VN - Ren'Py - Summer's Gone [Ch. 5 Beta] [Oceanlab]

Summer's Gone is a testament to how far stunning visuals can carry a project.
It possesses middle school tier 2edgy4u writing with an unsympathetic main character. I understand it was the intention to portray the main character as "damaged" but they only thing that's accomplished is in creating, for lack of a better term, a real cunt. I simply don't see any reason at all any character in this game would want to tolerate him for any length of time, let alone pursue anything romantic with him.
The project suffers from dreadful pacing. Summer's Gone is not updated frequently. Unfortunately some of these precious few updates have been squandered on laboriously long basketball sequences with a meaningless table top game segment added. At the time of writing we cannot discern what the main plot to this game is, nor have we been given an especially strong understanding of the game's world.
Summer's Gone commits the cardinal sin of the nonstop introduction of new characters. From a mechanical stand point, each character in a novel is a tool to accomplish a specific function (highlighting character traits, reinforcing story themes). They should not be introduced because you got an idea for an attractive new model. Each new character cannabalizes limited screen time for the truly important main characters to receive development. Combined with the length of time between each update, one would need notes on each character to simply remember who they are and sadly enough each entry would be incredibly sparse.
It's a Dean's List D-

Another game that I only tried due to the ratings, and once again I find myself wondering what it is that people see here that is worthy of 5 stars.

The MC is plain horrible - like, not in a Raptus or Euphoria way, where they are meant to be unlikable sociopaths. No, the MC is just a whiny horrible person and you'll spend every minute of this story hoping for an option to throw him into the train tracks.

There is no sex -or at least there wasn't any before I dropped it-, which is weird, what with it being a lewd game. Nevertheless, no sex wouldn't matter if the story was good, but it isn't: remember that bottom-tier MC we talked about? For whatever reason every single girl out there wants to fuck him, instead of the more natural response, which would be to punch his face.

I'm giving it an extra star because the renders have good quality, even if half of the characters look the same.

In any way, if you're looking for a good story, a relatable or likable MC, or good lewd content, this novel isn't the place.

A novel about a melancholic asshole whose dick doesn't work and is a cunt to every one for no apparent reason(his "trauma" is never revealed), this is the first MC where I want to punch his face, this dude is unbearable but that doesn't stop the supermodels from fawning all over him.

The only saving grace of this novel are the renders.

This is not a slow-burn story, it is a no-burn story.

Apart from fancy renders, that are also breaking immersion, because each of the females in the game is some super model with permanent makeup and instagram style image filters.

The MC is an emo impotent guy, who for some reason has a demonic charm and all of the 20+ females want to have a go with him, but cannot because he is impotent ofcourse.

The story flow makes little sense in general, and while there are some ok parts, it does not save the overall situation.

I am not even sure what this game is doing in F95.

Perhaps this was very good once but as someone new I feel like that is not true now. It's quality workmanship applied in a misguided way. The game is slowly collapsing under a mixed identity, slow build up with little happening and a truly awful MC.

Positives

- MC & Bella- One of the few relationships on here that feel there is real chemistry. Chemistry that works because both people are broken. Whatever else I think I will give the dev immense respect for this because that is not an easy thing to pull off. It is one of the best dynamics on this site. It feels like there is a real spark there. Biggest problem is Bella is fun loving MC is not, as of right now that limits this dynamic. Seriously it's good, worth playing the game just for it. I expected to hate this route but it ended up been brilliantly done.

- Characters- Game has very good characters. Actually it's simply full of characters that are either likable, memorable or both. All also have their own interests and relationships outside MC which goes a long way to making them feel believable and builds the characters. They have unrealistic proportions in some cases (Mila) but mostly the women look hot. Also Mila's ass justifies them proportions, fuck realism in that case. Mega booty for life.

- Renders- I mean you can see for yourself it's high level. Same for animations. There is a real attempt to make the visual part of the VN pop and have scenes be visually striking. Once again massive respect for the work put in there.

Negatives

- Language. I'm not a native speaker but have lived in UK and US most of my life. Wormy, bibi in English make the character sound infantile and they pop up again and again, wormy also just sounds unflattering and gross that's how you describe a crawling crack addict not a dick. This is not how English speaking adults talk and those words do not work in that language it pulls you out again and again. What was wrong with dick, lil you, sausage, cock, dong and honey, babe etc? That really needs to be stopped.

