VN - Ren'Py - Summer Heat [v0.6] [Naughty Fox Games]

Just played update 6.

Very few developers put this much effort into making the love interests look so hot and amazing in every image and animation. There's so much to look at and admire down to the posing, lighting, scenery, and how the sex scenes capture the hottest angles and allow you to flip between different views.

I'm giving 4/5 because of how inconsistent the development of the story, relationships, and intimacy has been across updates. Chapter 4 and 5 were packed with sexual content and love interest progression, but in chapter 3 and 6, the progression stops and there's only one brief scene in 6, and it's very forgettable. Also, the interactions with LIs in chapter 6 don't enter any new territory. It's odd since the MC is presented with a new dilemma this update where he should start making riskier, bolder decisions with Bree/Sophie/Mia/Kate, but he continues acting passively--even when the girls are basically throwing themselves at him.

I'm hoping the future update take more risks with the characters and story. The developers sometimes focus too much on non-essential (and I assume time-consuming) animations. It could easily become a 5 star game for me.

Review of 0.6 (Spoilers)

I had high hopes for this game when I first played it but there are just too many short comings for me to give it a very good rating.

The overview of the game is "Experience the ups and downs of summer class! Meet girls, earn their trust (or break their hearts) and practice your photography skill in the process. No matter what you choose, you'll feel the heat." You would think that with that explanation of the game there would be a focus on an art class and character interaction, sadly that is far from what actually happens in the game.

The art camp is almost entirely ignored so far as well as the photography the MC has apparently gone to this camp for. There are three short "photo sessions" that take place. This art camp also starts out with with the MC having to clean his room and a exercise program, for reasons. It's not until the second day that you do anything related to improving or learning about art at all. It may not sound so bad but it has take around two years of development to get through a single in game day. It's made worse by the fact that you are constantly dragged along on errands to make the place ready for everyone else with no say in the matter. You will be doing fun activities such as going shopping, hanging lights on a porch and tagging along with an instructor to help him take care of his personal tasks. There is also almost no time spent with the LI's overall. It has some of the worst pacing I have seen in an AVN.

The pacing and lack time spent with the LI's adds even more problems the the actual relationship buildig. And it seems to have just gotten worse after the last update where the MC is told he has to leave in a few days because of something the player had no control over. As I said it may have take years to get to this point but any progress you make is still the LI's meeting the MC a few hours ago so everything is very, very rushed. What little you can do that is. Mia has the most lewd content so care aside from Cassandra but I don't think she is an LI, just another side character to ham-fist sex into the game. Anyway, Mia is a character you probaly spend the least amount of time with out of everyone but she can get sexy with the MC at the end of the first day. Everyone else though, is still in the very early stages of a path. If nothing happens to where the MC can stay every sex scene will likely happen 48 hours after saying "hello" to any of the girls. There will be no earning trust or breaking of hearts because they still know almost nothing about each other let alone be madly in love. It's all pretty much just flirting at this point. But it's not just about the lack of sex, I really like slow burns. For that to work though you actually have to be making a steady push forward to that reward and it just isn't there. Most of the limited interaction with the girls are just run of the mill "Hey how was your day?" conversations that don't progress anything at all until they throw in a "romantic" scene out of no where to force it along really.

The renders of the game have no bearing on my rating but they are far from the worst I have seen. The animations are kind of a hit or miss though. They aren't bad per se, but the camera angles leave a lot to be desired. I believe the devs said it was because it was limited due to it be a first person game but there are many others that do it much, much better that are also first person. And honestly they have been working in DAZ for years now so I think that is a significant amount of time to wrap your head around camera angles at the very least.


TLDR: It started off nice enough but don't judge the game based off the overview because it doesn't represent the actual content. The pacing is also very bad and there is very little progress with many of the LIs. The renders are above average but the animations could use some work.

One of the most enjoyable and lighter visual novellas.
The plot progression is a bit slow, but the visual quality is amazing.
I can confidently say that this is one of the best in market in terms of rendering.
Sure it would be nice if the development time for the update was shorter, but
I give it 5 stars for Bree alone. In my opinion, the aura and development of the relationship with Bree is one of the most romantic and heart-warming slow burns ever.
All in all Pros: beautiful locations and girls, a world with great plot potential, interesting characters, a balanced personality MC and a solid 4-5 hours of gameplay.
The downside is the long awaiting time for updates, and only two fabular days of the camp passed in the novel, although the first day was full of action though.
I highly recommend playing it,
Regards!

