Kioku: Last Summer

I’ll start this by being honest and say that this games is very unfinished and broken. There is a lot that feels off about this game, but I’ll try my best and write down what I found. I really wanted to like this game, but it was not what I thought it would be. Ok so in the game you get almost no direction as to what your current quest is. I spent most of my playtime running around trying to figure out who to talk to or where to go next (this was made even harder by the NPCs being broken most of the time, but I’ll get back to that). The book that contains your quests is broken and do not say what you need to do until after you have completed each quest. Even after seeing the quest line in the book I don't think it does a good job of actually giving you proper direction for what you need to do to progress. I also wish the map had more uses. It shows where the player currently is, but I would also like if it would point to the next objective. Breaking this game is very easy… I think I was on day 3. I don't remember exactly where I was, but I remember getting stuck on the bike after playing with it. I went in and out of the game without closing it to get unstuck, and when I tried to talk to any of the NPCs they all just looked at me and no text would show up. Unable to progress I closed the game and restarted it, but the issue persisted leaving me with no other option but to start all over from the beginning. One time I restarted from the beginning and all the children were missing from the school cutscene. I had to restart my game after the apple mini-game after I realized I could just go and pick up the apples furthest away first, but that broke something and I could not end the day. Often I would see the yellow ring around a character and go up to talk to them, but they would again just repeat the same dialogue or talk about something relating to a previous quest instead of progressing the current quest. I would then have to run around and figure out on my own (because the quest book is broken) what I had to do to progress or restart the game. The Esc key stopped working randomly making it impossible to pause and leave the game. Sometimes when talking to dad, Asti and him would switch dialogue. Asti would speak and the camera would be on her, but the text would be dads but Asti’s face would be next to the name, and same for dad. There are so many more issues like this, but I don't want this to go on forever. Each of the NPCs have about two lines of dialogue that they keep repeating. Even while in the middle of a quest the blond girl will always talk about crabs. I would at least expect them to maybe say something relevant to what was currently happening in the game, but nope. Again, this just made it harder to know what I was supposed to do next. This is a recurring problem with every NPC in the game. I would run around each day and see if they had anything new to say, but it would always be the same line of dialogue. The teacher would be standing outside the school and welcome you to the library and talk about how it smelled of books in here… while standing outside. She and Asti's dad would often stand together outside the school, but there was no dialogue indicating they were actually talking together. During my time playing most of the NPCs were just standing around random places on the island doing nothing and say the same thing every time. Oh, also when NPCs had to be somewhere new, they would all run in a conga line to the next location. This was unintentionally funny and made me laugh because sometimes the character talking would still be running during a scene, and you would get this intense closeup of them talking casually to you while still running. Why not just have them teleport to the next location? At the beginning of this game you get to play a game caller Marubi. I spent so long trying to figure out how to even start this game, yes, START. It begins with you choosing what card to play with and then a button on the right of the screen lights up indicating you press it to begin. This is not the case. I pressed every button on my keyboard, everywhere on my screen and nothing worked. Pressing R would “restart” the sequence I believe, but this would also double the music track. I tried restarting my game several times and nothing worked. I eventually figured out (I don't know how) but to actually start the game you must have your mouse over the card you want to use, and then press Enter. Finally getting to play the in-game marbles game (not a card game) it was very boring. Its super easy, and there is no strategy to the game. You just point and shoot at your opponent until you break their marble. Your opponent take a long time to shoot at you, so I felt I just waisted my time waiting for them to shoot and for it to be over. The board you play on is too big. Making it half the size could maybe help the game not take forever. I've already said a lot, but the game has so many issues… I feel the game is a bit misleading with what it really is. I’m a big cosy gamer, and this game really isn't doing anything cosy gamers might be looking for. I think this game is actually for young children? I dont see how this is meant for adults. The writing is terrible. The way the characters talk in this game is straight out of an anime sometimes. The NPC are about as interesting as a blank piece of paper. The crab fishing minigame wasn't engaging or doing anything new. You literally just smash E and hope you catch something. Using the bike to get around was fun, but it just made me realize just how small and empty the island you are on really is. You cannot interact with anything aside from the NPCs and enter a few buildings. Going around and interacting with certain characters or other things often breaks the game in weird ways. The main character Asti is bland. Like all the other characters she isn't very interesting. She just seems like a Mary Sue with how she doesn't seem to have any flaws. You sometimes have dialogue options, but I dont think it does anything to the story. The story isn't engaging or interesting. I could maybe forgive how broken the game is if the story was good, but I don't think there really is much more of a story going on other than one of the kids being sad about moving. Why should the player or Asti care? We just met him, and he immediately starts bullying Asti. I get that this is him lashing out and being upset, but wow is it done poorly. Again, this game is unfinished. Playing it is pure frustration with how confusing it was and how often I had to restart because the NPCs or the quests stopped working for no reason. Even if the devs fixed every bug this game has, I don't think its worth 15 euros. Don't buy. A waste of my time and money : (

