Summertime Saga

Summertime Saga is a very surprising porn game title that has been in development since 2017 and still isn’t technically released. However, the game has been available for a very long time now as the developers’ are keen on taking fan opinions into consideration while they polish the final product.

A Booming Patreon Success

When lead developer Dark Cookie first took to Patreon to look for funding to push his passion project to the finish line, no-one could have guessed that he would end up as successful as he currently is. That is not to say that Patreon is a bad place to get funding – far from it. Rather, it’s damn impressive that a single developer with a dream and a gleam in his eye managed to push to a point where he’s making high five figures a month simply by providing the world with a free porn game.

The people backing this project are completely satisfied as well, it would seem. The game is receiving constant praise from the community and the backers alike, and Dark Cookie has escalated to hiring several developers to aid the game towards a faster dash to the finish line, without a compromise in quality.

Many other porn games depend on donations and quite a few monetize the product itself, but Summertime Saga features absolutely no in-game purchases nor can you speed the game along by spending real money. What you see is what you get. That means that for the average gamer, one of the most enthusiastic interactive porn projects is absolutely free, with no commitment or tricks up their sleeve.

Top-Tier RPG Satisfaction

The game takes some pages out of popular porn games’ books, but it manages to upstage them at every turn. Starting at the beginning, the game features an open world that you can navigate freely, to meet and interact with tons of NPCs, most of whom are female. Every single female NPC in this game is naturally up for grabs. You get to know them, romance them and finally have sex with them in properly fleshed out sex scenes. Throughout these concepts, the game manages to up the stakes categorically.

First of all, the NPCs in this game are not cookie cutter. Every single one of them has proper personality and a backstory, as well as relationships with other townsfolk around the open world. They have wants, needs and even demands that you have to pay attention to. In proper RPG game fashion, you have to watch out for cues about things that might ruin your chances with a certain girl only to prevent you from ever sleeping with her again. If this were a standard freemium porn game, you wouldn’t have fail conditions. Every girl would be a guaranteed sex partner. That might seem like the optimal approach, except in freemium games you have to pay real money to speed along your process, only to receive a reward in the form of a single static image of your character having sex with the girl.

You get none of that in Summertime Saga. Instead, you feel like you really earned the girls’ affections by getting to know them and developing proper virtual relationships. This is a real dating simulator that gives you a real challenge. You have to think strategically about these girls and make all the right calls if you want to curry their favor. And once you factor in that there’s no intended way to cheat the system, you realize just how groundbreaking this game really is. It’s a real open world sex-themed RPG in which you can truly feel immersed because your actions have consequences. You’re not on a narrow toll road being billed every 100 feet. You’re free and encouraged to enjoy yourself in a world that’s gotten more hands-on attention from its creators than the average triple A RPG game these days.

The Story

Summertime Saga doesn’t technically need a story, given that the open world lends itself to a lot of custom RPG experiences that you can cater for yourself. Still, you get a nice little intro that is a bit grim but sets the tone of the game quite nicely. There are, naturally, adult themes, but specifically there are adult themes that are not sex-related and they just add to the excitement.

Namely, you arrive at a small town where you discover that your father has been having shady interactions with some dangerous people and he has wound up dead. After the funeral sequence you also learn that you’re going to have to contend with the consequences of his actions as these shady individuals now have you in their sights.

This flavor of crime drama adds a lot of excitement and edge to the game’s overall cheerful vibe, making the exploration that much more enticing. The girls themselves are the icing on the cake, but the story meshes everything together for a very concise and entertaining experience. You flat out get more story out of this game than you would from, say, a full-length hentai movie. – And the sex is a lot more believable.

Your main character is rather forgettable on his own, which is very nice because it lets you immerse yourself into the story much easier. Had he gotten a lot more backstory and more defining characteristics he might rip you from the experience. As it currently stands, he’s a very bland and average young man without any particularly identifying traits and that lets you make up your own backstory as you play the game. You get to decide the kind of young man you are going to be. There are unfortunately no options to play as a woman yet, and it’s unclear if this would be made available in the future, but it’s unlikely since the developers would have to re-do all of the sexual animations for the game.

Technical Aspects

The game is an absolute marvel of modern coding and video game design. The art style is impeccable and boasts the absolute maximum level of quality that two dimensional graphics can bring to the screen. It draws a lot of inspiration from some retro games like Pokemon, of which the main town map is very reminiscent. On top of that you get a ton of visual novel style interactions, but not the classical first person 2D sprites, rather, the side by side with dialog on the bottom layout.

It’s a far superior layout for a game that is extremely sprite heavy. Visual novels usually have tons of backdrops that were drawn specifically for the scenes and they mix animations into the story as well. Here, it’s much more appropriate to have the characters side-by-side as there’s a greater focus on their physical interaction and it’s a much nicer experience overall. The game doesn’t refer to you in the second person at any point, so it would also be odd if the game were played from a first person perspective.

The game is of course available on PC and it’s extremely optimized. It looks amazingly well on any computer screen with properly saturated colors to have you staring at the town map for hours on end in satisfaction. Though, arguably the parts where you get to experience naked women might be a bit better.

And even though the game is receiving constant updates which add tons of content and aim to finish the stories of all of the characters, you still get to experience the game on PC and Android at the same time. Every update gets pushed immediately to the public and you can snatch it for free from the developers’ website. Truly this is the power of Patreon.