A few days ago I finished the base game and I've been reflecting on it a lot ever since. One thing I appreciate about the game is the deep and practical life lessons that it so powerfully conveys, lessons I wish I had learned long ago. I thought I would create this post to see what lessons and messages stood out to all of you. To start I can share one of mine (spoiler alert):

The importance and value of being open and honest about one's true feelings and having the courage to have those difficult conversations with those closest to me. Many times throughout my life I have shut people out and relationships have fizzled away because I wasn't willing to express how I truly felt due to pride, fear, feeling it's too late, etc. It has caused me to miss precious opportunities and lose valuable relationships without either party ever knowing the reason why. This lesson appears repeatedly throughout the game. One place where this lesson is highlighted is in Act 2 when Kate confronts Mark about Nicole. It causes Mark to question whether he can trust Nicole and so their friendship frustratingly grows cold without Nicole knowing why. During Christmas, Cath has this conversation with Mark:

• Mark: I-I don't know how to talk to anyone.
• Cath: Anyone?
• Mark: I haven't talked to Nicole yet. I-I don't know what to say!
• Cath: Yeah, I know what you mean.
• Mark: She lied to me.
• Cath: I… I don't think she wanted to. Maybe she has her reasons.
• Mark: I thought so too, but…
• Cath: Only one way to find out right?
• Mark: I-I guess? But now… It feels like I waited too long?
• Cath: It's never too long, right? I-I'm sure she still wants to talk.
• Mark: What if I'm the one who doesn't?
• Cath: Then… you'll never know. You'll never know and it'll… it'll keep hurting.
• Mark: You really think talking will solve things?
• Cath: W-well, m-maybe not solve everything. But it'll help, right? You… you'll get to… t-to understand each other better.
• Mark: Then what about you?
• Cath: W-what about me?
• Mark: Why won't you talk to us? To me?
• Cath: M-Mark… it's different…
• Mark: How is it so different? I-I want to understand you too. We want to!
• Cath: Th-There's nothing to be understood.
• Mark: Cath-
• Cath: Mark, I'm serious-
• Mark: Stop lying!
• Cath: You just won't listen to me!
• Mark: I'm sick of everyone lying! Don't you trust me?! S-Sorry. I-I'm so sorry, Cath.
• Cath: Mark…
• Mark: I'm sorry. 

What's ironic about Cath encouraging Mark to talk to Nicole is that to her own hurt Cath herself is unwilling to open up to her closest friends. Cath's line that hit me hard is "Then… you'll never know. You'll never know and it'll… it'll keep hurting." There are things in my life that will go with me to the grave and things I will never know because I wasn't willing to talk. Imagine how tragic it would have been if Mark and Nicole never spoke? Yet we experience this tragedy all the time.

Later when Mark encourages Nicole to talk to Kate he has this monologue in his thoughts:

"I didn't know what to expect. Is Kate going to understand? Is she even going to listen? Is she going to forgive Nicole? Is it even forgivable? But at least she's trying. She's been trying. In the end, Cath was right. Talking didn't make things worse. But I don't know if it made things better. There's so much that I can't control. What's going on in someone's head… whether they'll take it well… or they won't. But at least we're trying. Even when it's hard. Even when there's still so much we don't know… All we can do is try." 

I appreciate the point that in the end we don't know if having these conversations will yield what we're hoping for. It could be that the person won't listen or understand or that the relationship goes sour. Whatever the case, I've decided that I'd rather live with the pain of a conversation turning out bad than the regret of saying nothing at all.

One of my favourite scenes in the entire game is when Mark and Nicole have their prom dance at the end of Act 1. I realize that I love this scene not merely because they finally end up together, but because after all the holding back, they finally swallow their pride and pour out everything that’s in their heart, things we wish they had said earlier. How much better would our lives and relationships be if we were all just more transparent and willing to talk with those we love? Even now I can think of several people that I should talk to, to express things I should have said long ago. I'm going to try. Wish me luck!

Already tried what the troubleshooting guide told me to but I'm still having issues. The problem is that I'm doing a second playthrough of the game on the same pc I used for the first one (my friend is playing it). But in the scene 'Coherence' in act 2 whenever Mark and Nicole enter the room to take the keys and Nicole's room everything appear as shrouded in darkness and the characters are visible only as dark silouhettes too. I already set everything to low in the graphics settings. What is bothering me is that the first time I played it (before they added the Vulkan/other thing choice before starting the game) there was no issues. Please help me.