- The MC (sorry this one is so long). Oh boy the games biggest problem. The two ton albatross dragging everything down. He believes he's some sort of string puller. When his plans as examples boil down to rob place, be violent and don't tell sister to have some sort of leverage on guy that wants to bang her...motherfucker have you not heard of an after school fight? These aren't genius he's utterly fucking retarded. He treats people like shit, isn't fun, is petty, immature and isn't insightful, funny, intelligent, kind nothing to make up for it. There's nothing there, he is an angry void to play. It's not interesting.

I'd give that a pass in your typical AVN where the "landlady" goes mad for guy that looks like a cracked out gollum and has the personality of A4 paper. We know what's up there. It doesn't fly or work in something more serious though. It feels like he wondered in from a different game. Oh as a bonus he's a teenager in a AVN that's more impotent than a 99 year old paraplegic.....fucking Yay!

Why do I want to play as this guy? He's awful.

- No Fucking. So there's no sex, to serve the story and build up. Except it crossed the line and stopped doing that already. There's 3 chars Mila, Victoria and Bella that are at the stage fingers, hands and oral at the least make sense. The dynamic is already at that stage. The fact these dynamics stopped progressing is holding the story back not enhancing it. This is without mentioning sex doesn't stop building a story or dynamics. You can well and truly eat the cake and fuck it in that regard. It's absence is really strange and brings issues. There was no reason both build up and sex can't coexist in a story.

The reason seems to be so the MC can wallow and suffer more. Which well do we not have enough of his bullshit to deal with without him been romantically and sexually incompetent as well?

- Identity Is Mainstream. If an AVN doesn't contain porn then it's competing with my time with other non pornographic stuff. It really is that simple and unavoidable. SG with sex scenes would blow 99% of AVNs on this site out of the water even with it's issues. It doesn't as easily compete with more mainstream books and VNs and that's a problem because it's closer to them than most stuff on Patreon or here. There's a reason something of this quality isn't on the front page even on a pirate site where it's free. It's a mainstream product and judged by that standard it simply does not stand out.

Conclusion

There's a good idea here. A broken dude crawling his way back from nothing and establishing himself, establishing relationships, making a future, revealing his past and the mystery and trauma from it. But the broken part has been allowed to go on FAAARRRR too long. It's the kinda thing an editor would drastically cut down for good reason. There is a point where build up becomes filler and this game smashed that point and just kept going.


TLDR Game with a great idea and visuals but has allowed it's story and chars to fester in a emodump.

Great game I think that it is subjective, but I personally like the mystery element which makes the game has for me it's a great game and the renders are some of the best if not the best I guess my only complaint about this game is the writing I think that the dev can't really convey what he actually wants to tell but I guess it's mostly due to the language barrier, and I am looking forward to the next chapter.
P.S: sorry for my bad english

one of the best vn i have played if not the best. the story is great, although ocean is reworking the previous chapters and trying to be politically correct but i like the original one the most. The graphics and renders are by far top notch. The problem is only with the delay in updates as ocean is continuously try to rework the previous chapters

Amazing game, full of great romance and wholesome moments, especially on Bella's route, who I thnk has the best romance path I've seen in a AVN and it's not close.

The writing may not be the best but the renders, music, great characters and overall atmosphere more than make up for it. Don't play it if you expect lewd scenes

this game wants to be more than a porn/fapping/teasing story failing so hard doing it , not just because the dev isn't stephen king or some good ass writter making possible that people forget about the sex in a adult game, but and because if i want a good story with no porn, i have countless streaming platforms , pages and books to do it.

I don t know what to tell you guys, i played about 1 hour this game and the story isn't (by far) enough to make me want to spend my lifetime playing it, i prefer burn hours fappin than reading an uncomplete story where you don t know what the fk is the dev going with, tomorrow you can have the usual "health issues" post or whatever

1*

Unfortunately I have to follow the latest negative reviews and say that this project has become a little too clever for my tastes.

I'm fine with a slow burn story, the slow building of the characters and the lore of the world is but there is a limit to everything.

The author is a good dialogue writer and until now seemed to have kept the bar straight towards a specific story.

With this latest update tho, more characters continue to be added which causes a significant sense of dispersion and frustration.

