One of the most difficult aspects of expressing things throughout a novel is to temporarily abandon a particular sets of ideas that the author defines as the core element of the work to expand into some others path that adds to the main story justifying the detour (which is even more true when we are talking about a game with multiple choices, due to its vast number of ramifications). That's one of the reasons many games are easily forgetable.
Summers Gone keeps the consistency: a boy that suffers for his girlfriend suddenly disappearing after he looked at the full moon and its turned into a bloody red ball in the night sky (yeah, don't do drugs, kids), and this nighmare remains haunting him for the last 3 years. It is how you'd imagine from a boy having the same shitty dream for 3 years where the good times with his girlfriend suddenly vanish, left him behind at the mercy of only loneliness and despair (as represented by the dark sky and the bloody moon). The boy becomes empty; every aspect of life itself becomes an insane joke, based into suffer without a motive, without meaning, and facing this cynical characteristic of life, he embraces this sarcastic way of being, which is pointed out sometimes in the story, as an example he monologue "all this suffer could be easily solved by a simple cut (on the wrist)" after see a girl being run over (it's a dark theme, and because of this, it can be a hard to illustrate well, many could not understand or if so, could not like due to its controversial topic, but, for me, this complexity is its charm). This idea is the core that moves the viewer so as a few characters by conflict or empathy. But this, as of itself, its not enough to be something different (if you're an unhappy bastard cursing the world for an existence without meaning while everybody elses is "happy", without a single connection between these two counterpoints, thats not cool, thats just boring), and thats where the story takes one step further by giving the doubt that maybe, just maybe, some people have a good reason to be unhappy too, and some of them are, and express themselves by others means, and some aren't, and this people, following with their lives and trying to achieve some kind of happiness, presents to the MC a few new colors, and as he interacts with them, he starts to learn how to feel again.
PS.: its good to have a MC that's not dumb.
PS2.: the background sound and the music, at times, can add a nice touch.
R : choices matter, there are consequences, renders and animations are breathtaking( even before the remaster), finally we got a game with ponytails, and Bella is waifu nr 1.