Alright let's talk. For me this is around a 7.5/10. This is a fun cozy game, which feels like it could be reminiscent of childhood, or an idea of childhood. It's a pretty short game, but it tells the story it sets out to tell pretty well. There's a sense of wonder throughout. I enjoyed the graphics and the music. The minigame was also kind of a cool idea. That does not mean the game does not have issues: Yellow tape: A lot of people complain about markers in games. I got lost trying to figure out where to go several times. Part of this was that the logbook didn't update so I had to restart to go back to the last point of information if I didn't remember what I was doing cause I had to step away. Soft locks: There is no hard lock in this game, but there are several softlocks. Areas where dialogue trees won't generate or don't exist and will prevent future dialogue (this happened several times). After one cut scene (part of the cloudberry quest) the game though I was partway through the ground. Each time something like this happened I had to shut down the game in full, and then restart to get it to fix. Language switched(?): One time the games language randomly switched to Japanese (I think?), and one time it randomly switched to German. Once again had to fully exit to fix. Achievements/100%: Stickers: There's no logbook of which stickers are found or are missing. I'm apparently missing two stickers, have gone back through multiple times, and cannot find these. Would be nice to have some idea what's going on here. Maybe have the characters provide a hint when they have a dead dialogue tree instead of having them stare into space? Bike Ride Achievement: I don't know what in the Lumiose City is going on with this, I went back and forth from the map multiple times, definitely over 50, and this still didn't pop. There's no tracker on where this is, which would be nice. Similar mention with the skipping achievement. For the not getting caught achievement, I'd like to know where this applies to? I guess the school? For this it would be nice to have manual save and auto save so if someone wants to go back they can. --------- This is a story game. The MC is a child. It's from a child's POV. I enjoyed it, but understand this is a story. You're not here for replayability. You're here for a story.

