With only a few simple and frantic sweeps of the mouse, this world of plain whites had burst into an explosion of colors. Impossible’s Été (French for Summer – pronounced /ay-tay/) has you exploring the small and sometimes cluttered streets and back alleyways of Montréal, painting the world into fantastic watercolors that had instantly sold me on it in so many Wholesome Directs. You play as [choose your own name and pronouns] as you move to Montréal for the summer, renting an apartment from Marianne, the redhead you’ve seen in trailers. The ad said the place would be furnished, but like most young people, Marianne expected her parents to do some of that work.

As a result of your bare apartment, Marianne suggests the new painter that came to town should paint things and sell those paintings at the local café. Coloring in parts of the world as you explore is how you get stickers to use in your paintings: Paint a traffic cone in the world, and you’ll be able to paint a traffic cone on your canvas. Sadly you can’t just easily do a Piet Mondrian because you are a talentless hack who has to rely on someone else’s abstract ideas, so you will start out by painting a bird on a plain background and selling that for a couple hundred bucks.

Été isn’t all about exploration though, as you have a story to tell with your summer in Montréal as a burgeoning new artist. Meet people, get quests/commissions, paint what they tell you, indiscriminately throw paintings together with reckless abandon, hope your plain white canvas with a bloody hand print and paint splotches sells well, and buy new furniture for your apartment and studio. You aren’t bank-rolled but you’ll stumble into an old woman (the kind of woman you would say “look at that old woman”) who sees something in your creepy paintings and offers you a chance to hold an exhibition of your work.

Some of these quests are simple, such as painting a bird that you’ve already colored in while exploring the world. Other requests include finding specific items or letters in the world, some of which are behind certain doors or are in different parts of the city you’ve not yet explored. One such early quest was to find the letters I, M, L, and T and find a heart. Sounds simple, right? When the world is not yet colored in, you can’t really see very far, so you have to color in trees, the skyline, park benches, and beyond to properly make your way around.

That’s unless you want to live in a watercolor version of a Norwegian synth-pop music video. As I say, coloring in the world gives you more “stickers” or 3D models to paint with when you are at your easel, which makes sure you can unleash your creativity to the streets of Montréal. That or slap random things together and call it art, I believe that’s how they came up with half the stuff in the Tate Modern. The old woman, “Peggy,” does love my artist’s renditions of some undercrackers on a clothesline or an alarm clock next to the bed, titled “My Mortal Enemy.”

In my more than 15 hours of play, I’ve not found a rhyme or reason for anyone buying your bodged-together pieces. Even the commissioned work, it is lacking that “no, do it this way,” though for the bloke that wants to promote his “herbal” business, I did just slap a spliff in there and a herbal plant with his store name on it. Just to make sure it was eye-catching enough, I painted the background neon pink too. I don’t think I’ll see him by the end of summer.

With unbounded creativity, you’ll be left to create whatever you want from the stickers you’ve collected in your weeks in Montréal. However, as I’ve said quite a few times now, I wasn’t exactly filled creatively for all 15+ hours. This is the “problem” with Été or even Media Molecule’s 2020 title, Dreams, they are about uncurtailed freedom to do as you like but not everyone is as creative and artistic in this realm as a few others. In fact, it returns to something I’ve said to some people before. Creating boundaries is often more freeing than without.

One example of this is my dear friend from the park, Hervé, who asked me to paint my own Memento Mori, (Latin for “Remember Death,” as we covered in Strange New Worlds) a capsule of what death means to me. His quest simply asked for one item representing life, one representing death, and one representing time. If I wanted to be slapdash I could have just thrown items together and called it a day, but his boundaries got me thinking for a few minutes. Painting something specific for him. Then when that was done I made another that was a bit more personal and creative.

Meanwhile, there was another person in the park calling himself “Lord Reginald IV,” who wanted a portrait of himself in a specific way. Being someone who called Jonathan Yeo’s recent work some very cruel things, I got some red-based inspiration from his work too. The point is that some of those commission-based requests allowed for more interesting ideas to break through, either to make fun of the person asking or to be truly connected with them and what they are going through.

However, doing some of that early on can be difficult as you begin with only one color to paint backgrounds or tint objects with. While exploring you’ll find these floating blobs of color which make sound as you get closer to them, which are called pigments. Pick up the pigments in the world and return to your pallet of colors and if you have three or more you can create new colors: Red, Azure, Green, Purple, and even White, which is more of a shade. After selecting one while painting, this allows you to pick the shades within that color, allowing for a deeper purple or lighter blue.

In the later game when you’ve only got one or two pigments left to find it is a lot more difficult to collect them, especially once you realize there are hidden sections of the map. Though there is a hint of a tutorial, you are mostly left to figure out the world as you explore and eventually you’ll understand once doors are colored in you can work them. Same with bins and certain other objects. Though as I’ve said exploration is key there is something else from it that is just as important as objects to paint with and pigments to color with, and that’s the droplets.

Once you’ve colored in the hundreds of objects, be it crosswalks, traffic cones, bird cages, and so much more, these items will burst with color, and droplets of color will appear above or around them. These droplets are quite significant as they are used to fill the petals around your cursor, each droplet filling up a small portion of the petals. What do the petals do? They give you an almost Microsoft Paint paint bucket effect as you can quickly fill in a larger circle around you, which is important as it allows you to fill in larger objects.

However, the droplets seem to be something else worth mentioning beyond their gameplay effect, as on some systems they’ll cause a significant performance issue. In fact, Été can have rather large performance drops with or without droplets hanging around. Being a time-management title, you tick through the day from sunrise, midday, afternoon, evening, and night. On these transitions, depending on how busy the area I’m standing in could be, I’d see a couple of seconds of freezing.

In certain areas, I’d find something similar to screen tearing effects despite Vsync being enabled, objects jittering as I ran past, and the elevator in the studio almost guaranteed to make someone feel sick. With performance overall sometimes sticking around 60 (limited by Vsync) and regularly dropping to 30-40 FPS. The worst of it all (for PC users) is the load times: Early on they’d be around 3 seconds, but towards the end of the multitude of hours I’d see 50-second load times for the market or other sections of the map, with objects of painting taking a few on their own.

If Impossible can fix the performance for some systems and maybe cut down on the exposition a little, I’d nearly be calling Été perfect. Who wouldn’t want to paint disturbing images to sell at an exposition where kids say generalized positive things and help strangers with their problems by creating thrown-together images? Maybe if I weren’t as creatively bankrupt as I am artistically, I’d be able to make less juvenile art and get a lot more out of Été. That said, I’ve played 15 hours in the last couple of days for a reason.

Ultimately, despite heavy performance hiccups and minor bugs that I’d come across, Été is as charming and delightful as most of the residents of this fictional Montréal. Full of exploration, creativity, and stunning art direction from the team at Impossible, I know I’m not going to forget Été any time soon. Lacking maybe one or two quality-of-life things, such as selling unwanted furniture and searching through stickers, there could be improvements but “I ? MTL” after all, even if I look at that quest as nothing more than a perfunctory task.

A PC review copy of Été was provided by Impossible for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Été

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Such a beautiful art direction.
• Simple and fun gameplay with a creative bend.
• Open Dyslexic.

Cons

• Sometimes significant performance hitches.