Best Month Ever!

Best Month Ever! is a narrative-driven adventure game set in 1960s America. Players experience a poignant road trip through the eyes of Mitch, the young biracial son of a terminally ill single mother named Louise. As they travel across the country, players make choices that impact their journey, navigating various adventures and difficult situations in a story that explores themes of family, legacy, and coping with loss, all framed by a filmic, ‘Paris, Texas’-inspired atmosphere.

Best Month Ever!: Review

Introduction

In the vast and often predictable landscape of narrative-driven indie games, few dare to tread the path of raw, unflinching human drama. Best Month Ever!, a 2022 point-and-click adventure from the Warsaw Film School’s video game directing program, is one such title. It is a game that asks not what power fantasy you wish to fulfill, but what legacy you wish to leave. Framed as a poignant flashback narrated by an adult man recounting the final weeks of his mother’s life, the game is a heart-wrenching road trip through the socially and racially turbulent America of 1969. This review will argue that while Best Month Ever! is technically flawed and occasionally tonally inconsistent, its ambitious narrative, profound thematic depth, and sheer emotional audacity cement its place as a significant, if imperfect, entry in the canon of interactive storytelling.

Development History & Context

Best Month Ever! is a fascinating artifact of modern game development education. It was created by students, graduates, and employees of the “Video Game Development” program at The Warsaw Film School—marking it as the first such project produced by the program. This academic origin is crucial to understanding the game’s strengths and weaknesses. Developed using the Unity engine and published by Klabater SA, the project was clearly a labor of love and learning.

The development team, comprising over 80 credited individuals, operated with the vision of creating a cinematic, narrative-first experience. Their background in film is evident in the game’s strong sense of pacing, scene composition, and thematic ambition. However, the constraints of being a student project are equally apparent. The budget was likely limited, and the team’s relative inexperience with the technical rigors of game development resulted in the janky animations, inconsistent voice acting, and control issues noted by many critics. Released on May 5, 2022, for Windows, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation, the game entered a market saturated with polished indie darlings, forcing it to rely almost entirely on the power of its story to find an audience.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative of Best Month Ever! is its undisputed cornerstone. Players experience the story through the dual perspectives of Louise, a terminally ill white single mother in her late twenties, and her eight-year-old biracial son, Mitch. The premise is devastatingly simple: diagnosed with less than a month to live, Louise quits her job, packs their meager possessions into an aging Cadillac, and embarks on a cross-country journey. Her stated goal is to give Mitch the “best month ever”; her unspoken mission is to find him a safe home before she dies.

The plot is an episodic, often harrowing series of vignettes that force players to confront the brutal realities of late-1960s America. The journey is not a nostalgic romp but a brutal exposure to racism, misogyny, sexual abuse, and poverty. The narrative fearlessly tackles themes of generational trauma, as Louise is forced to confront her abusive family and the Pedophile Priest, Father Judah, who molested her and her sister. It explores Half-Breed Discrimination through the lens of Mitch’s existence, rejected by his maternal grandmother, Margaret—a quintessential Racist Grandma—and initially by his paternal grandfather.

The game’s morality is not black and white. Players influence Mitch’s future through a three-pronged “Karma Meter” tracking his Righteousness (relationship with the law), Confidence (inner strength), and Relations (empathy for others). Choices are relentlessly difficult. Do you have Louise steal from a racist gas station owner who threatened her son? Do you instruct Mitch to lie to keep the peace with a hostile family? These decisions culminate in nine possible endings for adult Mitch, ranging from the Golden Ending where he becomes a congressman or doctor to a Bad Ending as a paroled gang member or a Bittersweet Ending as a soldier disowned by his own family. Crucially, every ending reveals that Mitch has a son, and the quality of that relationship is directly determined by the player’s choices, creating a powerful, multi-generational arc about breaking cycles of trauma.

While the writing is generally competent and the relationship between Mitch and Louise is beautifully realized, the narrative is occasionally undermined by its own ambition. Certain events—a tornado, a run-in with the KKK, a Magical Native American guided peyote trip—feel so over-the-top that they risk tipping into absurdity, clashing with the game’s otherwise grounded and somber tone. As one reviewer noted, it sometimes feels like the game is trying to cram every significant 1960s trope into a three-hour runtime.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

As a game, Best Month Ever! is mechanically lean, prioritizing narrative propulsion over complex interaction. Its core gameplay loop is that of a modern point-and-click adventure, heavily inspired by the Telltale model. Players navigate 2.5D side-scrolling environments, click on context-sensitive prompts, and engage in dialogue trees where choices have tangible consequences on the story’s outcome.