So I had been waiting for the new update to review the game, before it was around a 3.5, but after the very poor and lackluster update I'd have to bump it down to a 2.

The good things:
-The graphics, some of the best ones I've seen hoenstly, and the few animations we have are really really good
-The girls have great designs.

The bad:
Sadly the story of the game is not super engaging so far, it's passable for a AVN but not one of it's strong points.
-The timeline is VERY poorly timed, before the last update everything that had happened in the game had ocurred basically in 1 day time, actually, more like 1 afternoon, which makes it feel very rushed and it just feels like all the girls are super horny and throw themselves to the MC for little to no reason, considering they just met him like 2 hours ago, even one girl that acts like she doesn't want anything to do with you the entire morning at night is already looking at your dick...
-And honestly I dont even want to talk about the MC, he's super boring, no motivations, no good backstory, nothing. He's just the average nice guy you see in AVN with a big dick and that's it, he really couldn't be any less interesting right now.

Amazing visuals, this is one of the best visually looking game on the website.

The story and plot just is not there, dialogues are worth skipping.

MC chasing every skirt, too many characters that don't open up properly.

The reason for a low score, and even wanted to give it 2 out of 5, is lack of any meaningful content or progression. There are in total as of version 0.6 about 3 sex scenes, of which 2 feel like a filler content. Scenes are not hot, are dull and boring.

It would do better if you cut half of the girls out, especially seeing as there is no content with them anyway.

This looks like a beatifully packaged product, but dull and empty inside.

Fantastic game, actually nice and interesting characters with a nice little story. The girls are actually charming and you can feel bad for being an asshole. It's honestly great and I wish we had more games like this

The 3D models of the girls in this game are THE BEST out there. Period. The writing is not amazing, but it's not terrible either. Most of the characters are kinda well written and have different personalities, there are some good dialogues and some sexy scenes, both about teasing and explicit ones. It's a pretty decent game.

Then, why only two stars? Because this gave has been in development since 2022 and the plot it's barely set. At this rate, the game will be finished in 2040. One small update every year or so. And the best part is, the devs waste time and resources doing scenes with animations and a lot of renders that aren't interesting or add something to the plot or the characters, like... cooking a breakfast. If the devs doesn't have the time, skills or resources for doing a game like that, they should have done another one less ambitious, with less characters and subplots.

Awesome! Loving the Chit Chat dating app—fantastic storyline with all the right vibes. Beautiful profiles, smooth experience. Excited to see future updates—keep up the great work on this amazing platform!

eating a shit sandwich for which you pay is better than playing this pos for free
terrible plot. constant blueballing. bad timelines. crap dialogue. all so that they could progress stories with characters with less flavor than bread... all for nothing. keep polishing it more devs. itll still be worse than a turd sandwich.

glad theyre getting their rent paid tho!

One of the most impressive visuals, characters. Like the "Free Mode" which is not too time consuming and cluttered. Giving 3 stars because of the update progression and Developers start of the "Milking" era.

Beautiful game, great characters, good potential. Devs really need to re-prioritise their workload though.

I'll give the devs a bit of benefit of the doubt. People are quick to jump to the 'milking it' assumption, but also when a game takes off you suddenly have a massive increase in expectations and pressure, along with large numbers of paying subscribers making different (often contradictory) demands that you feel obliged to try and satisfy. It's no surprise that development can become disjointed and slower.


My main suggestion is that the devs rework the balance between quality of renders and number of renders per scene. There's no need for a different render for each line of text. There is no need for dozens of renders of someone making breakfast and then an animation of some gorgeous toast popping out of the machine. That entire scene could have been cut out without any loss to the story. It's just slowing the story progression down and wasting dev time.

I'm not even sure that the sophie photo scene needed all those different pictures available unless it's somehow key to the character development or plot? You could have 2/3 pics and then two/three more if he goes back for seconds.

Basically just streamline the content a bit and progress the story more. Also try and complete a day at camp for each release tbh. With the number of LIs, the minutiae of character development is going to be impossible to manage. As some others have mentioned, the slow pace of story progression (in game time) leads to a feeling of slow burn whilst they've only been there a couple of days and it's actually moving really fast.

But yeah the game is beautiful. That bree scene in kate's room...