[b]NOTE[/b]: This review was written a short time after release. The reason for not recommending it is that at the time of writing, many bugs, soft locks and other issues prevents a functional experience from start to end for me and several other players at least. [b]These issues may have been fixed since then, and if they are I would have recommended the game.[/b]: I'm very torn on how to review this game. On one hand, it's the first game of Lugn Games and the developers there are really nice. I want them to succeed. They have put a lot of work and their souls into the game, and making a game is a huge undertaking. Kioku as a game also has a lot to like. On the other hand, Kioku has been a rough journey with stuttering, many bugs, issues and something which doesn't reach its full potential. The story stands at the center of the game. It's slowly paced with low stakes, where we follow a group of children doing things reminiscent of summer in Scandinavia back in the early 2000s. This is not a bad thing, and together with dialogue highlighting the different personalities of the children there is a serene, child-like innocent tone of the whole game. In this sense, Kioku manages to achieve its goal of transporting you into a world of idyllic, innocent nostalgia. That said, the story explores few original ideas and is very predictable. I think some of the best childlike stories are the ones which also explores themes in interesting ways adults can appreciate too. The Moomin stories does this very well for me, and I find Kioku lacks this extra quality making the story interesting for children and adults alike. The visuals are a bit of a mixed bag as well. It's clear that the game tries and wants to lean into visuals imitating games from the early 2000s such as Zelda: The Wind Waker. The devil is in the details though, and Kioku fails to utilize a lot of techniques which could have helped really strengthening the authenticity of such an art direction. A few examples are how the game has a more modern take on cel shading, where modern shadow and lighting techniques are used. Despite this, the lighting often feels very bland and flat. Kioku's visuals are nice during daytime where the vibrant colors, strong shadows and modern techniques like AO plays well together. This model falls flat inside buildings or in the evening, where everything looks flat or the lighting model fails to unify everything. The games Kioku tries to imitate did a lot of careful work around their texturing and lighting model together with use of graphical techniques. Imitating this in an authentic way is difficult, and doing it together with modern graphics techniques is even more difficult. Kioku fails to do this for me, and it ends up hurting the vision of taking me back to 2000s nostalgia. In addition, the modern techniques greatly helps making my GPU (GTX 1660S) roar loudly while the game lags and stutters a lot at lower graphical settings. This is unfortunate, because the game could have used more authentic techniques over modern ones which would have been great for both performance and the overall vision. The music is a highlight of the game. Especially the calm, soothing main theme and the more upbeat Marubi theme is great. At the same time, I find myself wishing there were more music to the different situations that happens on the island. The best themes also gets a bit repetitive towards the end. This repetitiveness is something I also find in the gameplay. The first half was fun and varied, but halfway through the game a lot of the quests starts repeating. The island is also quite small, so halfway throughout the game I had explored most of it and the sense of exploration and wonder was gradually replaced by frustration over bugs, soft locks and game breaking issues. Minor bugs such as broken localization, wrong UI and characters teleporting around is not a huge deal for me, but it does drag down the overall impression along the way. On the first day of the game I encountered a soft lock. On the third day, I encountered my first hard lock. I ended up having to tamper and modify my save file to be able to progress at all and get the game back to a working state, only to hard lock two quests later again. This trend continued throughout the rest of the game. Towards the end crabs, the shop, quest logs, achievements and NPCs had completely broke down. [b]This makes it difficult to recommend the game as it stands at the time of writing.[/b] The developers have been notified and are working hard to fix these issues. I do believe issues will be resolved and there will be less issues as time goes on. The people at Lugn are great and it's clear that they want Kioku to be as best as it can be. But, from a player perspective I think it would have been better to postpone the release of the game and do more quality assurance to weed out these issues, especially since there's been so many of them along the way. In the end, Kioku is a mixed bag for me. It doesn't manage to truly fill me with cozy 2000s nostalgia, but it is a calm, slow and innocent adventure. It pains me to say so, but my feelings in the end is mixed with being bothered by bugs and issues, a little boredom and a lingering feeling that the game could have been more. That said, I've also had fun playing Marubi, fishing crabs and playing with the other children on the idyllic Kioku island.

Buggy. Wait until everything is fixed.

Es un juego muy bonito donde haremos amistades, está lleno de mini juegos y lo mejor es que se puede jugar al ritmo de uno, si no te dan ganas de hacer un mini juego simplemente seguí con otra cosa y ya. Me la pasé buscando stickers por la playa. Es para jugar un rato cuando venís re estresado y querés relajar o mandarle toda una tarde. Puntaje wholesome 8/10

Such a cozy, nice experience!

[h2]前言[/h2] 不是，哥们！谁家好人快暑假了转学啊！？也就是国外了，放国内能直接达斯，不过你别说，小时候就应该好好玩，因为长大后真的没有时间和精力。 [h2]游戏介绍[/h2] 《Kioku: 夏日记忆岛》是一款开放探索类型的游戏，游戏采用的是3d的卡通画风，整体看上去非常讨喜，而且游戏的优化做的不错，在游玩过程中没有任何的卡顿、掉帧！ [h2]游戏剧情[/h2] 玩家在游戏里面将会扮演少女阿斯蒂，在夏天跟着爸爸来到了记忆岛，我们将在这座岛屿上面度过自己人生中的第一个暑假，并且在岛屿上面结交新的朋友。 [h2]游戏玩法[/h2] 游戏玩法很简单，虽然说是开放世界探索，但是还是需要完成主线任务来推动故事剧情发展的，任务会记录在背包里面的笔记本里面。游戏目前的内容并不算多丰富，大部分都是通过和人物对话来获取新任务，然后再完成任务，而且游戏的引导方面做的不咋滴，只告诉你要去的位置，但是这个位置说的很模糊，虽然有着地图，但并不是那种实时地图，而是一张岛屿的简略图。不过游戏也有着自己的特色，比如弹珠怪物对战、钓螃蟹、偷果子等等，玩法都比较简单，看眼教程就知道怎么玩了。 [h2]总结[/h2] 游戏整体质量还算可以，画风这块非常加分，小游戏的玩法做的也不错，就是引导不太行，还有就是内容不够丰富，稍微有点枯燥，感兴趣的可以自己试试！ [quote] 闲暇时光，不妨试试游戏。 欢迎关注[url=store.steampowered.com/curator/45653622/] 闲暇時光鉴赏组 [/url] [/quote]

