I’ve been hungry for an action adventure game recently. In this modern era of live service and infinite roguelikes and deckbuilders (seriously, I know they’re popular genres, maybe try a different highly replayable genre), the humble action adventure game has fallen by the wayside a tad. So I’ve been quite curious about Usual June, a quite classic one of those that might end up being a Halloween regular (quick disclaimer: Cara Ellison, who many moons ago did some writing for RPS, is a writer on this one).
Usual June, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, follows the titular June, a young woman in college who has no idea what to do with her life. It starts during a quiet summer break that’s quickly interrupted by strange, crystalline crabs attacking the local cemetery, with ghosts showing up now too. So, it falls on June and her friends, one of whom is one of those aforementioned ghosts, to figure out what’s going on.
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A demo for the game arrived earlier this week offering a glimpse into how it shakes out, and it’s quite nifty! There’s no one game I can compare it to, though it has a similar snappiness and crunchyness that you might find in the likes of Kingdom Hearts, with some Hades-esque movement thrown in. As far as I played, there’s no blocking to speak of, it’s all about keeping an eye on your surroundings and dodging and parrying at the right time while trying to string together combos with your trusty, morphable wrench.
One thing to note is that the genre stops at action adventure, there’s no platforming to speak of here, and while the environments aren’t designed to accommodate that, there’s an uncomfortableness to simply not being able to jump. Like an itch on your back you just can’t reach, kind of thing. It’s something I’ve felt before in the likes of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and I adjusted to that quickly enough, but it did feel like it interrupted the flow at times.
The game’s not quite ready yet though, so perhaps some slight finessing can ease those pains. It is out soon, though, as it also now has a release date of October 28th, positioning itself quite nicely for the Halloween season. The vibes are just right for the time of year too, there’s a cosy quality to it that fits in well for Autumn. Not cosy in the cosy gaming sense to be clear, more in the Over the Garden Wall kind of way, where there’s an underbelly of something else going on too. If any of this sounds like your vibe, you can wishlist the game on Steam ahead of its release.