Until Then

I went in expecting a breezy visual novel and came out the other side genuinely shaken. Until Then is a 2.5D side-scrolling narrative adventure from Manila-based Polychroma Games, set in a fictional version of the Philippines in 2014, months after a catastrophic global event called "The Ruling" has left the world quietly fractured. You play as Mark Borja, a teenage slacker living alone while his parents work abroad, crashing through exams and group chats and a maybe-crush on a new transfer student named Nicole. For a long opening stretch, the game asks you to simply exist in his life. That patience is the whole point. The interactivity here is more layered than it first appears. Alongside the standard side-scrolling exploration and dialogue choices, Mark's smartphone is practically a second game: a Facebook-style social feed with nested comment chains, satirical news articles about ineffectual governments and conspiracy culture, and a texting system where you watch Mark type a response, second-guess himself, delete it, and send something different. That moment of hesitation captured in a few pixels of animation is the kind of craft detail that quietly signals this team knows what they are doing. The minigames, too, feel purpose-built: skewering fishballs from a street cart, hitting keys on a videoke machine, painting in careful patterns. None of them are demanding, but each one places you inside a specific Filipino high school afternoon in a way plain dialogue cannot. Where the game earns its overwhelmingly positive Steam reception is in its emotional architecture. The story opens as coming-of-age slice-of-life and then, around the third chapter, starts pulling the floor out from under you in ways that draw comparisons to Doki Doki Literature Club and NieR: Automata for good reason. There is a false ending, a butterfly, a time reset, and subsequent playthroughs that are shorter but significantly darker. The true ending requires sitting with that structure. Cathy, Mark's best friend, is the character critics and players keep returning to: her arc is specific, painful, and handled with genuine care. The pixel art manages to convey tears with a few light-blue pixels under a character's eye, and the score moves between piano arrangements, garage-band Stronks tracks, and city ambience rainfall and street vendors without ever becoming melodramatic. The honest criticisms are real though. The story is largely linear, and dialogue choices carry little weight on the overall outcome. Some scenes in the back half lean heavily on exposition dumps, and the lack of a conversation history log or a skip-seen-text option becomes genuinely frustrating across multiple playthroughs. A few reviewers noted the sci-fi mechanics introduced in the second half, quantum physics hotspots and alternate lifetimes, can feel like they compete with the quieter emotional core rather than deepen it. These are valid complaints. They are also the kinds of complaints you only make about a game you cared enough to finish twice. If you came up on Life is Strange, A Space for the Unbound, or Night in the Woods and have been hungry for something that understands why those games worked, Until Then is the answer. It is also one of the most genuine pieces of Filipino cultural representation the medium has produced, built by a team of ten people using Godot, referencing LRT-2 stations and Quezon Memorial Circle from memory because pandemic travel restrictions kept them away from home. That kind of handcraft lives in every environment. A DLC titled Afterimages, adding two new chapters, was announced in early 2026, so the story is still growing. Go in slow. Let it be ordinary for a while. It earns what comes next.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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