I am a big fan of Farming Simulation and Life-Simulation games. I also happen to be a Zelda fan, including The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Because of this, I was very excited for Summer in Mara when it started development. I’ve followed it fairly closely during its development cycle and Chibig Studios has created a beautiful game, with some very glaring issues.

Now, before we get into the good, the bad, and the frustrating of Summer in Mara, let’s talk about what the game actually is. Summer in Mara is a farming-sim and narrative exploration game that puts you in the role of Koa, a young girl who was rescued as an infant by a woman known as Yaya Haku. You experience a small portion of Koa’s time with Yaya Haku at the beginning of the game, where you learn that Koa was raised to take care of the island she lives on.

Sustainability and respecting nature are important, and soon after you get into the game, you fast-forward a few years. Yaya Haku has now passed on, and you are left to figure things out yourself. As you progress through Summer in Mara, more abilities and options are opened up to you. Crafting recipes will be acquired, as well as things to do such as fishing, mining, building things with a hammer, and more.

The problem with progression is a multi-layered issue. Firstly, one of the mechanics in the game is that you have a stamina bar and a hunger bar. As you do things like chopping trees, planting crops, watering things, mining or fishing, your stamina bar depletes. You also get hungry over time, which is fine, as you can craft food. However, as the day drags on, your stamina bar starts to deplete faster, which is meant as an incentive to sleep.

However, once you get to other islands, you either have to pay money to sleep or find some other method. The issue there is that it takes a long time to travel back to your island and you don’t get as much stamina back for sleeping elsewhere as you do at home. The gameplay loop is meant to require you to go explore other islands, interact with merchants to sell crops or other foraged items, and then return home to plant seeds you’ve purchased and tend to your island.

Yet with the constant stamina and food requirements, at least early on in the game, it becomes tedious trying to travel back and forth between your home island and the city, or wherever else you are exploring. On top of that, when you begin the game, you are given a map. However, the map is not of your home island, it is of an island you won’t visit for another few hours. This means you have no way of navigating at home.

What makes this worse is that when you do get to the island that you have the map for, you have no indicator of where you are in relation to other things, so it is absolutely impossible to navigate by map. This gets even more frustrating, as there are next to no tutorials on how to do things, and the only clues to what you have to do next come in dialogue, which doesn’t always give you clear instructions on what to do or where to go.

The lack of being able to properly navigate with a map, or with waypoints is the biggest, most frustrating problem. The stamina issue can be overcome and so can the lack of proper direction in terms of tutorials and quest objectives. However, not being able to tell where you are in relation to where you’ve been is absolutely infuriating when you’re trying to find an NPC to talk to or if you are trying to do something specific. Granted, the map does show where certain NPC’s are, but if you can’t tell where you are, it makes navigating to them very difficult.

Another major issue lies in the color of the UI. The stamina bar and the food bar are both blue, which isn’t a problem unless you are outside in the world, where the sky is also blue. As you can imagine, being that this is a farming sim where you are outside and exploring often, the blue blends into the sky making it hard to see your stamina bar.

Additionally, it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Normally in games like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, you have plenty of time to do everything you need to. However, exploring other islands is very time consuming, so progressing in the story and doing your farming chores is far more challenging than it is relaxing.

You also can’t do any kind of crafting away from home, so if you get out somewhere and need to craft food or something else, you have to drive your boat all the way home, craft what you need, then trek all the way back. Hopefully, the devs in the future will consider an update that lets you craft from your boat.

With that being said, I do think that Chibig has a beautiful sense of style here. The characters and environments are colorful and beautiful, and the music is very calm and serene. The controls are easy to use and there aren’t any crashes or major issues in the game beyond occasional visual bugs during dialogue scenes.

To summarize, Summer in Mara isn’t a bad game, it just feels unfinished. With a lack of quality of life additions, such as being able to craft anywhere, and a lack of a working, useful map, the game just feels like it could have used a bit more time in the oven. It almost feels as though the developer was cramming in as much content as possible, without making sure that simple things like navigation were easy to achieve.

Personally, Summer in Mara is a disappointment. I am always happy to see more farming and life simulation games, but this one quickly became more frustrating than fun. The farming mechanics themselves were easy to understand, but the navigation and the lack of proper direction left a bad taste in my mouth.

A Nintendo Switch copy of Summer in Mara was provided by Chibig for this review.

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Summer in Mara

$24.99

5

Score

5.0/10

Pros

• Smooth Controls
• Beautiful Art
• Great Crafting System

Cons

• Map is Useless
• No Tutorial
• No Direction on Task
• Time Moves Too Quickly
• Stamina and Hunger Bars Almost Invisible Outside