Other than that, the main story didn't make any progress other than a few little clues scattered here and there. I Initially thought that the author already had the whole story in mind but I'm starting to think that he still doesn't have a precise idea (secret project inspired by Greek mythology? Great conspiracy of the rich and powerful?). The fact that the MC don't have a past is another clever ploy to be able to insert anything at a later time, a time that never arrives by the way.

Furthermore, another very important issue remains to be resolved: what genre will the project refer to? Full harem? Forced choices? And at that point, will there be the possibility of having more LI? And again, which kink will the project focus on?

None of these questions have been answered and this is starting to weigh on us because the project does not seem to have a precise identity despite the excellent technical and writing work.

That said, there is still time, and hopefully with the closing of the first chapter and the beginning of the new one, the project will begin to acquire a precise identity and give some answers.

If that happens, I'm ready to revise my vote.

I was a big fan of this game until chapter 5 then I suddenly realised that with the development time of this game the plot hasn’t gone anywhere since the first initial release. I was hoping chapter 5 was going to expand on the story and give us information about summer you know the character the whole game is based around and her mysterious disappearance but the majority of the updates just feel like filler content adding new pointless characters to a already bloated cast and exploring their backgrounds when we haven’t touched the backgrounds of the already existing characters.

Unlike others having no sex scenes doesn’t bother me I just want the story to progress and it unfortunately doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere right now. How many more years will we have to wait to see some actual character/story development.

Could be good in 5-10 years but with how long the update time is there’s just no way to get behind the story right now and some dialogue has me scratching my head. Losing scenes just so you can have music in parts bothers me a little bit I mean I can just Spotify most of them anyways Oh and 0 info on summer for like 4 years now.

Really tried liking this VN, but the dialogues between characters is not very engaging. Most of the time the characters just talk shit to each other and story so far is uninteresting to me (we still dont know shit about Summer and the point of this VN).

The fact that developer keeps reworking earlier chapters and breaking saves makes you replay it and the story doesnt get any better.

I dont understand where these 5 stars review come from.

The only great thing is the renders and good looking females, so a great way to make it worth our while is to have some lewd content, but nah nothing so far and we are probably years away from it too... our MC is pretty much a eunuch.

Save your time and play something else if want spicy sexual content, a good laugh or a interesting story of substance.

To me with this chapter 5 , Summer's Gone ends in a big disapointment, probably not helped by all the hype i had read before reading.

And it had nothing with the removal of some explicit part in several scenes in order to sell it to the german part of steam, as i was more interested by how the story was progressing and how the characters were explored, especially with the adult themes of trauma and mental issues that Summer's Gone is supposed to revolve around.

Summer's Gone v4.5 had some good potential to me, there were some things i didn't liked or felt was mediocre but when i learned the dev was going to rewrite most of the chapters, i thought it could only then be better .

And after being at first interested in seeing that some new scenes that were added to improve a bit the story background, i was then really surprised on how the scenes and dialogues that were rewrote actually removed a lot of the emotion and some of the important psychological setup for the MC i saw in v4.5

Additionally some dialogues felt so strange that often i was thinking "but none talks like that" or "i guess it shows that it's a man that is writing that woman" , though this may probably more have to do with the dev not being an english speaker.
"bibi" "wormy" "tiddies" felt annoying as it made those adults often feel like if they were 10 years old talking to each other, though fortunately there are not too many of those (in fact it's much worse in the other game from that dev in which those words are used a lot more)

Now for the renders, while some are good to very good, i was annoyed at several of them using terribly choosen camera angle or being very strange (like some of the women hairs "flying" as if there were some winds despite them being indoor).
Related to camera angles : I know people have their kinks and etc.. but when you make a specific point in the story and dialogue that the MC due to his past trauma is uninterested by some women "assets" when he talks to them, fact is that several of the renders showing the characters during those talks have the camera zoomed on either the butt or the breasts while the women are talking to him.
This just break totally the illusion that the MC had some mental trauma.

Would have been much better to make this butt/boobs camera focus only happening progressively through the story to visually show that the MC was starting to overcome his issues.

Overall v5 got worse to me than v4.5 while i expected improvements unfortunately
2 stars but if the system allowed it it would be more a 2.5 stars to me

The renders are great, sure. But beyond that you'll see nothing but a badly-written Euphoria parody. The dev thinks he's writing some serious mature story, but what you're getting is some juvenile high school drama shit.

