Best Month Ever

Review

Best Month Ever is a graphic adventure that follows the story of Louise, a young single mother who’s taking care of her eight-years-old son, Mitch. Afflicted by an incurable illness, Louise decides to take her son on a road trip across post-Vietnam America to find him a home for when she will no longer be around. Like in a Telltale game, Louise (and sometimes Mitch too) will be presented with a different set of choices that will determine what kind of man her son will grow up to be. The story is narrated by an unseen adult Mitch, who comments on his mother’s though decisions and the obstacles they had to overcome during their journey.

You will need to check your son’s three attributes when making choices: Righteousness, which determines Mitch’s probability to follow (or not) the rules, Confidence (about himself when doing something) and Relations which affects how he behaves in front of others. Each choice will add positive or negative points to these stats that will lead you to one of 9 different endings. While there is an effective illusion of choices, most of them won’t change much the story structure, except for the ones that will affect your son’s attributes. There are some occasional quick time events too, but sadly nothing happens if you fail them; no extra scene, game over or anything, which makes these QTEs quite useless.

The narrative premise is certainly interesting, but there is a general lack of interactivity through the different environments that you will visit. Sometimes you will be able to take a closer look at some items, but nothing more, with a slow-paced gameplay that is entirely based on dialogues. Voice acting is good enough, but it’s often too slow and you have to wait for the characters to fully say their lines even if you’ve already read the text, which unfortunately can’t be skipped. Some may argue that Quantic Dream, Telltale and others don’t allow you to skip text in their games either.  But they have their own ways of keeping you engaged in the conversation, using cinematic cutscenes and techniques, while in much more static 2D scenarios the choice of skipping dialogues is preferable, and teams like Night School Studio, for example, already do that.

Visually the game looks quite good, with colorful cel-shaded environments and characters. Performance-wise there are still some hiccups, like longer loading times between chapters and occasional frame drops even below the 20s, despite the scenes being rather small and simple.

What I think is the main problem here is that the game focuses too much on dealing with sensitive topics such as racism, pedophilia and others, presenting generic stereotypes and situations only to enforce its morals on these topics and not because of some kind of well-written and intriguing storyline. It’s basically a cruel, but superficial, vision of a black and white world. Soon enough the story loses track and, instead of focusing on Mitch’s growth, it shifts to a dying mother’s personal drama and her last (crazy) things to do. And even then, after events that would be traumatic for any child, the mother doesn’t have a single conversation with her son about what really happened. Some of the characters you encounter often feel like they were forced to appear down your path, with multiple situations being out of your hands despite the choices you previously made. At the end, you are passively experiencing a game in the only way it can be interpreted, which seems more like sitting in a class and listening to the teacher’s lecture.

At its core, Best Month Ever! has some very genuine ideas and the concept of a road trip with your son during ‘60s America is certainly intriguing. Yet the game continuously enforces vague stereotypes throughout the game only to prove its point regarding different social arguments. The choices you make that should define Mitch’s behavior are constantly belittled by some more story-driven moments that collide with what you have previously chosen and the way you wanted to educate your son.

Review written by Sonic Punk for Zeepond.com

Best Month Ever! Steam Store Page