Summers with the Sea King

This game was entered in Shufflecomp.

It has beautiful styling, with an easily readable font and nice color choices.

The game plays naturally, and tells you upfront what stats are being tracked, which made it easy to plan out overall paths through the game while still maintaining agency. I liked that.

The story writing is very strong, talking about a young person and the strange boy they fall in love with at a young age. Only during summers can they meet, and as the player ages, they soon must part.

The two paths contrast each other well, and overall the story is scoped just right, with a nice narrative plot arc that rises, has a climax, then falls to a denouement. I had chills for one ending. Very well done.

This was a linear short story where you reminisce about summers from your childhood, and the time you shared with a friend (or was it more?). The entry contains 4 endings, which are dependent on both your choices throughout the game, and one specific choice. Though it is overall linear, your choice will bring quite a bit of variation throughout.

The path I ended up getting was full of melancholy, with the looming unescapable crossroad of adulting ruining everything the magic of summer for those two. Between the want of everything to stay as is and the practicality of things, the writing really portrays how relationship can come and go, and words - written or oral - have more impacts than we think.

Apparently, that ending is one of the saddest one, but it strangely felt satisfying to get (even if I tend to prefer more sweet/good ones). Growing up can suck a lot, and nothing ever stays the same, whether you fight it or not. It felt so meaningful and inline with the choices I had made (granted, I didn’t take the most hopeful ones…)

Also, extra points for the adorable UI!!

This game really hit for me emotionally, partly because it captured some feelings/experiences that I remember from childhood but also because it's just well written and evocative. The magic of a beach vacation, friends you see once a year and don't have any contact with otherwise (us millenials may be the last generation to have that particular experience), uncertainty about the way a friend feels about you... it's all conveyed so well.

As I played through the first time, I completely forgot that there was any state tracking going on, but when I remembered at the end I was impressed by how that aspect worked. There aren't a lot of choices throughout the game; more passages end with a "next page" link than with a choice. But the five or six choices you do have, determining what you said to Caspian at certain moments in several childhood flashbacks, what direction your adult life has gone, and one action you take in the present, subtly interact to result in one of at least three different endings. After playing through the first time and getting a very satisfying, fitting ending, remembering that I'd brought about that ending through my choices made it all the more meaningful.

Playing through several more times revealed that the game is also subtly responsive to your choices throughout, in ways that heighten the emotion. So all in all, this is just what I look for in a narrative game: a good story that the player is able to help shape.