Best Month Ever! Review - A Meandering Road Trip

thegamer.com:

Best Month Ever! (I’ll leave the exclamation mark out in subsequent mentions) wants to be a poignant road trip. In particular, it wants to be a trip down the stretch of memory lane that goes back to the less-than-glamorous history of America: the decades after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It replicates the nostalgia of warm, sepia-toned photographs—those taken with an old-school film camera—as it retells this tale, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. Everything you’ll see in the game is a recollection of old memories, tangled in a web of historical events and personal anecdotes. Events play out via sequences of flashbacks that are clearly spliced together, in which you’ll click on a few objects or meander around the vicinity. Chapters conclude with a snapshot that wouldn’t look out of place with a cheesy “Wish you were here!” greeting, emblazoned across its image. And all these are set in the most Americana of backdrops: highways that lead to truck stop diners, drive-throughs amidst the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, and riverside campfires in the thick of a forest.

But the most memorable of road trips have a vivid, enduring story tying them all together. In Best Month Ever, this tale is centred around a young man named Mitch, who’s recalling one of the best and most bittersweet moments of his life: when his mother, Louise, decided to drive their beat-up car across rutted dirt roads and stretches of asphalt. Of course, life in 1960s America isn’t going to be easy for a single white mother and her Black child, and it will come as no surprise that Best Month Ever is also about navigating the systematic issues and obstacles of that era as the duo. Louise and Mitch will visit estranged family and