I'm writing this review from the point of view of someone that just experienced for the first time the entirety of Summer Heat as of the v6.0 release. Overall I think the game is nice but it flounders in a couple of key areas. The dev's work ethic is brought into question too as this barely qualifies for a prologue by most VN's standards.

Presentation
Summer Heat's presentation is great at a first glance, it has a clear defined identity and it shows a lot of polish in key areas like the menus, in game UI and overall flare and aesthetics, almost everything comes together except for some hiccups when it comes to the sound and some visual elements which I'll explain later.

Gameplay
Top of the line as far as linear VN's are concerned. So far your choices don't diverge too much (which is a good thing for the development side of things), but there's plenty of interactivity and reactivity peppered throughout the game, a lot of your choices are remembered by the characters and the order that you do certain dialogues/actions matter by the way some scenes play out. It's great because it adds replayability and you can go "oh shit that was not a meaningless choice". I'm torn on the "pick this choice to get closer to x character" but other than that everything else is solid.

Sound
I like the sound effects, there's a lot of variety and off the top of my head I never went "oh, something would've been nice here", I quite enjoy the sound effects during sex scenes too, that combined with the ambience, add to the overall immersion and it makes the game feel natural. There are some issues when it comes with the music and overall sound mixing however. The music is fine, but for the most part it plays too infrequently and although I think silence can make certain scenes more poignant it loses power when you go for long periods of nothing, it's even more jarring when a melody starts playing out of nowhere as you get into an emotional scene. There are issues with the sound mixing too since sometimes the music/sfx would be at the right volume but the next time they played they would be borderline inaudible.

Visual Art
Renders are top of the line as far as 3d models go, but I have a couple of issues. There's an overuse of gaussian blur that looks out of place at best or it completely butchers a scene in places where it wouldn't make sense to have it, I know the dev is going for a "professional photograph look" but it would be nice if it was used more sparingly. Certain characters' proportions looked off to me in some places particularly early on but they may have been adjusted for later versions.

Writing
When it comes to writing in this game I'm torn between really liking some elements while disliking many others.

Let's start with the good:
I enjoy the overall eerie vibe and secrecy in the game, it's almost Lynchian in a way, I've glanced at a couple of reviews mentioning how there's no plot so to speak but I think that if done properly once the ball gets rolling the story will make sense when it gets there (if it gets there), which is why I prefaced my review by mentioning how this feels more like an unfinished prologue. If you think about it most slasher/horror films start with something boring like a lame party or visiting a creepy grandma then things suddenly start happening and I can see summer heat doing something similar with its plot. With that being said, you can have all the set up you want but if there's no payoff then this becomes more of a frustration than anything
For the bad side of the writing well...:
So far, after 2.5 years of dev time 1.5 ingame days have passed, on the same day you make a couple of trips with Miller to the same strip mall for some reason, get tangled up with most LI's and a couple of side characters, do several photoshoots, go to art class, go to PE class in the woods, play around, watch a movie, get wasted in a strip club, get reprimanded by your art teacher/summer camp leader, fool around with a girl you met earlier, fool around with your childhood friend, etc. This is in a weird balance where a lot of things are happening individually with each character but not enough is happening overall with the world and the environment that you inhabit. I have a couple of issues with poor characterization too, the story doesn't do enough to justify most of the intimate encounters that happen within the game except for maybe Eve which is antisocial (in the "lets go burn a church" sense of the word) and Mia which clearly has a lot of personal history with the MC I'm willing to bet they probably took each others virginities too so their hookup makes some sense

Porn
I'll admit, the 3/4 sexual scenes that are in the game are really hot, devs have a good eye for eroticism and the escalation that happens (within the scene) is great You just know the leg locking creampie sex scene with Bree is going to be great, however I feel like the sex scenes as of now are misplaced or just put in to appease the Patreons to avoid the "no sex" tag, the scene with the car lady feels way out of place since the game doesn't present itself as pure smut, the scene with the mafia boss daughter is similar despite having some possible plot relevance but the problem there is that too much happens within a single night for it to be believable. And although Mia's scenes are great they feel more like a warm up for the real thing that may not even come within the next two/three years (if ever). I don't know who is the audience for this, there's not enough writing or set up for the slow burn crowd and not enough sex for the ctrlskip chronic masturbators

Let's do some math, last update (v0.5) was on October 2023, 10 months ago, according to the changelog the devs did:
6 renders per day and 65 words per day at a 0.04wpm rate, I understand that dev time is not all just that but you compare this to other projects and you can clearly see how slow it's going not to mention how they are inflating their numbers just by looking at the files with unren, there are no 100 new sfx/music/ambience they are just counting every time they implement something like this on the script, might as well count scene transitions at that point.
I wanted to give this game 1 star because frankly it looks like yet another tale of "dev gets lazy as soon as he gets $1000/month on patreon", in 2.5 years 1.5 in game days have passed, there's a new 3 day deadline which means by 2029 we'll have something actually worth playing.

