Until Then

Most games about the end of the world want to show you the explosion. Until Then shows you the group chat afterward.

Developed by the Manila-based Polychroma Games and published by Maximum Entertainment, this is a cinematic narrative adventure that opens on Mark Borja, an ordinary high school student in a lovingly rendered, fictionalized Philippines. The country is still healing from a catastrophic event called “The Ruling”—but you wouldn’t know it from Mark’s daily grind. He practices piano. He crams for exams. He stays up too late texting his friends about nothing in particular. That mundanity is the point, and it’s also the trap. Because underneath the slice-of-life texture sits a coiled, multi-layered story about memory, trauma, and the people we lose.

This is a debut with the confidence of a studio three games deep. Polychroma isn’t chasing the survival-horror crowd or the puzzle-box theorists, though it has something for both. Instead, it plants itself firmly in the tradition of narrative heavyweights—the Life is Strange lineage, the Night in the Woods sensibility—and then localizes that formula with a specificity most Western studios never attempt. The jeepney rides, the texting cadence, the particular ache of a Filipino household: none of it is decoration. It’s the spine of the thing.

Positioned squarely in the premium indie narrative space, Until Then launched on Steam and Nintendo Switch on June 25, 2024, at $19.99. It is not a game played for mechanical mastery. It’s a game played to feel something specific and hard-to-name, and then to sit quietly for a while when the credits roll. That it aims for this without ever feeling manipulative is a real achievement.

• Interactive Social Media Mechanics: A fully simulated phone interface—status updates, scrolling feeds, and messaging—where posts and replies quietly reshape relationships. It’s the most authentic depiction of teenage digital life since Emily is Away.
• Branching Dialogue With Memory: Conversations fork, remember, and pay off hours later. The game tracks the small choices, then weaponizes them emotionally.
• 2.5D Pixel Art Over 3D Environments: A hybrid aesthetic that pairs expressive pixel-art characters with layered 3D backdrops, dynamic lighting, and genuine cinematographic depth.
• The Looping “True Ending”: Multiple playthroughs peel back the narrative’s reality, rewarding replay not with new content but with new understanding.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s be honest about what this is. The activity is walking, talking, and tapping a phone. Until Then is not a game of systems or challenge, and anyone arriving expecting friction will bounce off hard. The core loop is simple: inhabit Mark, move through a scene, engage in dialogue, and interact with the phone. That’s the engine.

What makes it work is rhythm. Polychroma understands pacing the way a good novelist understands the paragraph break. The branching dialogue doesn’t just offer choices; it offers hesitations. Hovering over a reply to a friend, aware that the wrong tone lands badly—that friction, that tiny social latency, is where the game lives. The messaging system is the standout mechanic. Composing a text here carries weight because the game remembers. A callous reply at 11 PM echoes into a strained lunch the next day.

The Interface Is the Story

The phone isn’t a menu. It’s a character. Scrolling the in-game social feed reveals the texture of a whole community—inside jokes, passive-aggressive posts, the low hum of teenagers performing their lives. This is skeuomorphism deployed with real purpose. Most games treat a phone UI as a delivery system for objectives. Until Then treats it as the emotional membrane between Mark and everyone he’s trying not to lose.

The Minigames: Charming, Occasionally Intrusive

Then there are the minigames. Inserting a USB drive. Navigating local transit. Practicing piano. At their best, these moments are tactile grace notes—they slow the pace and root the player in the physical world of the game. The piano sequences in particular are quietly gorgeous, syncing input to the evocative soundtrack in a way that feels like play, not chore.

But not all of them earn their place. A few of these interactions arrive at exactly the wrong moment, puncturing a scene’s momentum with a fussy input prompt. When a story is building toward an emotional gut-punch, a small mechanical task can feel like the game clearing its throat mid-sentence. It’s a minor sin, but a noticeable one.

Grief, Structured as a Mechanic

The masterstroke is structural. Until Then uses its multiple playthroughs and looping “true ending” not as a completionist checkbox but as a thematic argument. The disappearances, the fracturing memories, the mind-bending truth waiting underneath—these unfold across replays, so that the act of returning becomes the experience of grief itself. Going back. Looking for what was missed. Understanding, too late, what was in front of you the whole time. That’s not a plot device. That’s the entire thesis, encoded in the save file.

The early hours test patience—the slice-of-life setup runs long, and some will wonder where the promised strangeness is hiding. Stay. The slow burn is a loaded gun.

The 2.5D pixel art is the hook, and it delivers. Character sprites carry a startling range of expression despite their deliberately limited resolution, and Polychroma layers them over 3D environments with real depth of field. Dynamic lighting does the heavy lifting—a rain-slicked street at night, the amber wash of a bedroom lamp, the cold flicker of a phone screen in the dark. These aren’t backdrops. They’re moods. And a 2.5D game of this scope is light on hardware, which suits the modest platforms it targets.

The soundtrack deserves its own paragraph: restrained, melancholic, and deployed with the discipline to know when silence hits harder than any melody. The UI design mirrors the game’s whole philosophy—unobtrusive, tactile, and quietly confident.

On Steam, the mouse-and-keyboard setup lends the phone interactions a natural precision. Clicking through the social feed and composing messages feels close to using an actual device, and the higher resolution lets the dynamic lighting shine at its sharpest.

On Nintendo Switch, the game arguably finds its truest home. This is a handheld experience in its bones—an intimate, personal story best played curled up, not projected across a living room. Docked, it holds up, but there’s something apt about holding Mark’s world in your hands the way he holds his phone. The controls and minigames map comfortably to the Joy-Cons. For anyone who owns both platforms, the Switch version is the one we recommend. This game wants to be close to you.

Until Then is what happens when a studio trusts its story completely. Polychroma Games could have padded this with systems, upped the stakes with spectacle, chased the mystery-box crowd with cheap twists. Instead, they built something quieter and far braver: a game about ordinary teenagers, one specific corner of the world, and the unbearable weight of memory. The minigames occasionally trip over their own charm, and the opening asks for faith it doesn’t immediately repay. Both flaws fade against what the game accomplishes by its end.

This is a great narrative adventure with a phone in its pocket and a broken heart under its cozy sweater—clearly recommended, with reservations worth knowing going in. Play it. Then play it again—that’s not a suggestion, it’s how the story completes itself.