And what kind of MC do you play, you ask? Well you're an emo loser edgelord who looks like one bad haircut away from being a school shooter. You're kinda like the Western version of the incel hentai rapist but dumber. And for plot reasons every person who has a vagina finds your socially-challenged personality hot and mysterious and wants to hop on your dick.

So did they hop on your dick, you ask? Fuck no, because MC is too depressed to be horny, I'm not kidding. He can't get hard even with a pair of naked tits in front of him. All because of Summer.

Who's Summer? Nobody knows, she died or something, not even the MC remembers. I don't think the devs remember her either.

So instead of, idk, getting your shit together and bang some chicks, you larp as Light Yagami thinking you control the school or something and all you did is hang out with some crazy bitch named Bella and do some childish crimes together, great.

What else did I forget, oh yes, basketball drama again, reminds me of that other shitty harem game about basketball. What else, you also assaulted a librarian because you were harassing someone? And also a pointless but unspoken requirement in every Renpy game to have a DnD session with the girls.

Oh most importantly, this game has no sex scenes, zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing, just competitive cockteasing like that milf game. After years of making this game, it gets nowhere.

It's official, this game has gone south.
-Story: A young man that has some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder after the disappearance of his girlfriend some years ago when they were 13 or so. He isolated himself from people since then, and now after all those years almost alone thinking in his missing girlfriend, MC is depressed, asexual, has the body of Gumby and even suffers from erectile disfunction. But he has to put his shit together and get out of his isolation because he starts in college. That's the starting point of the plot. But for some reason nothing of that actually matters. The mystery of the missing girlfriend doesn't have any impact in the story since nobody, include MC, try to solve it. Also, MC suddenly gets the body of a Greek statue and becomes handsome, dark and mysterious, so every girl and women around falls for him. Apparently, all girls in this game feel attracted by clinic depression and other mental issues, for some reason. Maybe because some of them seems to be mentally challenged too.
After that, it's just a collection of random cliché scenes without a lot of meaning. In general, the characters in this game do not speak or relate like authentic human beings. It's been years of development, and It seems that the story has just been set and we don't know where it is going or what kind of story actually is. Right now, just a pile of scenes with little connection between them, and many of them, completely absurd.

-Renders: So good that are actually bad. The dev is trying to make this game so aesthetic, so beautiful... that overdoes and makes it look like one of those meme videos of "Balenciaga" generated by an AI for YouTube. The ridiculously long eyelashes, the girls always dressed, haired and made up as top models in a fashion show even if they are just at class in college... It doesn't make the player think "this is beautiful", but "this is absurd". Of course, the dev doesn't refrain himself from giving most of them unrealistic bodies to make them look not even porn actresses, but like silicone dolls on the shelf of a sex shop. Poor Mila is the worst of them.

-Gameplay: Just a few choices, and not really meaningful so far.

And now, the dev has decided to remake everything. I thought at first that he was removing the worst over the top scenes and elements, like the female teacher hitting poor Victoria with her car and then flashing a gun to MC when he's trying to help the girl. But what has mostly done is to change some bodies -for worse- remove most of lewd scenes, and add some fancy sceneries. Now, some of the dialogues have no sense, because are related with elements that were removed, and there even aren't lewd scenes to make the player think "the game is bad, but at least is hot". No sex after 5 chapters and several years of development, by the way.

Holy shit I love this game, chapter five was incredible, man it's incredible how waiting for months is always worth it in the end.
Bella and Nami, two incredible characters that I can't stay away from; the chemistry between Bella and Nika is simply incredible


The writing of this game is incredible and the setting is also amazing

Oh boy where to start with this one....

The renders are the only good thing about this , because jesus the story makes no sense, and the little sense there is is so bad.

The plot could be summarize with Mc has a heartbreak, he's so sad and mysterious that every female character wants him, but since he's so sad he can't get his dick up.

No developpement for female character either. Don't know who they are, what's their story or maybe we will get developpement in episode 15 in 2050.

If at least we had some good sex scenes, but nope we can't get some since MC is impotent.

As for the developper, his time he split between two big games so we will never gonna get an ending.

Stay away from this, it's not worth your time.

Confusing at times, sometimes strange in the way the characters appears... But hell... This is just outstanding!
Not the typical AVN but in a lot of ways simply superior to anything out there.
Animations, renders, storytelling... Worth every (cruel) day of waiting for the next chapter ;-)
Just keep it up, Ocean!