RPGM - Completed - Desert Island in Summer? [v1.1 Steam] [Erotic Bear]

I was looking for a game to fill the void in my heart after What I'm Looking For In Summer and Himegashima Island. This game is NOT what you're looking for.

However, if you're looking for some fantastic pixel art HCG, that's kind of the only thing this game has going for it. The girls are lovely, but after the their initial hook, what else does the game have to offer?

Story: There isn't any outside of the initial premise. Maybe a few tasks that get done, but something happens, and then it gets resolved, but no overarching story.
2/10 - for initial premise and following through with it

Characters: Instead of learning about the characters now, you do flashbacks into how you met them. It's an odd approach of providing "depth" to characters, and does little in terms of adding additional personality. The dialogue itself is good enough to provide a baseline understanding of their personality, and honestly it should have leaned heavily for that instead of what it did. IMO it would feel more organic, such that the MC builds bonds now rather than through some random flashback.
4/10 - for odd flashbacks, but enough writing to understand a character's personality

Gameplay: There's an overworld with various events, and a few areas where you do mini-games to progress favor towards a heroine. The overworld is difficult to explore, with odd routes and openings to potentially explore, but are there for no reason other than to just be there. I've spent way too long trying to explore the map to get to a dead end and find nothing. There's this one area where the initial encounter, you can still explore it, but there's literally no reason to explore it, but you think there might be some random event there. Nope, that area is never used ever again. And there's random encounters everywhere. It could be under your bed.

The mini-games themselves are a mixed bag. They're extremely basic with a minor bump in difficulty on the next encounter. They're more tedious than they are interesting and fun. It's just something to do to work for a heroine and nothing more. At the very least, it's not grindy or super long.
4/10 - short and simple

Lore and World Building: This one was quite difficult for me. There's definitely something going on with one of the main heroine, and is loosely revealed at the end. I haven't seen it myself, but someone within the discussion mentioned that there is additional lore that can be discovered through books at a certain level. You have to walk up to the object, which has no indication that you can interact with it what so ever, and interact with it.

I'm talking about the flavor text/dialogue you get when you interact with random environmental objects, e.g. a random lamp. All of the interacts early on are very lackluster. The MC only really states what it is, or gives an excuse that there's nothing of interest here. It conditions the player that "Hey, I know you want to interact with objects, but there's nothing to do here." At the very least , it would be interesting to see a character event or some kind of interaction with other characters, but there's NOTHING.

That's why when I got to that certain level to interact with the books, I completely skipped over it.

Other than this notable about what's going on with that particular heroine... there's not much to talk about. The overworld is very, very boring and their sprites are minimally viable. I think visually it looks okay, but we run into the gameplay problem I mentioned earlier; it looks like there's places to explore, but there's actually nothing to interact with. It's very dead.
4/10 - hints at something, but doesn't really do anything

Music/Sounds: The music and sound didn't contribute much to the overall feeling either. It minimally worked and fit the place, nothing else. The transitions from zone to zone and event to event was a bit jarring. It "works."
4/10

Execution and Experience: Very, very poor. I was coming from Himegashima Island and What I'm Looking For In Summer. Perhaps my expectations are too high when this game was mentioned as "similar, " but it's not at all. I have a difficult time following dialogue and trying to figure out who is talking. I also got very lost on what I'm supposed to be doing. Obviously it seems that I'm supposed to be increasing my favor to the heroines, but at a point the mini-games disappear. There's also no clear indication of WHAT increases your favor, and it's very difficult to figure out what the favor is immediately after doing something. I don't even know if H-events increase favor. That's how unclear it was.

I was not entranced by the experience/world this game has to offer. Perhaps I was initially when you start getting the odd nightmares, but it does not expand any further on this. It fails to probe the player's curiosity, and the resolution of the story and its events are just... why am I even playing this game? Obviously to whoo the girls but, I wasn't having fun; and that's what matters when you make a game.
4/10

Art: But this is an H-game. How does the HCG do? Fantastic. If you like pixel art, this game is a treat for the eyes. The overworld pixel art is extremely bland, however. I'm pretty sure that it's just RPG Maker assets. No real shame there if you just want to shove out a game. But I definitely feel that they could have executed the presentation of the character sprites and dialogue better.
8/10 - only down because of generic gameplay art

Overall: This game advertises itself on its art, specifically it's pixel HCG. If that's all you really care about, then you care about the HCG. The game to get to the HCG is slightly painful, but is it worth it? That's something only for can decide.
6/10

So how should I describe it... it is short hentai/anime game.
I say "/anime" as plot is anime like.

it has around 16 sex scenes that are ok pixel art style one, sound for them is ok/normal/basic.

Gameplay is bad but because it is so short it is not rly a big problem. You should not expect rly anything from the story here. As "spoilers" in the end whole premise means nothing.
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Addendum: this rating is only if you pirate it. If you spend money to buy it on steam it is rating compared to price is more like 2.5/5

Holy fuck. This is NOT a game. This is a wannabe anime. Zero player agency and a 6+ minute unskippable anime OP intro after the prologue that pauses if you tab out hoping to wait it out. Holy fucking shit if i wanted to watch an anime, i would go do that instead. I want to participate in the fictional world. not get NTR'd by poor "game" design if you can even call this a game.

This game is pretty good!! It's got some nice music and visuals, and really really good character art and animation. The writing is also decent, and it's clear that these characters are more than just sex objects to the creators of this game.

It commits two sins though, in my opinion, the first being a relative lack of direction. The player is just left to wander around the environment until they find an event, which is probably the most tedious and disappointing aspect of this game. The other sin is that it has lengthy puzzle segments, which, aside from being easy to complete, are tragically devoid of character development or connection to the main plot. I would have appreciated the puzzles a lot more if they had led to us learning something interesting about each character, rather than just shooing us away to do some busy work and padding out the game.

