with the videoke (karaoke) and the piano. The videoke are pretty much the same as the Karaoke Bar minigames in the Like a Dragon series where you just have to time your button presses, and playing the piano is essentially Dance Dance Revolution with buttons. The problem is both of these are rather difficult, and the worst part is both the videoke and piano have trophies and achievements tied to how well you play them. I’m not going to Platinum Until Then because of this, and that really makes me sad. This was the annoyance I had that I talked about earlier. They just aren’t fun, and the fact that the videoke is limited to just “Auld Lang Syne” doesn’t help matters.
My grievances with my passion for meaningless achievements aside, I want to go back to what really makes this game special, especially from my Filipino standpoint. It’s both the direct and indirect nods to Filipinos and representation, even when we’re talking about the possible end of the world.
I already talked about the authentic feel the group chats and social media aspect have, and these are true to form considering the Philippines is actually one of the the world’s most active countries when it comes to social media usage. I also talked about the usage of change for the MRT machine, as well as the videoke machine. I even mentioned the street food. One thing I didn’t talk about was the garbage on the streets, despite civilization being advanced enough to have trains and carnivals. I didn’t talk about the slums or both the subtle and extremely direct denouncements of political corruption. All of this is here, illustrating both the real beauty and ugliness of the Philippines, and much like they do in real life–the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
Eventually you get to a point in the game where things go absolutely crazy. I mentioned that you go through just about everything. Mark has a crush, he moves on, he falls in love with some else. Then someone dies. And it isn’t just someone, more people die. It eventually gets to a point where the game goes from a slice-of-life narrative to one that’s completely sci-fi at left field, and it all works somehow. Despite all this, much like they do in real life, the Filipinos in the game just treat it like it’s normal and live about their lives.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve noticed it by now. I keep saying “much like they do in real life, the Filipinos in the game just treat like it’s normal and live about their lives.” This whole concept is “bahala na.” It’s a phrase Filipinos use to say “whatever happens, happens.” It’s a whole thing you can read about here. For better or for worse, I’ve lived by it. It works because it allows me to focus on myself, but it also can be to my detriment because bahala na could very much be the reason why I don’t take something seriously. The fact that the developers so cleverly put this concept in the game is really impressive, and whether it was purposeful or not is something I’d be interested in knowing if I ever got a chance to talk to them.
Getting back on track and speaking on purpose, I didn’t delve too deep into the game’s plot because of the way the game is purposely paced. It took me nine hours to roll credits on Until Then. That said, that’s not where the game ends.
Gaslight me for spoilers all you want, but in order to take in the full Until Then experience, after the credits roll, the game asks if you want to continue. When you do that, the game essentially starts over. From here, it essentially becomes a required New Game+. Why is it required? Are you getting a new ending? Are there big changes? Yes. Yes to all of it. And then when you beat the game, you have to do it again. One more time.
Having to beat the game three times to get the full experience is going to turn off a lot of people, and I totally get it. I’ll say this though — the 17 hours I took to do all that was absolutely worth it. For the sake of getting this review out by the time the embargo lifted, and I didn’t, I binged the game and this is not something I recommend. Every required playthrough of the game felt different, and at the same time, it felt like one story. I just feel like if you space out your playtime a little bit, it would be a lot easier to appreciate the experience. Until Then will be compared to A Space For The Unbound and Life is Strange a lot, and those are fair comparisons, but in all honesty as someone that’s done it all except platinum it — Doki Doki Literature Club is the comparison. As far as beating it, NieR Automata isn’t a bad comparison either, especially considering the fact that every repeated playthrough will be shorter than the last. If telling you all this gets me in trouble, bahala na.
Polychroma never came out and said it, but there’s definitely some Doki Doki Literature Club DNA in Until Then, and I’m not talking about this parodied screenshot of a game being played.
Until Then is impressive in so many ways. The pixel art is stunning and its clever use of color to emulate lighting really puts the visuals in a class of its own despite looking like so many other titles. The music in the game also enhances every moment–the soundtrack definitely helped bring a tear to my eye during this one Christmas scene. Even with all that, what Until Then does best is tell its story through the authenticity of its characters. There are times where it overstays its welcome in the 15-20 hours it’ll take to experience everything, but I’ll take the careful attention to detail over pointless cuts any day.
I’ve wanted this game ever since I heard about it, and it seems like I waited forever, but it was absolutely worth the wait and I’m so glad I was able to play this game to its fullest extent. Polychroma Games made something special, and I believe they’ll be a studio to look out for. I just hope the Platinum in their next game is easier to get.
by Danreb Victorio
