Category: Review

Game Review: Summer in Mara (Switch)

written 07/04/2022

Summer in Mara is an Adventure/Simulation game released by CHIBIG on June 16, 2020, for Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Steam. You play as Koa who was rescued from a shipwreck by an elderly Quido named Haku and raised on her island in the sea of Mara.

Rating: 3.9 out of 5

Price: Paid $9.49 out of MSRP $24.99

Recommended: Yes

One Word Description: Relaxing

  • Pros: Decent graphics, good music, relaxed gameplay, farming, crafting, fishing, cooking, building, sailing not annoying, storyline, many side quests, easter eggs, quick jumps available
  • Cons: Back forth fetch quests, no vehicle to make main town island easier to navigate, hunger and power meter, anticlimactic ending, buggy gameplay, some quests unclear, unsatisfactory ending

Game Review – The game starts off with young Koa running around the island and Yaya Haku being the stern but loving grandma. The tutorial turns out to be a flashback and all of the sudden, Koa is older, the island is in disrepair, and the only reminder that Haku existed is a little shrine decorated with shells near the mysterious stone gate. She’s been barely surviving on her own and continues to subsist off oranges, blackberries, and fish until one day a strange creature she names Napopo happens by. With sudden inspiration, Koa fixes the island, makes new tools, and eventually repairs the boat to explore Mara!

First stop is Qalis, the main city of Mara, which is the main island in the game. There Koa meets with many new characters and thus starts the game. Summer in Mara is a quest-centric game. Finishing tasks for the inhabitants of the sea unlocks new quests, items, tools, characters, and most importantly: the map. There is a good rhythm to the flow, offering many choices to the player. The time element governing night and day has no bearing upon things aside from shop times and forcing Koa to rest. The later it becomes, the faster the stamina depletes, and no amount food will fully sustain her until she either sleeps at her house, at the inn of Qalis, on the boat or in a sleeping bag/tent.

As a general rule, when new things are available to be built, build it! Oftentimes, the act of building on Koa’s island will unlock new recipes allowing the player a sigh of relief and the fun of decorating the island. Cut down, burn, replant trees as you like. The game imposes limits on number of trees, but building wells increases that amount. Collecting animals who then produce items when fed, encourages farming of crops. Initially, the one-time-use items and limited materials can be anxiety-inducing, but most items can be bought if you have enough money. However, the game is extremely generous with random free items so long as the player spends time sailing and speaking to mail crabs. Speaking of money, it’s easy to sell items for cash, AND the nice thing is that aside from a 99 item cap, there is no inventory limit.

The main story quest can be…frustrating. There’s a lot of back and forth and fetching this and that, and dealing with irritating, stubborn old people. While that is easily forgiven of side quests, main story quests are better off being more straight forward in my opinion. Thankfully, I spent so much time gathering items that most quests were quickly and easily dealt with. The story is mostly told through character dialogue, but sometimes there are animated sequences. Trying to protect Mara from enterprising aliens was surprisingly making me angry for the inhabitants, and I was excitedly looking forward to the big ending as the events were reaching a climax when–

–an error occurred, and I got back into the game only to have missed it all. It had thrown me directly into post-game conditions. I had to go digging around on YouTube for the cutscene only to find that I missed almost nothing. The animated scene was short, a little confusing, and not all that satisfying.

Hmm. I decided that I would actually finish the rest of the quests out and spent several more hours digging up chests (apparently, I never knew about the shovel the entire game!) and making money. I kept hitting more and more game bugs as it went on until I thought I hit the biggest bug of all: an unfinishable quest! However, as is turns out, it’s not a bug. You literally cannot finish all of the quests because according to the developers it symbolizes the idea that quests never end in Mara :). Buh. While I understand where they’re coming from, that doesn’t sit well with me… doesn’t give me closure. Ugh. I wish they’d come up with a different way.

So, basically, I quietly finished the game and…I guess…that’s it…?

Gripes

  • Some things are unclear. Like some of the quests sent me to the search engines because I simply could not figure out where to get some things. I kind of wish they’d mentioned somewhere that building items on the island would help unlock new recipes. If they did, I definitely missed it as did many other players according to the forums.
  • Running around on Qalis was hella annoying!!! It’s nice that the island is well laid out, but geez, running literally back and forth to opposite ends of the place over and over again was getting seriously tiring. Plus, I think the ZR button on my Switch is permanently affected by constant depression. I wish more developers allowed constant running toggles. Rune Factory 5 did a great job of that.
  • A horse, or roller skates, or a bike would have helped tremendously on Qalis
  • BUGS. GLITCHES. From random teleportation, to getting stuck on things, to menu limitations. Admittedly, it wasn’t game-breaking and only one significant glitch (though I think that might be Switch and not software?) that prevented me from seeing the end cutscene.
  • It would have been nice to have more access to workshops/kitchen/tool making outside of the home island. The constant need to go back because I needed to make ONE item was irritating. Maybe make it a boat upgrade?
  • There are 3 types of trees that need to be planted on higher elevation. That’s kind of cool to have that consideration, except that the only place on the island to grow the 3 fruits was so super tiny! Why!?
  • I really wish there was more post-game content. Something like restoring the old Navy Academy would have been neat or establishing a new Navy altogether. Perhaps as a reward for completing all of the quests, it unlocks that! Or maybe completing the colossus. All in all, too short.
  • Some of the islands seemed useless. Like the GIANT island in the north that became a wasteland because of the Elits and houses a giant bunny. Or the two map squares that are completely empty. Even the weird Halloween Island.

