VN - Ren'Py - Completed - Secret Summer [v1.0 Epilogue] [SuperWriter]

Man it really felt like wasted potential here.

I never had an issue with the models unlike some of the other reviews, i like them all and the girls are interesting and varied. The story was good and the sex scenes (at least from a narrative standpoint) were hot.

But the game has some clear flaws that are just hard to ignore:
1 ) How time flows in the game is confusing, early in the game leanne tells you her audition is in like a week but a lot of things happen between that and the audition that clearly takes a lot of time, so it was confusing. It's like whenever you switch to another girl's story the time freezes for the original girl.
2) Sex scenes really needed more renders if you are not going to have animations. I'm not one of the believe that all games needs to be animated, a good narration can more than make up for it, but you really need different renders of different points in the scene to make it flow better.
3) The ending, even taking the epilogue into account. It is just waay too rushed. Norah was my favourite girl yet you barely get anything out of your relationship with her.

Taking all into account, i can't give it a higher rating than a 3. If you have time to kill it is worth a play, but i would first play other games before this one.

Interesting beginning ( story related ) that allows to build relationship will all the girls for a classic Harem game ( familly oriented ). MC is the usual only nice guy on earth. Father behavior is caricatural and exist just to support the story. And the final discussion with the father is quite "empty".

And then when relation is confirmed, it becomes quite "empty".
For the adult part : don't expect much. this is more story and relation oriented.

This game is better than previous title from the developer but there is still some "magic" that is missing.

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.

It's a good enough game, don't let the 3 stars make you think it isn't.

There's a couple of very attractive and endearing LIs (Leanne, Zoe and Irene imo). But it's held back by the same issues as Picture Perfect. The graphics are a little dated, the storylines are quite average and forgettable, there are few real choices as they mostly lock you up from better outcomes instead of offering equal alternatives, and worst of all the endings are rushed and feel incomplete. Worse than PP, you don't actually have a different solo ending for each LI and a harem ending, the harem ending is simply the addition of the solo routes where PP offered a different harem ending. And Superwriter did not deliver all the pregnancy endings that were promised.

These games had potential, but it is worrying that nothing was learned and their ending still disappoints.

This game is solid - models are nice, storyline is engaging but the ending is rushed, some of the girls could use more sex scenes and lack of sounds make it awkward to read lots of text. Having epilogue removed from the game is silly, thankfully multimod fixes it. The game is good to play through once but leaves you wishing for more.

My score is very low, reflecting that of others. It is clear that it is overrated, since the game is incomplete and forced to finish, the game has an unpleasant points system because you don't really know what you are doing well and what you are not doing well. If you play the game, I recommend using the mods they offer because there is no important variation if you make a mistake and you only lose content by doing so. I really think that at most the game gets 3 stars, since to compare with others the difference is too much.

Alright drama story of the 'Family Harem' specialized genre.

It has a decent length, and the relationships are somewhat believable, but the artwork is somewhat stiff, a few characters are clearly better-written than others, and the ending comes kind of out of nowhere if you follow the full harem path.

It's alright, likely won't regret playing it, but not enough to really recommend.

It was great . The ending was a bit lacking as it was rushed . The scenes with the mother character were very good . The model for the mother character is one of the best models . I enjoyed the game although the ending could have been a bit better and detailed .

Well, not terrible, but not good either. The one thing that sticks out the most about this game is that it's kind of boring. The sex scenes are boring, the dialog is boring, and the plot is mostly boring. It's interesting enough at the beginning, but in the second half of the game nothing happens. Just boring, daily life.

As for content, there's really only one real love interest (your stepmom.) The others feel like sidekicks with very few sex scenes. There is harem path, but it's not really a harem path. The game isn't nearly perverted enough for a harem path to work. The "harem" path is nothing more than all the females sitting on a couch telling you that it's OK to have an open relationship. That's all. Nothing more. No harem sex scenes. There's not even any threesomes. It's always just the MC and one of the girls.

It's well put together and the renders are nice. It's just that it's... boring. It feels like the author wanted this game to go in a different direction but then switched to something else halfway through. And it just didn't work out.

