Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid Review

Many of Japan’s biggest games have been created in an open world format, but I didn’t expect the next one to be so…*checks notes*—summer vacation adventures. Sony’s Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) series pioneered life sims in the early 21st century, and now comes Natsu-Mon: a feel-good adventure that gives a rarely seen subgenre novel life. As a longtime fan of Sony games, I welcome change rather than demand cleanliness. I still don’t get tired of walking through a virtual field of sunflowers, even though I’ve done it often enough to become a seed farmer.

Natsu-Mon is the latest spiritual sequel from Natsuyasumi creator Kaz Ayabe, who’s returning to spearhead novel releases for other publishers — you might remember 2022’s Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation — but unlike Sony’s games, they’ve finally gotten English localizations. Natsu-Mon originally released on Nintendo Switch last year, and in addition to now being in a language we can understand, it’s also had a suitably beefed-up port on PC.

Given its heritage, Natsu-Mon sticks close to the structure that Boku no Natsuyasumi created 24 years ago: play as a little boy in Japan in the past decade, and spend all 31 days of August (a tiny but typical summer vacation for Japanese schoolchildren) in a remote village. The main difference is that while previous games featured stagnant painted backgrounds and gorgeous tank controls, Natsu-Mon goes full-on 3D with an open map. The home base is the tiny town of Yomogi, surrounded by a neighboring town, a mountain, and all sorts of hills and grasslands. Said little boy Satoru is the son of the managers of a traveling circus troupe, and inevitably helps organize the town’s regular shows.

On the second day, Satoru’s parents have a proverbial fire to put out, so he’s taken care of by circus performers and, indirectly, the rest of the town. As in any good RPG, there’s a cast of characters milling about the town at all hours of the day: the neighborhood kids with their “detective agency,” the cafe owner and twin brother who runs the lighthouse, the nosy journalist, the men in black. Many just hang around reliably, but some provide tiny moments of magic, like when you go to see who’s out for a drink in the evening, or when the cafe and toy store owners practice playing folk songs under a tree. Still, replayability is naturally high, since you talk to a character every day just to get a feel for the next plot point. The characters aren’t entirely the focus of Natsu-Mon, but they provide the necessary depth to fill the rest of your time exploring the setting.

Breathless in freedom

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On Switch, people didn’t waste time comparing Natsu-Mon to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel. But it’s not a clone in the strict sense of the word, it just borrowed a few good ideas: an upgradable stamina meter (“stickers”) to stay energetic longer; a cape for gliding longer distances; and Satoru’s ability to grab and climb almost any vertical surface.

Where Natsu-Mon adds a welcome change to the open-world routine is the lack of punishment for the player. Satoru has no health meter, so there’s no way to get hurt. Power You will be slowed down by running out of stamina or falling from a high enough height, but you will never lose. So go ahead: run in front of a moving train and watch it stop instantly. (In the game, kids! Only in the game!) All that limits you is your stamina meter and the approaching dinner time.

But, man, that stamina meter is a huge weakness. I’m sure I’m the type of open-world gamer who usually tries to get superpowers as early as possible, but I’ve been a long-time Natsuyasumi player and love them for their art and storytelling—they’re all about mindfully soaking up the tiny pleasures of life. So when the action-gamer part of me takes over in Natsu-Mon and I just want to get more stamina stickers so I can climb the Yomogi Lighthouse, I feel like I’m avoiding more enjoyable moments that I could sluggish down and enjoy. There are side activities like fishing and collecting fossils, as well as regular quests (“adventures”) that take up story and character exploration. To make sure that’s relative slowing down: Natsu-Mon looks like a cozy life sim, but I found myself running around constantly, even if not aimlessly, making the experience feel more like a cross between Zelda and A Short Hike.

The expanded freedom of 3D comes at a tiny cost in scenery. I mentioned that Natsuyasumi’s games were known for their painted backdrops with cartoon-looking characters set against pretty, realistic scenes, but here the entire world errs on the cartoonish side. While the characters are nicely styled with flat colors, parts of the map have mushy terrain that unfortunately isn’t much more consistent from a distance.

But not everything is questionable: I appreciate the low-poly graphics, and I found some really pretty fields, hillsides, and vistas that feel appropriately like something out of a storybook. And given Natsu-Mon’s 20-year pedigree and nostalgia underpinnings, you might as well pretend it’s a PlayStation 2 game—in the best sense of the word, of course.

Windy time

As a cartoonish Switch game with an install size of under 3GB, Natsu-Mon should run smoothly on anything with graphics hardware from the last few years. By comparison, the Switch version struggles to maintain 30 FPS, but on PC the game effortlessly hits a stable 60. This also applies to Steam Deck, which, because it’s also similar to the Switch, simply leaves the Nintendo version in the dust. This might get a passing grade, but digging deeper, the graphics settings are at best utilitarian: FPS is circumscribed to two toggles (30 or 60) and a single general “image quality” setting that only seems to affect the rendering resolution.

You get a full range of screen resolution options, but no real ultrawide support. It’s a bit of a letdown, but all things considered, it’s fine for a chill adventure for all ages that doesn’t try to blow your mind.

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The main reason Natsu-Mon is on PC a year later is because of Broadcast Over Sunset, a novel, simultaneously released DLC pack that adds the remote Sunset Island for Satoru to explore. It’s a textbook DLC map: a little over a third the size of the main one, with novel creatures to collect, and a few novel characters and secrets to go with it. Again, I like running around the world of this game, and conquering a novel area in the story works for me, but Sunset Island doesn’t really stand out that much from the rest of the game and feels more like a slapdash experience than a more unique adventure. Considering that completing the main story gives you a New Game+ mode where you keep everything you’ve accomplished, it’s probably best to save Broadcast Over Sunset for later.

That said, the DLC provides more of what makes Natsu-Mon enjoyable: the tiny thrills of exploring a novel place without any worries. The open world of Natsuyasumi’s formula is exhilarating after all these years, although it has to leave some things behind: we don’t get the perfectly composed idyllic scenes of its predecessors, and it doesn’t quite feel How unique as they are, when I spend most of my time running around the map. But Natsu-Mon’s strength is its modest size, pretty stages, and tons of quirky characters. Who knows, it could be a harbinger of smaller open-world games that are more like a vacation than a job. In the meantime, I have to climb a lighthouse.