You hate to see it but at this rate the game is either getting abandoned or getting rushed to a completed state in an unsatisfactory manner, I didn't get anything out of it when I played the v0.6 release, I'm going to wait at least three more years or until it gets completed/abandoned. I recommend you do the same.

I would rate it 3.5 stars but there is no half star. The art is really good. I think the models are well done and really it's a highlight of the game for me. The girls at the camp are pretty sweet too. It kind of begs the question of what will happen if you start something with all of them.
It's almost like there are two games here. I like the game at camp-it's more restrained and enjoyable. When it switches to obvious porn it doesn't do much for me. The whole strip club just feels out of sync with the Lis at camp which includes his childhood friend who obviously loves him. There is some mystery at the club too which will be shown later I guess. For now it's just a place Mr Miller seems to go to for hours.

Anyway, I think it's mostly enjoyable but there are times when it borders on ridiculous and those times are why it isn't rated higher. The MC switches between Chad and some nice guy too and that doesn't work too well either. He might not have to choose an Li if they saw him going porno Jim with strippers. I guess the future will show how this game will end up.

i try not to review a game with development time in mind. But it really is representative of the game itself - the whole game is a big blue ball simulator. That would be fine - that's not necessarily bad if you get a sense of future payoff, butat this point (0.6) with plenty of time to get a sense of where the story is going, the outlook is not great.

The good:
-Renders and the girls look very nice. Cool.
-Sometimes there's good sexual tension. Every now and then there are solid scenes and writing that have you wanting more.

The bad:
- Ultimately to the above point, it's all just a tease. You think things are going somewhere, and they don't. Over time the scenes become less purposeful and replaced with content that gives a sense that the devs are stalling (in the story, don't even get me started on outside of it)
- Good games have either great story or great sex scenes (and great games have both). This game has provided neither. There are some scenes but not with main LIs. I don't give a shit about these scenes with outside characters. Those are fun to have every now and then, but not at this amount. Cassandra? That should be a one time thing, not meaningful and yet she gets more exposure than most of the main LIs. This whole strip club arch? What's the point? Ember (Tinder) just more wasted development taking away from the 5 main camp LIs. Most of the interaction with LIs at the actual camp are just a tease, or are absolutely useless towards developing either characters or sexual tension.

At this point (0.6) the dev has put themselves in a huge hole. They haven't provided the groundwork for actually developing a good story, but they also don't know how to develop the romantic/sexual tensions sufficiently to make it make sense whenever we might finally get real sex scenes with camp girls later. It really did seem like there was some hope with 0.5, but after 0.6, it's very clear that they don't know how they want to proceed and that's why they're creating useless filler content

High quality renders and some good stuff overall -- #TeamBee4life --but overall it's a bit generic. Development time is also way too long for the amount of content being produced. Seems like the devs are milking this one.

Every single trope and cliche you can think is here
-wimpy mc and at the same time the coolest dude ever...check
-girls without any personality whatsoever besides some trope...check
-stupid mafia plot...check
-literal whores as lis...check
-moron as best friend...check

the star is for the top of the class renders.

only play this if you legit dont have anything else to do.

renders are good. the story itself is interesting hoping this story focuses more on the advancement of the plot than the lewd scenes itself because i believe at the moment the story is its strongest asset. looking forward to future releases good luck devs

The game has a very very promising start, I give 5 stars for a future prospectus, I hope the dev doesn't get lost as the story progresses, but if the prologue promises so well, I think we won't be disappointed by the rest of the game.

Story seems interesting, renders look great. Designs look great too. Yeah its a short so who knows how things unfold but so far im liking it. The dialog is rough though, english is clearly not the devs first language but by no means does that kill the game though it may distract you.