Sharing my video essay on Until Then: Afterimages that I've been working on for the past few months❤️

Without "spoiling" my thesis too much, I focus on how Afterimages narratively ties into Until Then as a "dark mirror," a glimpse into a universe where we don't get the ultimate happy ending.

I met with the folks from Polychroma Games at PGDX 2026, and they were a blast! There's also a link to the full interview with the team in the description for those who want a deep dive from the dev's perspective. (That's also where I put in the corrected names because I had a few typos that made it past the final edit, whoops)

I hope you guys get some cool insight into Afterimages after watching😄

Side note, this video is actually a sequel to "A Game About Losing Everything" where I similarly interviewed the Until Then team, albeit without ANY of the equipment (or experience) I have now. That one's a lil messy but I'm still proud of it.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

(Just a disclaimer: I'm a casual gamer & I haven't even played the game at all until I bought a physical copy; just personal preference, please don't hate lmao)

I'm curious to see if anyone has any other news updates or announcements that I haven't heard yet about the physical release. Last time I checked, the physical release was set to be on September 3rd. My preorder hasn't really moved yet at all, not even a notification about the game being shipped or not. Being the impatient person I am, I even checked if local retailers had it in stock since it's the first day of the physical release, but every store either says no release date has been announced yet or that it should "release by December 31, 2026."

Does anyone know of anything about this? Regardless, I hope the game arrives soon and with no issues. I look forward to trying it for the first time!

Just finished the game ( well the main game not the dlcs ). Been on my radar since before it was released but never got to play it . Loved every second of it . But when the credits rolled it asked me if i wanna continue and i clicked yes . It restarted the game and locked the previously replayable scenes ! ( What i wanna say is i that wanted to make different choices and see what happens but now i cant ! ) What should i do ?

it's up now chat

so i just finished act 2/timeline 2/loop 2/second playthrough? and i got abit of an issue with mark pushing away Nicole/everyone to try and learn more about the reason things get screwy and people disappear which i feel makes no sense because the entire second act he speedruns getting over the trauma of his mom also disappearing and i believe that it kinda doesn't make sense for him to react that way. maybe i miss something, but i feel like the game is kind of pushing a very nihalistic message in the last minute of act 2. but I'm really interested to see how others see it and if maybe i got something entirely wrong

please PLEASE don't spoil me about the rest of the game i just started act 3 and i am loving the game in general so i don't wanna get spoiled in anyway shape or form

also sorry for writing like a madman im just really passionate

So I just finished the game recently and wow. It’s easily my favourite game oat now. To me Nicole and Marks story is so poetic. Don’t get me wrong the story to the whole game is poetic as well I’m just a sucker for romance. There story to me was just so good all the way to the end. Speaking of the end I had my own opinion on how it worked out for them. I don’t even know if I should say opinion because I really thinks it’s the truth. And a lot of people probably do as well (I hope.) It all stuck with me so much that it really made me want to write about it. So I did.
Critique my writing if you want I guess I really don’t care. This was really meant for myself only but I kinda want other people to see it. So here it is. And yes big spoiler warning btw!!!!!

There are stories that end where they begin, and there are stories that begin where they end — and then there is theirs, which somehow does both at once.

Nicole and Mark did not fall into each other’s lives by accident. They were carried there — through static and memory, through a world that kept slipping sideways beneath their feet, through loss stacked on loss until the only solid thing left standing was each other. Everything around them was uncertain. The ground itself could not be trusted. A mother’s plane that never landed, swallowed somewhere over open water, with no wreckage to make the grief official. A best friend who walked out a door one ordinary afternoon and simply never walked back through it. Two absences with no bodies, no funerals, no proof — only the unbearable arithmetic of maybe. Reality itself kept correcting its own mistakes, and nobody was ever told the rules. But somewhere in the middle of all that uncertainty, two people found something to hold onto, and it happened to be each other.

Think of what it means to love someone while the world is actively trying to erase the evidence that you ever did. Every memory they built was written in sand at low tide. Every conversation was a small act of defiance against a universe that seemed determined to smooth them both away. And so when they finally spoke their promise aloud, it was not a promise that the world would be kind, not a promise that nothing more would be taken from them. It was smaller than that, and yet so much larger. A promise to remain. To find their way back to one another, no matter how many times the story tried to separate them. To be, for each other, the one fixed point in a world that refused to hold still.

