Free Video Game Review: Everlasting Summer

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

One of the things that people will have noticed is that I tend to criticize free games for being too short. I know this might be a very unfair criticism on some levels (after all, free games aren’t designed with the intention of being huge games which will be played forever), but I also tend to do this in connection to a game that only has one ending as well, which I feel negates the issue a bit because these are games which are short and which offer little replay value. I guess you could say that I make this criticism not because I am demanding free games be huge expansive games, but because I like seeing a free game which actually has a long enough run time to keep you engaged for many hours and which offers enough variety that you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

One game which fills this category wonderfully is actually a visual novel I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now: Everlasting Summer, a game by the Russian studio Soviet Games (the name’s kind of a giveaway). It’s also their first visual novel and they’re working on a second one at the moment titled Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll (which is intended for release in the second quarter of next year). There wasn’t a lot of information about the company from when I did a search about them, so I asked them to quickly fill me in on the details (thanks, guys!).

They basically started out as users of a Russian messageboard (lichan.ru, if you’re curious: it’s changed its name since then to lichan.hk, but Russian speaking tech guys will probably be able to find the archive somewhere) aimed towards anime and other traditionally Japanese medium fans and the site had mascots made by site members (kind of like the Angry Marines from 1d4chan, I guess). There was a thread in 2008 where the idea of making a visual novel based on these mascots was brought up and it became very popular, so people willing to work on the idea were brought together to start working on it. There was a lot that changed behind-the-scenes involving team members dropping and joining the team, concepts changing, artwork being reworked and scripts being rewritten, but a final team came together and worked on the project. However, over time, the game started to distinguish itself from the “Ilchan mascots eroge” idea, so the game had its title changed to suit the change in direction, opting for Everlasting Summer. It was released in November 2013 and was eventually put onto Steam, with two free DLCs added to the game while it was there as well (and an English translation).

They talked a bit about Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll as well, but I’m going to have to save that discussion for another time (likely when Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll comes out, since I am curious to check it out). For now, though, let’s start talking about Everlasting Summer and why I have such a high regard for the game.

Everlasting Summer has a plot which is surprisingly complex, involving a character travelling back in time (sort of: it’s difficult to explain properly without spoilers) to a camp where everyone seems JUST off enough to make you (and protagonist Semyon) realize that there is something wrong about the place, but you can’t place why. As the story goes on, the story gets weirder from there, with the end result involving a mysterious figure who seems trapped in a time loop…

It’s not a story to think too hard about, basically. Still, by the standards of your average visual novel, it’s actually rather deep: there’s a lot thrown at you in it, but it is done well enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed by it. I could very easily picture this sort of game (with some adjustments) making for a fairly solid independent film, which is a good sign in my book!

The characters are all also very good. I think the only one which breaks with reality a bit is Yulya (a catgirl), but, well, this IS an anime visual novel, so it’s somewhat excusable in a “would have been more surprised if there wasn’t one” kind of way. I’m also wondering how the team got Miku into their game (I am not joking: she even LOOKS like Hatsune Miku and part of her character involves her being a good singer! Subtle...), but I get the feeling that I’m approaching things from the wrong perspective on that one, although I wouldn’t suggest showing the game to Crypton Future Media’s lawyers any time soon. I think, if I had to pick a personal favorite character, I would have to go for Slavya, but none of the characters are badly written at all. They might fall into the level of being stereotypes for some people, but I can’t say that I personally found the stereotypes to be a problem (plus, you kind of have to have characters in a dating sim which cover a lot of bases and don’t usually have the time and space to go into a lot of depth with the characters, so it’s arguably justified to have characters who seem a bit stereotypical in these types of games due to the nature of them).

The art style is where I find things get a bit iffy. The backgrounds are very well done indeed, but it’s with the characters themselves and the occasional picture that includes them as the main point where I feel things are let down a bit. It just seems a bit amateurish to me. Not bad, I should stress, but I’ve seen more professional looking artwork in other visual novels and this problem lets Everlasting Summer down a bit. I can’t complain too much in good spirit because it is a free game and originally started out as a game for forum characters, but, speaking as a critic, this is one of the areas where I would have expected better than I got.

Still, if there is one thing which I feel makes the game a good free game to play, it’s the sheer replay value of the game. This isn’t a game you will play once and everything will be the same, no matter what you do: there’s so many endings that you are almost encouraged to play it several times just to see them all, and getting all of them requires some genuine effort. It gets better when you learn that there’s actually a game inside the game (it’s basically a variant of Poker), which has consequences upon the whole game depending on how you do in it, so you do need some skill in the game if you want to get every ending. It’s not a major thing overall, but I like little touches like that, because it makes playing the game require some degree of skill aside of memorizing the appropriate option to get to the desired outcome.

As a quick note, I played the game as it was available upon Steam, which means that the adult content was not available in my copy of the game (it is easy to restore the adult content, as a quick search online will be able to point you in the right direction very quickly, but I opted not to do that while playing the game for this review). I don’t feel it detracted from the game at all, in all honesty, although I would certainly encourage people who want to play the game as intended to do so.

Overall, even in the censored version, I found Everlasting Summer to be a very enjoyable visual novel. Is it perfect? No. But it’s very well made and I have very few complaints overall, so make of that what you will and check it out if it sounds like your kind of thing!