(As of 0.6) Summer Heat is a conundrum. At face value should be a dime a dozen on here, and it has many of the familiar features you would expect from an adult VN: you are put in a situation where you are the sole sexual interest of 5+ beautiful women, none of whom have a boyfriend waiting back home despite being super model gorgeous, your masculine counterparts exist not as competition but rather comic relief or to advance story beats, and there is a mysterious, shady subplot involving organized crime. In spite of this, it execution of these standard-issue tropes makes it stand alone among its peers. I struggle to explain why, only to say that it succeeds because it embraces its slice of life nature -- nearly every part of the game feels plausible. Maybe a childhood friend takes this summer art camp as new opportunity to expand our relationship, or maybe I could share a romantic moment with someone I just met because we found ourselves alone, doing something new for the first time. It almost never feels like you are put in an unrealistic situation that could pull you out of the narrative. I say almost, because although the game is ostensibly set in a small, rural American town in the mountains, there is one glaring issue: the European mind cannot fathom living anywhere without what appears to be a mafia-connected club, even in a town which appears to only have a gas station, cafe, and a club with 20 employees . I'd just as hope this serves no purpose other than to provide secondary women to have sex with while your relationships with the heroines bloom, but I'm not convinced based on how many story beats in 0.5 were focused on it. Thankfully, although the setting could have easily made for an "auntie" or "landlady" style relationship with any of the heroines, you are thankfully complete strangers to everyone in the game outside of your two childhood best friends. Pacing in Summer Heat does feel a little off, as the first 5 updates cover only your first day at summer camp -- the devs could spread things out a little time-wise for believability.
Dialogue is important in a game like this. Summer Heat works so well because the dialogue, particularly coming from the player character, feels natural. And not just because it is competently written (although this is a huge plus in the game's favor, as it is a rare AVN that doesn't sound like English is the 4th language of the author), but rather the game takes itself seriously. For instance, when a character makes a joke, there isn't a 400% volume increase guitar riff, a smash cut or dramatic zoom to an exaggerated reaction face, etc., as is all too often the case in these games. Even with such a low bar to clear, Summer Heat does a great job taking itself seriously without overcorrecting into melodrama. The main character not being a sex pest (again, another low bar) or a complete moron really helps a great deal here as well.
Summer Heat is far and away the best looking of the Daz 3D VNs, not just in its the sense of the models and lighting, but also their staging in a natural way. The developers clearly care a great deal about the way the game looks visually and they have improved a great deal since v0.1, which is the only place you'll find graphical issues like poorly fitting clothing that are commonplace in other games. The problem is that these painstakingly crafted renders make development of the game obscenely long, with 8-10 months between updates now the norm. If they managed a shorter development cycle with fewer unnecessary renders, they could maintain the same development cycle while making the shorter content updates more palatable to players (hence the 4/5 star rating). I may grumble about the development time, but there is genuinely nothing of this quality on the market, so I'll be back next year, grumbling about the time 0.7 surely will take.