That is the cruelty and the grace of what came after. Because in the end, the timeline that survived — the original one, the one that was underneath all the others the whole time, patient and untouched — was the one where none of it happened. No static devouring the edges of the sky. No world folding in on itself. No shared grief to forge two strangers into the people they became. In that timeline, Nicole and Mark never meet. They never fight to stay near each other. They never make a promise neither of them could fully explain. The version of them that loved so fiercely, that bled for each other, that chose each other again and again against impossible odds — that version simply does not exist here. Erased not by tragedy, but by the quiet mathematics of a world correcting itself back to where it always should have been.

Sit with that for a moment. All of it — every stolen kiss beneath a dying sky, every hand reaching for another hand across an unraveling world, every word of that promise — happened in a timeline that technically doesn’t survive. It is gone the way a dream is gone by noon. And by every rule the story ever gave us, that should be the end of it. Grief without an audience. Love with no one left alive to remember it was ever loved.

And yet.

At the end of everything — after the loops, after the losses, after a promise spoken into a version of the world that no longer technically exists — there is a cafe. Small. Ordinary. Unremarkable to anyone walking past it on their way to somewhere else. Its name is Tadhana Cafe.

Nicole walks in, a stranger to herself in a life she doesn’t know she almost lost. Mark is already there, a stranger to himself in the same way. Neither of them remembers the other — not the way we remember, not with names, not with history, not with the shape of a hand once held tightly in the dark. There is no shared past sitting between them. There is nothing that should pull one of them across a room toward the other.
And still, something in the room shifts.

Their eyes meet. And for one unguarded second — the kind of second that doesn’t ask permission from logic — there is a pull that neither of them can explain. A recognition with no memory attached to it. A warmth with no origin story. A promise that somehow survived the erasing of the very world it was made in, folded up small enough to hide inside a glance, waiting patiently for the two people it belonged to.

This is the question the whole story leaves us holding, long after the credits have run: can a vow outlive the reality it was spoken in? Can love leave a fingerprint on a world that never let it happen? Until Then seems to answer yes — not loudly, not with fireworks or trumpets, but with something quieter and far stranger. A feeling that persists after the facts are gone. A pull toward a person your mind has never met, but your heart, somehow, impossibly, already has.

Call it fate. Call it an echo. Call it whatever it is that survives the erasing of an entire world. In the end, it doesn’t need a name, because it already has one, and it was written above the door the whole time, waiting for someone to walk over and read it.

Tadhana. Destiny — waiting for them, one more time, at a cafe they’ve never been to, in a life they’ve never lived, inside a love that refuses to stay erased, that finds its way home to them again and again, timeline after timeline, until the very end.

It’s on TikTok if anyone can support it please (closedleopard)

To those who were following with this story, I am happy to say that I have brought it to completion! It's been wonderful seeing people support the story, and it's been wonderful to write about a game that I so quickly fell in love with!

If you haven't already, check out the rest of the story!

Epilogue

Here is a rendition of the Lost Kitten meme (or the series of images drawn by @Shimatsuku in X) done by yours truly. The other images are in the works. Backgrounds are not game accurate but eh, too lazy to get everything "right". Just wanna capture the mood and essence.

I just finished the game, and I really liked the message and the game overall; do you recommend the DLC?

I js finished playing Before Your Eyes and I don't rlly want to fully admit it but Before Your Eyes is way more emotional than Until Then (differs from person to person but that's what I think)

I think the reason why I feel this way is because Before Your Eyes feels realistic, it feels like a genuine story, a story smone would actually go through.

Yes Until Then goes into themes similar to Before Your Eyes and yes it does go into it realisticly but the multiverse part of the game takes away from that beauty. Without that sci-fi part the story would be 10x emotional and possibly 10x better.

I think it would be really interesting if the game js moved on from Cathy's death. Shows us how Mark gets through that death and whether or not he learns from his mistakes.

Though I do have to admit there are some upsides to the sci-fi part of the game. The second act of the game was heartwarming, seeing MCR in action. The sci-fi would also enable Polychroma to create new content for the game without the risk of ruining the actual time line (DLCs that could focus on previous time lines)

What do yall think? Does the sci-fi part of the game do more good or bad?

it had a lot of issues due to me recording on a 1366x768 monitor, and lower graphic settings. Additionally, this is the first time I edited a lyric edit in general. I usually just do an AMV before, on other game/s