Overall, a cute game! A little buggy, but very solid. I definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys fetch-quests, farming, cooking, crafting, fishing, diving, and sailing. It is extremely relaxing with no time limit (aside from parts of the main story that requires you to sail and therefore can’t quick jump), so you can explore, or craft, or build, or whatever at your leisure. The mechanics work well, the hunger and stamina meters are fair. There’s a collection element, and there aren’t too many limits on building. Developers crammed lots of little details into the game and got many things right! Very enjoyable and I will always have fond memories of it. The 4ish stars out of 5 are for annoying back and forth running, lack of satisfactory ending, and all the glitch-bugs I kept running into even if they’re not game-breaking.

Game Review: Castaway Paradise (Switch)

Castaway Paradise is a simulation game by Rokaplay released on Facebook in 2014, mobile and Steam in 2015, XboxOne and PS4 in 2018 and finally for Switch in 2021 (Wikipedia). You have become washed up on the shore of an island after falling asleep in a small boat and encountering a significant storm. When you awaken, you encounter the friendly mayor of the existing village that needs your help to recover from the storm.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Price: Paid $5.94 out of MSRP $19.99

Recommended: Yes, if you like Animal Crossing types of games

One Word Description: Short

  • Pros: Knockoff Animal Crossing, high progression speed, flexibility, fulfills a genre fix, variety, gathering, good pickup game, changes and rewards with season
  • Cons: Short, Small map, ugly graphics, repetitive, slow start, knockoff Animal Crossing, low replay value

Why I Bought it: This game had been on my wishlist for a while because I like the type of game. What pushed me to buy it finally, was that I had a strong desire to play a game like Animal Crossing and it was on sale. I’m not one to knock graphics easily because I believe that if gameplay and story are good then poor graphics can be forgiven. The initial dislike of the art did not turn me off.

Game Review – It starts off well enough. A short cut scene to explain what happened. You wash up onto the beach of the island, a kelp monster, and meet with a cow that happens to be the mayor of the nearby town. The islands had also been hit hard by the violent storm that caught the character, and she starts the tutorial section by having you pick up a few items and plant a tree. Then you get to choose boy or girl and that’s it for character creation (later, you can customize with found items like clothes and hair). The initial tutorial is over, and she gives you a tent to stay in for the moment. Then the tutorial continues with different villagers having you run errands and eventually you get all the equipment necessary to plant, grow crops/flowers, chop down trees, catch bugs, and fish.

Then it’s up to you! The goal for the game is to open up all the bridges by doing quests, selling things, and generally forming the island and later islands into whatever you want. Unlocking access to the other islands offers new fruits, new bugs, different trees, more fish, and other amenities. It also allows you to find other villagers. You make your own house, furnish it, and then expand it through your efforts. You eventually unlock a museum where you can donate your fish, shells, and bugs. The game offers lots of flexibility, so you can plant wherever and whatever you want, landscape trees to your whims, do or don’t do quests as you will.

Overall, I do recommend the game. It’s simple in concept and delivers it, too. It’s open and flexible but gives you enough direction and constraint to keep you on track and playing. The fast-forward speed of the game was fantastic mostly because you can tell that it’s a mobile game at heart. I, for one, am happy to not have to deal with annoying action points. Even though you have to earn puzzle pieces to unlock the bridges, you can simply buy them, too, which is really, very nice. As a completionist, I love the ability to gather and complete collections. They do a great job here in that regard. It gave me exactly what I was looking for (albeit short, with lack of replay value, or this case: play-on value) and fulfilled that desire for this genre of game.

However, I just could not get over the ugliness of the characters, despite my generally lax attitude towards game graphics as a whole. I understand that it’s an old game (8 years old now), but goodness. I mean, it’s not that much different from Minecraft, yet where the rest of the game was acceptable, the character design really annoyed me. There are also useless functions in the game like the bank, which is supposed to earn you interest over time, but they max you at a set maximum where the return is mere pennies especially when you quickly progress to the point where money doesn’t matter at all. The in-game shop never has a new set of items to buy, but it really doesn’t matter because you just buy everything in the menu of the game, so… yeah. What is overly underwhelming, though, is the very last part of the island you unlock. Typically, as you progress through a game like the way this one was building up, you’d expect something really big and exciting or maybe a new town or even a new villager or a big place to build a house or lots of new fish, but it was nothing. Just some new trees. So I planted all my trees and flowers and watched them grow and…that was it. It was anticlimactic and rather disappointing. I was left at the end thinking, so…that’s…it. I guess I’ll just stop playing now? And so, I just stopped playing.

Worth $20 MSRP? No.