The most common interactive elements are Quick Time Events (QTEs) and simple minigames. These include fishing, throwing rocks at targets, and in one particularly tense sequence, a shooting gallery mini-game where Mitch must shoot the tires out of a pursuing police car during a Hot Pursuit. These moments are designed to inject adrenaline and player agency into what is essentially an interactive movie. However, they are also a primary source of the game’s technical frustrations. Critics universally panned the rough controls, noting that characters often get stuck on geometry, clicking is imprecise, and the QTEs can be unforgiving due to clunky implementation.

The game’s most innovative system is its three-stat morality tracker. Unlike many “choice-driven” games where consequences feel nebulous, Best Month Ever! provides immediate, clear feedback on how a dialogue option will affect Mitch’s development. This transparency makes every decision feel weighty, as boosting one stat often means lowering another. The system ensures that the gameplay, however simple, is intrinsically tied to the game’s central thematic question: what kind of man will Mitch become?

World-Building, Art & Sound

The audiovisual presentation of Best Month Ever! is a tale of two cities, reflecting its dual identity as a film school project and a low-budget game.

Art & Visuals: The game employs a stylized, painterly art style reminiscent of a hazy, half-remembered dream. The backgrounds are often beautiful, evocative watercolor paintings that perfectly capture the dusty, neon-lit, and pastoral landscapes of 1960s America. This aesthetic choice brilliantly supports the narrative frame of an adult Mitch looking back on his childhood. However, this strength is counterbalanced by weak character models and stiff animations that often look like “early Flash-era” work. Characters move awkwardly, and their lack of detailed features can make emotional moments feel distant. Technical issues like blurry textures and graphical glitches further mar the experience.

Sound & Music: This is where the game’s filmic aspirations truly shine. The original soundtrack by Jędrzej Bączyk is a masterpiece, an nearly 80-minute collection of folk, country, and jazz-inspired melodies that impeccably set the period-appropriate tone. It’s a “marvel to behold,” consistently praised as one of the game’s highest achievements. The sound design is also impressive, with clear spatial audio that differentiates between footsteps on grass, dirt, and rock.

The voice acting, however, is wildly inconsistent. The performance for young Mitch is universally acclaimed, full of spunk and authenticity that makes the character instantly endearing. In contrast, Louise’s delivery is often flat and fails to convey the immense emotional weight of her situation. Many supporting characters, often voiced by Polish actors attempting Southern American accents, suffer from Ooh, Me Accent’s Slipping, breaking immersion and occasionally veering into unintended comedy.

Reception & Legacy

Upon its release, Best Month Ever! received a mixed to average critical reception, with a Metascore of 65/100 based on 7 reviews. Critics praised its ambitious story, emotional impact, and superb soundtrack but universally criticized its technical shortcomings, inconsistent voice acting, and occasionally clunky pacing.

Publications like RPGFan (78/100) celebrated it as a “flawed, yet beautiful, tale,” while Hey Poor Player (60%) found it “unique” but wished for more impactful choices. The Gamer (60%) criticized its sluggish pace, and Movies Games and Tech (40%) dismissed it as an inadequate student project with logical inconsistencies. Player reviews were slightly more favorable, averaging 6.8/10, with many connecting deeply with the story despite its flaws.

The legacy of Best Month Ever! is still being written. As a commercial product, it likely found a small but dedicated audience among fans of narrative adventures like The Wolf Among Us or Gone Home. Its true significance, however, lies in its existence as a bold academic experiment. It stands as a testament to the Warsaw Film School’s program, a proving ground that allowed emerging creators to tackle a story of immense thematic complexity and emotional weight. It demonstrates the potential for games to explore mature, difficult subject matter with nuance and care, paving the way for future projects from its creators, who have since worked on titles like Beat Cop and The Amazing American Circus.

Conclusion

Best Month Ever! is a difficult game to score. Judged solely as a piece of interactive software, it is flawed—a 6 or 7 out of 10—hamstrung by technical inadequacies and uneven production values. But games are more than the sum of their code, and judged as a narrative experience, it soars. It is a brave, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking journey that uses its interactive nature to make players complicit in its difficult choices. It forces you to ask what you would do in Louise’s shoes and what lessons you would impart with your final breath.

It is not a comfortable game, nor is it a perfectly polished one. But it is an important one. Best Month Ever! earns its exclamation point not through joy, but through its unflinching examination of love, sacrifice, and the desperate hope that our children will be better than the world we leave them. For that ambition alone, it deserves a place in the annals of video game history.