So I subtract a star. But ultimately, this is still one that's worth checking out if the artwork on its poster appeals to you. My one advice is to not skip any text, since the game moves quickly and does have some charm in that department.

Overall a neat, short game. Story is wholesome, the characters are fun, the pixel art, albeit not too much, is of good quality, and the music fits the setting very well . There aren't much gameplay except some mini games/puzzles and progressing story events, which is quite unfortunately if like me, you are looking forward to a survival game.

Considering this is a $3 game I would say it's pretty good, the story is great and wholesome and the writing (even with AI translation) is not bad at all. The gameplay pretty eh but that is to be expected, you need to do a lot go guess work for wtf you should be doing next. Otherwise I enjoyed it thoroughly for its story, music, and the art. I ended up buying the game from DLsite for keepsake. I highly recommend for those seeking romantic and wholesome date sim.

Art is stunning and from what I've played of the game and considering the context that it's machine translated, the story is charming.

However, actually playing the game fucking sucks. Wander through giant maps looking for the characters or scenes, and I mean go through every nook and cranny because the game doesn't give any hints or direction, and then do bullshit minigames like wood cutting or catch a rabbit in a red-light-green-light hazard stage.

This game would actually be better as a visual novel.

Scenes pretty limited although all of them have great pixel art quality. No voice acting. Music seems well chosen. Can't recommend you play the game but definitely get a fap out of the full save. Story might be enjoyable if you can stomach walking through rpgmaker maps for hours - maybe find a walkthrough

This was a nice and short game with great pixel art and likeable enough characters. The gameplay is about what you'd expect. However, the translation is indeed funky, justified considering mtl was used. My only complaint would be Renka, she got done badly. It would've been great if she was similar to other heroines.

That's about it, what I really wanted to say was F**K NTR!!! AND HAREM END FTW!!!

Really fun game! The translation isn't perfect but more than good enough to get all the points across. The pixel art is great and the animations for the H-Scenes aren't clunky at all. It's pretty short and the total amount of scenes quite limited, but that only slightly takes away from the fun of the whole game. I only encountered minor issues that weren't game breaking.

I'd be willing to give it 5 stars if only it had a few more patches/QoL changes. However, I'd say it's still a good time waster, just spent 2 hours on it.

Gameplay, 4/5: Just Go Around Doing Shit
There's not much to say, other than it's sort of like a plethora of mini-games and references. For example, there's a shittier Ace Attorney mini-game where you gotta clear your friend's name, "wood collecting" where you... beat the shit out of stumps? And a mildly annoying "time your pushes to catch the rabbit" thing, plus a few puzzles here and there and... It's fine.

At only 2 hours long, it does not over stay it's welcome. It's just menial chores and would get really boring if it lasted maybe an hour longer, but with several different mini-games, albeit all kind of slow and easy, it keeps enough variety.

My main issue is that even with "Always run" on, the map is large enough that going back and forth to check on the heroines gets a bit tedious even within the first 30 minutes. Yeah, 10 seconds is not a lot, but multiply that by 10, and you get a minute and 40 seconds. You'll be seeing the same areas a lot, and the menu navigation to save is clunky (as of 1.0.1 w/ the Fixes Patch). Also, some things like random flowers or bushes have collision and it's a bit annoying. If collision for the small debris could be removed, and have a way to speed up everything just a bit more, as well as viewing just the animations for the H-Scenes, I think it'd easily get 5 stars.

Overall, it's short enough that the repeating days don't get too sickening, but it is enough to get sort of tedious by the 1.5 hour mark.

Visuals, 5/5: RPGM Stuff, but Good
The animations are cute, pixelated, and not just "sliding back and forth" or "stretch and return to normal" type "animations" as other games do. The girls are cute, with a decent enough variety, though those who like dark skinned girls are SOL. The environments are nice, and the textures and sprites for the girls are good as well. I believe the girls' sprites are unique as well.

A minor gripe that only cropped out here and there is that some walls, you can get closer to, like with the boulder puzzle where it's not exactly clear where you can step and cannot, but is easy enough to test out and not the end of the world. Still 5 stars because the issue is very minor.

Audio, 5/5: Unique Music (For an H-Game, at Least).
As stated in the header, I believe that there's unique music for the island and stuff. Standard sound effects for menu navigation and some SFX here and there, but they're all fine. No VA's. Music good. SFX OK. Not much else to say.

Story, 5/5: A Generic, Dumb, but Beautiful Story
It starts out pretty generic, and ends on a dumb (funny) way. I'll avoid spoiling anything here, but it's a stupid plot twist that's a bit funny. The characters are pretty generic, like the "violent" childhood friend, the kuudere, the mysterious and bratty one, and big tits weirdo. Then you have your pals who don't NTR you surprise surprise, where there's the monkey-faced pervert, yankee looking/delinquent looking, golden hearted senior, and big muscle bro who's a bit shy.

The intro, generic as is, is that you go for a summer vacation on an island and your shitty boat gets swept away so now you're in a survival situation, can you get the girls to like you?

Overall, while I got tired of all the reading by the end, it gives a decent background story for most of the girls. I may have missed things like, the "brat," I still don't really understand essentially, how she got here, since, she's "not normal" basically. Unless I'm stupid, which I may be.

TL;DR, 4/5: Good Time Waster w/ Minor Gameplay Problems
The game takes about 2 hours to beat. Good time waster for decent animations. You only get 4 per girl, and 4 girls, and there's no customization. However, it's all pretty good. There are better porn games, and better gameplay games, but as a porn with gameplay game, it's pretty good, with the minor problems listed in the "Gameplay" section gone, this game could be 5/5.