Summer in Mara
Released: June 16, 2020
Game Length: 25 Hours
Grade: C
Gameplay
Crafting Climb: At the beginning of the game, you'll essentially be stranded on an island. Eventually, you'll be able to cobble together a boat to reach the mainland. The town is full of people with established businesses. Their produce will be too expensive to buy, but their seeds will be cheap enough for you to get things going. The only way to harvest plants and grow food would be on your island. So for the first half of the game, you'll be traveling back and forth in an attempt to make some profit. Burning trees will provide you with coal while cutting them down will provide sap and wood. Mining ore will give you some lucrative options and growing crops will net you the resources you need for the quests. As a child, you will only know what your grandmother taught you. This means that you'll need to complete quests for people to learn how to make things. Depending on the circumstances, you'll learn how to cook different food recipes, better equipment, decorations, and other materials.
Exploring the World: There comes a point in the game where you upgrade your boat to travel faster and farther to more islands where you can pick-up even more seeds and resources. Although the quest system will guide you to each island while telling the main story, it can be quite the experience to find out what's out there all on your own. Money will stop being an issue as you encounter pirates (don't be afraid of them) and what is really threatening the people of Mara. You can further decorate your island and adapt to new outlooks.
Design Philosophy
Visual Novel: I find it fascinating that the developers took the route of adapting what could have easily been a visual novel with a world to explore. The characters are all great to interact with and the islands were a thrill to visit. The art style did a splendid job with its Studio Ghibli inspiration at its core and the mystery behind the islands. They provided a small prologue demo to try out ahead of time and even added a sort of free hour long epilogue. However, the world is paper thin as nothing dynamically changes. The buildings feel flat and the people barely move. Rock foundations could easily be climbed and nothing prevents you from falling off cliffs. There is a minute amount of gameplay maintenance to keep track of: automatically sleep at 24:00, collapse if you don't eat anything for a few days, or slowly fall apart when you run low on stamina for the day.
Unfinished Systems: If the world itself is very minimalist, then it is hard to justify the lack of polish on their gameplay. I'm not saying that the mechanics are "bad" per se. Let's say that they are easily exploitable. Take the "fast travel" system on the map for example as perhaps the worst offender. The ability to select a quest and find the objective on the map doesn't always point to where you need to go. By default, your cursor selects your current location. Since nothing says you have to be on your boat to use it and you can port to your current location, you might find yourself losing 15 coins to port yourself nowhere. But I found out that even though it costs you accumulative 15 coins per square to travel around, there is nothing preventing you to travel with no money. So jump around to your hearts content. Although you can feed animals to bring them back to your island, there seems to be no limit on the number of animals you can have on your island. If you don't collect resources when feeding the animals, it is possible to lose out on contributions to new resources. There is no penalty (other than getting a little hungry) to attend to your crops and immediately make progress on their growth by sleeping in that second to advance to the next day. You can always build additional wells for more water or make an offer at the top of the hill to make it rain.
Content: So what sort of things can you do in the game? The main appeal is being able to plant things anywhere on your island. Put down things like trees, fences, crops, and decorations wherever you want. You must accumulate bait to collect fish at certain locations in the world. You need to buy diving goggles (it "uses" one each time) to collect a few treasure chests underwater. You can collect stranded animals out at sea and bring them back to your island. Just watch out for that "new animal on island" overlay that seems to bug-out when you fast travel back home. There are shirts and backpacks you can swap on your person that actually changes in the cutscenes as well. Though, some of the outfits might appear backwards if they flipped your character to the other side of the conversation. Since this is a Kickstarter Project, you'll find islands named by people and small messages left in bottles. There are 90 of these letters attached to crabs scattered all over the world. Finding one will provide you with a random reward. In the 60 I found, there were maybe about 10 that were not in English. Every character that gives you a quest will be added to their own page with a progress bar to completion. Koa represents the main campaign and has 126 quests.
Summary
Review: In order to play Summer in Mara, you will need to dedicate some patience. There are a lot of mishap systems to learn as you start building up your island from scratch with the resources you gain in the world. You will need to adapt to the controls, utilize the provided lists inside all the various menus, and remember where to obtain resources when the game demands for it. Always make sure to build things, like placing down a shed will teach you how to make nails and making better equipment will open up more options. Despite the drawbacks of the graphics sometimes feeling like cardboard, everything about the characters, environment, and music are wonderful to experience. For trying out something different, I suggest picking it up at a good discount.
7-27-2022