I went into Kioku: Last Summer genuinely excited. The Y2K setting, nostalgic atmosphere, and focus on friendship and collecting immediately caught my attention. Unfortunately, my experience with the game left me more disappointed than I expected. The hardest part is that the potential is clearly there. The charming visuals, fun collection mechanics, and overall concept create a strong foundation for a memorable summer adventure. There are moments where the game captures exactly what it is trying to be: a nostalgic trip back to a simpler time. However, the technical issues, inconsistent progression, save problems, and lack of direction made it difficult to fully enjoy the experience. Too often, I found myself focusing on what was not working instead of getting lost in the world the developers created. Right now, I have a hard time recommending Kioku: Last Summer in its current state. I truly hope the devs continue improving the game because there is something special here. With more polish and fixes, this could become the summer adventure it was clearly aiming to be. Pros +Strong nostalgic Y2K premise +Charming visual style +The game clearly has potential Cons -Save/progression issues -Lack of direction -Steam Deck compatibility problems despite being listed as Playable -Collection tracking inconsistencies -Story logic that occasionally feels forced Verdict: 6/10 Check out my full review here Kioku: Last Summer Review - Not Quite Ready For Summer - Screen Hype https://share.google/yy4XrCq5brBwWIoKw

《Kioku: 夏日记忆岛》给我的第一印象是一款十分休闲有趣的夏日小岛游戏，游戏故事由阿斯蒂与父亲来到记忆岛定居生活开始，讲述了在这个暑假期间阿斯蒂在记忆岛上结识居民，探索岛屿的故事。只不过在实际体验过后却与想象中的差距很大，或者说当前版本的内容并不够有趣好玩。 [h2] 记忆岛的每一天 [/h2] 游戏主要以任务剧情驱动，玩家扮演阿斯蒂在岛屿上结识朋友，每天经历各种各样的日常故事，与伙伴们对决怪物弹珠、QTE钓螃蟹、潜行偷水果、自行车竞速比赛以及探索岛屿的过程中也能收集各类贴纸等等，娱乐项目比较丰富，整体上玩法十分休闲，但例如像类宝可梦的怪物弹珠游戏并没扩展太多有意思的玩法，还是比较可惜的。 话虽如此，游戏既然以任务驱动，不妨会有不少跑图以及人物对话，但游戏并没有明确指引，只是将任务需求、地点通过任务清单或只言片语中为玩家展现，这就导致前期非常摸不着头脑，很多时间都是在四处搜寻，例如前面几天会让玩家前往各种地点完成任务，但像咖啡厅、商店并没有标注在哪个位置，玩家仅能凭借经验自己寻找，而且有些任务也并没有明确告诉你完成方向，也只能自己摸索，这就导致游戏中的地图仅仅是告诉玩家岛屿大方向以及人物所在地外并无其他发挥作用。 另一方面，游戏的表现力与想象中差距或许很大，并没有太多温馨休闲的感觉，剧情人物之间的文本对话非常白开水，一些玩法上也没有持续吸引力，但探索收集对于我这种收集癖来说还是有些意思的，但问题就是游戏貌似没有提供收集册，展现玩家所收集到的卡牌、贴纸等要素，也希望制作组能加入一个，或许还能帮助玩家查缺补漏。 [h2] 总结 [/h2] 总体来说，《Kioku: 夏日记忆岛》是一款看似吸引人但实际上仍如大量优化打磨的作品，它有着不错的底子，以夏日小岛的日常生活探索为主题，不妨能令玩家在体验过程中静下心来，但游戏的引导、一些BUG也让原本应有的体验降低不少，只能说期待制作组之后的更新能带来更全面的作品。 [quote]漫话漫谈，期待关注:[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44551694/]写生漫话家[/url] ←节约宝贵时间，阅读省流测评~ 欢迎加入漫话家的大家庭:[url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/14030826]写生漫话家[/url]←共同探讨游戏中的精彩片段，向玩家展现第九艺术的魅力~

Very cosy game! I'm a few days in and still exploring the island. cute aesthetic and characters, the Marubi minigame is so nostalgic. Love all the little details!