Starting from last week, I have probably played 30 hours of A Perfect Day, a click-to-interact adventure game.
Because of its unique Chinese textbook illustration-like art style and nostalgic items from the 90s-childhood of millennials, the game has gained a lot of attention in the Chinese indie scene since its first announcement.
The protagonist Chen Liang, a sixth-grader, finds himself reliving the last day of the 20th century over and over again when his school announced an unexpected day off. He then gets to face his dreams and regrets on that “perfect day”, leaving behind a century of memories and secrets.
From the second the teacher announces the end of school, your day will be divided into six segments, and you can arrange your activities every two hours. At first, you can only choose from a limited range of activities, but that will gradually expand as you keep unlocking events. You can visit the video arcade with a group of close friends, join a mini 4WD race at the Children’s Palace, or just observe the life of your parents until the night falls and head to the park for the end-of-the-century firework show.
When the fireworks go off at midnight, and you finally drift off to sleep, you wake up to find the calendar shows December 31st again and again, for who knows how many times.
An endless time loop begins now, just like in Groundhog Day or Source Code. Driven by some mysterious force, you must repeatedly make up for the loss that keeps occurring during the day until you can escape from the loop.
Although the protagonist in Groundhog Day manages to become a piano master from scratch with daily practice, our protagonist does not retain extra memories or accumulate knowledge from the loops. The only thing that will remain in the upcoming loop is the items you put in your desk drawer before bed. There is only one single copy of an item across all universes, and if an item is taken into the next loop, it will disappear from its original space.
As you can probably tell, everything is item-based in the game: the protagonist's tasks and their progress need to be recorded in a diary, and other characters' action trajectories have to be drawn on the map. After all, you do not have a memory of previous loops.
Like all time travelers, you can do all kinds of creative things after knowing the script for a certain day.
Let’s say you want to write a love note to your crush. For an elementary school student, the challenge is manifold: lack of courage; not enough confidence in your literary talent; you may even struggle to find her after school (in an era without smartphones). But as a time traveler, you can keep trying in countless loops to make yourself less nervous and find the word that tugs at her heartstrings.
Just like that, the most usual and classic time shenanigans always work. My only complaint is that the game has a bit too much content. I completely underestimated the length of the gameplay – it takes about 20 hours to get to the “bare minimum” ending.
There is a lot to cover: in A Perfect Day, five different major storylines are converging in the fictional town of Zhenhua, a decaying northern industrial town. People with different characteristics gathered together to create an ensemble cast.
Although the map and actionable areas seem small, since each character has their own activity at a certain time, the entire plot of a day might be so complex that it would take a dozen loops to sort out fully.
Considering the short staff list I saw after beating the game, it’s not hard to imagine why it took the team four years to build “a perfect day” – the amount of scripting and debugging was just too much work for a studio with only a single-digit team.
Moreover, the developers throw a great amount of collection content and mini-games at the game. For example, the protagonist has an “Old Tyrant” console (a clear reference to the famous “Little Tyrant” Subor console). You can play mini-games by collecting cassettes, unlocking hidden plots, and even reporting points through the phone to learn your "national ranking".
Many of the "nostalgic elements" provide details that play an important role in revealing the plot. For example, when surfing the Internet, in addition to the good old "Energy Star" BIOS interface, you can actually browse websites or catch up with friends through the live chat app.
Yet what impressed me most about A Perfect Day is not its time loops and nostalgic flavor, but rather the carefully curated “deja vu moments”. The game is more like a delicate presentation of our past experiences through a unique combination of narrative and interactions.
Although the protagonist as an elementary school student often does not understand "adult things" (such as bumping into the father of a classmate with another woman), as one who has waded through it, adult players will soon understand the situation. The plot details are beautifully bonded in that sense.
For example, the protagonist may want to ask about something fervently while dining with family but does not dare bring it up at the table. He would then force himself to eat a couple of bites before having the guts to raise the topic. Back-and-forths like these plus multiple loops make the dialogue itself a bit tedious. But it is this suppressed feeling that brought back memories of my childhood when my parents grilled me at the dinner table – sometimes with a red face, other times with tears of grievance dripping into the rice bowl.
One of the major tasks in the game is to deliver a love note to the female protagonist. At the beginning of the game, no matter how you adjust your tone of voice, she just won’t look happy. Soon the game will prompt you to speak to yourself, "Wouldn't it be nice to spend more time with her today to understand why she's unhappy?"
After countless side conversations, I finally figured out what happened to the girl on that day and where she would be and at what time. In that last time loop, I was able to have numerous encounters with her.
This might be the most interesting aspect of the narrative design: everything that the protagonist deliberately planned is nothing more than a trivial coincidence in the eyes of others.
In fact, most of the tasks in the game are altruistic - to keep the father out of financial trouble, to save classmates from family issues, to resolve conflicts between friends... You stepped into eternity to help everyone else with their "perfect day”, but in the eyes of others, everything is so natural, and they don't even notice what you've done for them.
At this point, it’s really hard for me to describe what A Perfect Day is about. It does involve supernatural time loops, but it's nothing more than doing things that are considered trivial in an adult’s eye.
Will tomorrow be a perfect day? If I go back to the fireworks show at the end of the century, I wouldn't be sure. But the good thing is, when I was just a kid, happiness was not a luxury I couldn't afford. Big problems were as far away as the stars in the sky, and the only thing I needed to worry about with all my heart was just that one love note to my crush.
Contributed by Aria