To be honest I've never been so affected or emotionally engaged by a visual novel before. What is weird is how my opinion of some of the characters has altered and changed as I've come to know them and understand them better. None more so in fact than Bella, who I originally dismissed as an archetypal "mean girl", i.e., beautiful, haughty, wealthy, spoilt, cosseted and privileged, who took pleasure in torturing innocent, defenceless and less fortunate peers for no other reason than she could and always get away with it. (I expect we've all met people like that.) Then, as the story gradually evolved, I began to realise that at her core Bella was not like that at all but a damaged person, much like the MC himself, who had suffered some kind of inconceivably tragic experience which wounded her so deeply, completely and terribly that it distorted her personality, broke her spirit and twisted the world away from her, burning and scarring her as much as Summer's disappearance had the MC, altering the course of her life forever. Both were shattered individuals fated not to become the people that they should have been because personal catastrophe had left them estranged from society, doomed to live as outsiders wracked by almost intolerable suffering which might never be undone.
Initially I loathed Bella, then began to understand her, then became sympathetic towards her and now I love her! WTF? What a roller coaster ride Bella turned out to be! And she's just one of Summer's Gone characters! The drama of Summer's Gone is nothing less than Shakespearean and such a brewing masterpiece meant I HAD to become an official Patreon supporter of Ocean - didn't really want to - was forced to - literally couldn't help becoming so.
I'm rambling...
Ocean's Patreon pages are actually really interesting reading, especially if you are technically inclined, because besides talking about the games he is developing he also writes about hardware and software. I was intrigued to read that he is going to model one of his characters, experimentally, using the open source Blender program, which I have tinkered with in the past but found hard work I have to admit. Blender is excellent software but has a very complicated and quirky user interface and is less well documented, as it comes, than commercial software. (Although there are plenty of books available and freebie online tutorials on tap on the web.) Anybody interested can download the program from its website (or repository if you use Linux) gratis. Because Blender uses OpenGL, is written in C++ and scripted in Python, versions are available for most operating systems; if you want to preview what it can do (and it can do plenty!) check out some of the Blender movies on YouTube.
Rambling again...
Anyway, what I actually came here to say is that when I visited Oceanlab's Patreon pages I didn't notice many people giving the guy much praise for his efforts and would suggest that Patreon supporters reading these words drop by and tell the developer how much you like his work, as more and more of you in growing numbers are doing on this thread. Artists feed off praise (my artistic girlfriend tells me) and I don't think it'll hurt if you write a few kind words, on the relevant Patreon pages, expressing your admiration for Oceanlab's output, which, in my humble opinion, is the best of the best extant as far as the genre is concerned.
Summer's Gone put me through the full gamut of human emotion.
(No game has ever done that for me before.)
And, yes, I do know that this is a ridiculously long post!
(Couldn't help that either.
)
