While summer isn't officially here just yet in my hemisphere, we turn our attention away anyway from a private eye mouse to another indie game, one of a decidedly cheerier and more charming focus--that of a young girl's first summer on her new island home. This is Kioku: Last Summer, and this is also the SuperPhillip Central review.
Summer break with a game that can sometimes be summer broken.
Summer holds a lot of special memories for me, especially as a child, and no doubt I'm not alone in that. Friendships could continue to grow and prosper. Summer days spent playing outside from day to night, until the streetlamps turned on and you knew it was about time to return home. It was an era where the only real worry in life was possibly a scraped knee--or dreading the new school year starting, for that matter.
Kioku: Last Summer attempts to recapture the nostalgia folks have for summer with a decidedly charming game. Unfortunately, like a rural Midwestern summer, it's also full of bugs, and just like the spiders and mosquitoes of the real world, these bugs can bite--though in a different way that does make for a less enjoyable experience.
Starting out, Kioku: Last Summer stars Asti, a young girl who finds herself at a new island home with new friends to make, new discoveries to be found, and new adventures to be had. It begins with the island's ferry docking, and you, as Asti, entering the school where you're introduced to your classmates, the friends that you hope to make.
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| Summertime is always better spent with friends. |
The game follows a day-to-day format, though not in real-time. Each day presents a series of activities for Asti to accomplish to further the story. The first one, for instance, requires her to pick up three lost marbles belonging to a character named Bo, who doesn't take too kindly to Asti at the start of the game. He blames her for having his Game Boy-like device taken away from him by their teacher, calling Asti a "snitch" for doing so. Fortunately, this island is otherwise too kind, so snitches don't get stitches here. ...Ahem. Other activities that further the story can last a whole day, like searching for the whereabouts of a certain islander, or simpler events like bike races, learning to catch crabs from the sea, and various activities that essentially boil down to fetch quests.
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| Feeling crabby? Head to the water to catch the clawed creatures, then! |
Meeting the locals isn't too rewarding or exciting. They seldom have anything interesting to say when you speak to them, and the lines of dialogue at one time are limited to, well, just one line of dialogue each. This is not Animal Crossing where the locals have myriad things to say at a given point, and this isn't meant to be a sim like Animal Crossing anyway. A bullet point to Kioku: Last Summer is building friendships, and this couldn't be more passive. It's simply completing activities and progressing the story, and eventually Asti is the biggest social butterfly on the island--just like that.
When you're not progressing the story that plays out among a week of in-game days, there's not too much other stuff to do. You can search around the island for stickers, hidden in some pretty crafty locations--to the point where I still can't find the last one I'm missing for 100% completion. You can skip or ride your bike around the island for faster travel. You can head to the sea and catch crabs in a simplistic "fishing" mini-game, and you can even play a surprisingly enjoyable creature-battling, marble-slamming mini-game called Marubi.
Marubi pits three creatures in marble form against your opponent's trio of monsters, as you take turns rolling and spinning your marbles, or creatures, into your opponent's marbles. Each turn you and your opponent roll one marble apiece, and "attacking" another marble causes it to lose health points (or HP) based on their attack power. When all three marbles on one side are destroyed, the game is over and the victor is crowned. Now, sure, the game isn't very balanced in the sense that once I got a certain trio of marble monsters, I found that I was pretty much unstoppable, but the game itself is still fun.
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| Instead of believing in the heart of the cards like in Yu-Gi-Oh!, do we believe in the heart of the marbles in Marubi? |
Unfortunately, island life isn't ALWAYS the most fun or the easiest to adapt to in Kioku, and not because of the occasional rivalries and friction between friends. No, island life is difficult because the game, unlike the pristine island itself, is littered with bugs, some of these actually locked my progress for a bit. Kioku: Last Summer is an incredibly unpolished experience currently, and that's even after the developers' patch.
I've had instances where I interact with one islander, and suddenly I'm speaking to someone halfway across the island. Sometimes interactions don't work at all. The character you're trying to speak to will face you as if to initiate a conversation, but nothing will be said.
Generally, characters and tasks you have to accomplish next are helpfully highlighted by a colorful ring of flowers blooming around them. However, on some occasions I had it where even though I tried to talk to the proper character with the ring around them, they didn't initiate or continue the quest line. Instead, they talked about the weather or how they were yearning for coffee or whatnot.
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| Chat with the locales, as they have... well, not much to say. |
One very annoying glitch after a second bike race in the game saw me exit the finish line, and then go about my merry way. Unfortunately, as I learned later upon reloading my autosave (by the way, there is no manual save option in case you get softlocked and need to reload a previous save) that there was supposed to be a phone call from Asti's dad that she was supposed to be stopped by, but when I originally played through the scenario, no such phone call or interruption happened. So, basically a half-hour of my time was wasted wandering around like a goofball wondering why I couldn't make any further progress.
Kioku: Last Summer is not a long game by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it's over faster than my summers tended to feel as a child. To roll credits takes but a handful of hours, four or five, to be exact. Yes, there are achievements to earn, but most of these are time-wasters meant to be filler and little more. Why anyone would want to waste time "kicking" 100 goals into a soccer net is beyond me--WELL, OKAY! I WANTED THE ACHIEVEMENT!!!
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| But seriously, heck to the no, if you think I'm riding this bike ad infinitum for that last achievement. |
The game itself graphically on the presentation end of the equation is rather lovely. The anime aesthetic given to each of the islanders and characters in the game is suitably charming, and Kioku's color pallet is pretty and pleasant on the eyes. I especially enjoyed the lighting, specifically when the sun sets, blazing a bright ball in the sky over the horizon, sending its beams onto the island.
The sound design is a mixed bag in the sense that the default settings, at least when played on Steam Deck, are ridiculously low. It took me an hour to realize there was supposed to be sound in the game other than little fanfares here and there! Seriously, bring all the audio levels up to 100% if you want to hear anything. What I DID hear was nice and serviceable for this type of game to elevate the cozy atmosphere the developers wanted to give the player.
Kioku: Last Summer is a short experience, as stated, and unfortunately, it's one that I would have a hard time recommending in its current state. Perhaps once the bugs and glitches I experienced on a consistent basis are ironed out and some additional polish is included, this would be an easier recommendation for breezy and cozy summer game. As is, though, you'll suffer some frustrations that are ironically the complete antithesis of the cozy vibes the development team intended. That said, I still overall enjoyed my time on the island, but if I didn't have a review to write, I would have most certainly held off until next summer.
[SPC Says: D+]
A code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