This game is fine. As someone who played his first game, "Picture Perfect", his game endings always felt a bit lacking. Like there was supposed to be in the epilogue. It always felt incredibly cut short with just a simple pregnancy ending for some characters. His daz3d work has certainly improved. The character models, the poses, the lighting, and even the backgrounds are really great. However, none of the characters show any facial expressions at all. They're all lifelessly staring at your face with a few eye movements here and there. It gets worse when they are literally inches from your face in a few scenes. Also, dev has some extremely outlandish references from his old game. I did not like those at all. I get that it's a whole universe he made but it did not fit in at all. I hope his next game is better since this dev clearly knows what he's doing but lacking severely in some spots. Also, this game severely lacks in sex scenes. There are only like 4 per character. Needs more sex. 9/10.

The game was good. the artwork, the story all were good. but, I missed the animation of the sex scenes and sound clips. The game would have been great if there were animations. I also think that the game would have been much more enjoyable if there were more scenes. however, enjoyed the game. Definitely would recommend . Good job developers. Keep up the good work.

Great plot. Well written characters. I was really enjoying the game right from the start till almost the very end (well explain later).
Secret Summer is a huge step forward comparing with previous game (Picture Perfect), it is better in every aspect (my humble opinion), no forced non-vanilla kinks (like lesbian), characters behave corresponding to their personality, they have a soul.

The moments I remembered:
1) Scene with Lee and Felix the Fox, that was so awkwardly cheesy, but also so cute at the same. You kinda watch it, and it is so surreal, and you don't know what to feel, kinda not sure wether you should be annoyed because of cheesy scene and childish dialogues or you should like "awww, that's so fucking cute".
2) Norahs accent heheh, was smth

Now few cons:
1) I was a bit confused at the end with Irene's and John's situation, why didn't she just divorce him?
2) At the very very end, like last few renders, MC was thinking about turning proper harem game into "everybody with everybody" (like rabbits) freakshow with lesbian implied, seriously? He was, thinking something like "Maybe we could become even closer? Maybe I can give a group relationship a nudge?" Dev just couldn't help himself and had to ruin the mood? It were only thoughts of MC, but still.
You kinda made the vanilla harem game without lesbian stuff, why the fuck ruining it at the end?
And right after that scene game tells you there will be a sequel, smth tells Dev is going to do like he did with Picture Perfect - turn it into lesbian heavy shit. For some reason Devs tend to think that every guys like seeing girls messing around, where the fuck did hat come from?

I kinda bought Picture Perfect and Secret Summer both at once and after Picture Perfect i wasn't sure if I should give this one a chance, I am not a big fun of lesbian stuff, and the scene in PP when MC was literally teaching Miracle and Sabrina to be lesbians kinda blew my mind, but i still gave Secret Sumer a chance and it was totally worth it. But from now on I am not sure I will buy this Dev's games, he definitely like to bring up lesbian content here and there and it is annoying. I don't now what feedbacks he got on PP and SS on patreon, but considering that SS's reviews on steam are much better than PP, I take it I am not the only one with such an opinion))

Well, anyway, I was really enjoying the game to almost the end, so few renders won't change that for me.

This game is around average. I enjoyed playing it but nothing special.
Graphics: 4/5
Renders: 4/5
Hot female: 4/5
Fetish: 2/5
Clothes&Lingerie: 3/5
Animations: -/5
Story: 3/5
Gameflow: 4/5
Amount of content: 2/5

Quite a nice game, with an ok story and dialogue writing and nice looking girls.
It's nowhere near perfect and would normally rate it between average and good, but I really like the genre so 4 stars it is.

Breakdown:
There are not too many sex scenes and they are not animated so as an erotic game it's not outstanding.
Graphically it looks very nice. Most of the girls look unique and sexy. Irene is the only one with a stock model and while she is nowhere near ugly I find her model overexaggerated that doesn't fit well in the game.
Additionally the dev uses lot of face extreme closeups with perspectivic distortion and strange lighting that often results in heavy uncanny valley effect. I think it would have been better to lighten up on that.

