Review of v1.0
Secret Summer is a perfect example of a 3.5 star game: lots of positives, but one too problems for me to give it a recommendation. Let's get into it.
This is a classic example of a wholesome "family friendly" harem AVN, where you play the son and get the sisters, mom and step-mom. There aren't any side girls, and your choices are limited to which girls you want to pursue (with whom you need to select the correct dialogue options to get points). I love this formula, and Secret Summer supplements it with a decent plot which keeps the player engaged and well-written dialogue.
But the problems quickly become apparent. Firstly, the models aren’t very attractive. While the step-mom is hot asf, the sisters, especially the youngest, fall flat. Secondly, the relationship with the mom is ridiculous. Off the bat she wants to shower naked with the mc, then he quickly asks her to date him and she immediately accepts (supposedly because she’s “from the south”). On their first date he takes her out and reveals he has bought an exotic animals petting zoo which they use alone (containing a bear cub, elephant calf and more) along with a horse; none of this is played as a joke. Wouldn’t going horse riding be enough? Thirdly, despite this game doing a great job at giving the mc a personality without showing his face, it very occasionally randomly decides to show it. Why? It’s more off-putting to see an mc’s face randomly rather than either often or never. Last but not least, I quickly grew frustrated with the timeskips. At the start it was alright, as the mc wasn’t in any relationships and it was explained what happened during them. But later on they started occurring while the mc was in sexual relationships, and we would have no idea what happened during them until someone randomly mentioned the mc had been having regular sex. It was even worse during the endings: if you were on multiple LIs' routes, you saw their endings one after the other, and within those endings there were often timeskips where it seemed implicitly that the mc was just ignoring all his other relationships. AVN devs, please let us know how much sex is happening during a timeskip because it lets us fantasise and incoporate it into our understanding of the story. The worst of all was the 1-year timeskip during the epilogue. This just felt awful, and frankly I think that the sequel is going to have to treat the epilogue as non-canon because it was so unsatisfying.
Overall, while I mostly enjoyed my time with Secret Summer, it was too often let down by preventable problems for me to recommend it. I hope the upcoming sequel can walk where this game stumbled.