Summer's Gone is a VN where you play as a borderline sociopath as he goes to college.
It's a very pretty game, not gonna lie. I haven't seen too many VNs that have cinematics and I like them here. The girls are cute and their outfits are delightfully impractical, even with the lack of sexual content as of yet.
The number of choices available is honestly daunting if you look at the walkthrough. While this has the potential to be a great strength of the game, it also has the potential to be the opposite. The more options available to the player, the less focused a play-through can feel and the weaker each possible path can feel. There’s a limit to the amount of focus a dev can put into everything in a game, and the more stuff in a game, the less focus each individual facet receives. I hope Summer’s Gone can deliver but currently…
Unfortunately, the story is a mess. It seems to pretend it takes place in the real world, but just nothing that happens seems realistic. The sociopath main character witnesses a car accident and someone pulls a gun on him as he waxes philosophical on how it might be kinder to end the victim? The girl in the accident forms some sort of bond to the person who witnessed the accident and brought her back her wallet? A bunch of people introduce themselves to the uninterested MC, like him, and proceed to drag him around socially? The college gym class consists of attempted man slaughter? The list goes on and on. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief to some degree, or completely if the game is silly, but Summer's Gone is absurd while pretending at realism.
The dialogue trends towards awkward as hell. I think there's some degree of weak English going on in the game, but the fact that the game abounds with “roommates” complicates things greatly. If there’s no incest going on, couldn’t they just be parents and siblings? I know there are rules on patreon and all, but there are times I’m legitimately confused as to how characters are related. It doesn't help that the MC is in college... a place where it's rather expected to have ACTUAL roommates.
Finally, the main character is just borked. He can’t decide who the hell he is and stick with it. At the beginning of the story he’s an anti-social, jaded asshole. Once he gets to college, he quickly starts being friendly to other people… with a rather sociopathic focus on favors, using friendship and information against people, and completely excessive revenge plots. I could sort of run with this transition, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s also occasionally nice to people for no personal gain. It’s impossible to have any idea what the hell he’s going to do next, which makes him a pretty poor main character.
This is personal opinion, but I think it derives from having too much leeway in the amount of choices the main character has. While one path of choices can lead to the main character receiving much needed support and healthy relationships, different choices can exacerbate all of his worst impulses. This would all be great… if you couldn’t do them simultaneously. It’s bizarre to have the generally kind main character be randomly vicious, just as it’s weird to have the vicious main character be randomly kind. Judging from the walkthrough, there are stats that define what type of person the main character is, but it looks like they don’t dramatically affect most dialogue. This game could be phenomenal if this got straightened out, but currently it’s a painful weakness.
Overall, I can’t recommend this game. It has a lot of potential between the beautiful visuals and the amount of work that’s been put into the choice tree, but I’m skeptical that it will ever be able to deliver. There are a large number of characters in the game and already a monstrous number of decisions, all of which guide the story, but few of which seem to close off routes. It’ll take a huge amount of work to get any individual path through the game particularly strong with so many different characters and options. I wish the dev luck, but I’m not optimistic.