Storywise it's nothing new. It's the usual, son returns home after some longer separation trope but there are some interesting ideas. I found the Irene romance a bit too fast. I think it would have been better to start with some kind of revenge sex after provoked by John and go to romance from there.
The Zoe storyline was simply nonsensical. Both the fact that the person Zoe was depicted as has no problem to break in to someone's home and steal stuff, how the investigation went down with that hacker guy and the out-of place VR scene, how it lead to a secret society or how the whole thing ended felt stupid.
The characters are unique and not just the usual bitchy older sister, naïve but sexually curious younger sister. Though with Zoe I think the dev went a bit too far. I think the dev wanted to make her strict and no nonsense personality but her way of talking sometimes gave me a feeling as if she had some mental problem instead.

The game in itself isn't bad. There's a good linear story that isn't spectacular, but it's fine. It's a great game if you like incest, since it pretty much resolve around it.

It unfortunately doesn't have any music/sound, which makes it harder to be immerse in the story. I also prefer when there's animations, but I can handle a good game when there isn't any.

The big negative point for me is the ending. It pretty much came out of nowhere and feel super rushed.

It's not a game that I would go out of my way to recommand, but it's not a bad one either, so feel free to give it a shot.

Well, it was entertaining, I liked the story and the characters, however, I consider it a game to pass the time, so it's not bad, but not good either.

THE GOOD

The story, I mean, is not the best in the world, but it was developed in a correct way that allowed for a good "outcome" of it.
The designs of the characters, that is, the 3D modeling, they seemed good to me, that is, I liked all the characters visually, another thing that I emphasize about this and that at least I like a lot, is that the characters do not make ridiculous poses like most of games where for no reason they raise their arms and pose just because.

THE BAD

Certain relationships between the protagonist and the waifus felt weird but not bad, for example, the development between the protagonist and the "stepmom" felt a bit strange as it unfolded, at least from my point of view.
One negative point is that the game does NOT have any kind of sound, which let's say certain environments of sadness and that kind of thing were not felt too much. there is not moans.
Another point is that I feel like there aren't enough 18+ scenes for the content it has. Certain sexual scenes were very simple, very short and worst of all, they don't have animation, it's just the scene and that's it.

Summary:
o Character Design/Visual: 5/5
o Background music/sound: 0/5 (No sounds)
o Plot: 3.2/5
o Animation: 0/5 (there is not animations.)
o +18 Scenes: 3.5/5 (AI think there are very few for the content it has.)
o Gameplay: 3/5
Interface: 4/5

It's a casual game, I don't hate it, but I don't recommend it either, if you ever read this review, I want to tell you that you might as well not play it, you don't miss a super story, let alone many scenes and if you still want to play it I recommend that you put background music to give the atmosphere. Anyway remember that this is my opinion after all.



its says "fan" but i am not...

Everything about this game is 5 star. The story, the personalities, the renders, everything, I have zero complaints.

Except 1.

It ends where the fun is about to start. Everything has been building up towards lots of great sex, which we are left to dream about.
I get that it's about 1 summer and that summer is over, but I was left wanting more. A lot more.

Please make a sequel, I like this group so much.

Great start and middle, but terrible, rushed ending. When anything (movie, book, game,etc) has an ending that sucks it ruins the whole thing. This would be 4 stars had the ending not been rushed and had the same quality as the rest of the game. If you don't care so much for the ending I'd definitely recommend this to you, but if you do I would not.

An incest gem, so if you are into it this game is a must play. The girls are all very different and interesting, it's good to explore all of their stories. Lots of cumming playing this game, I loved it.

I like this one for a simple reason. It does the basics really well.

There's nothing ground-breaking going on here. There's a fairly standard plot and household. It's a +1 if she liked what you said, add them up when a scene triggers and see if you have enough points. You've seen it before.

The beauty here is that everything works as it should. The score system isn't trying to trick you, the characters are distinct and interesting and everything progresses at a decently judged pace. It's looks like its been made by someone who has learned from experience.

I was going to give this a 4 and call it the best 3 star game on here but a well made (and complete) time-filler is what the masses need so it's getting a 5.