When exploring the indie zone of an event likeTokyo Game Show 2022, there’s no telling what one will find. See, even though it’s still the AAA space that gets most of the headlines, it’s in the independent sector that much of the industry’s bleeding-edge innovations are found. Not necessarily everything is going to be ground-breaking, but many projects will broaden one’s image of how games can work. Rebuild Games’ Summer Road is one such project.
With Summer Road, Rebuild Games has taken the concept of the roguelike RPG and boiled it down into an easily-digestible ten-minute experience. See, much of this game is more or less automated. Movement, combat, navigation…all of it is governed by AI. There’s not a lot of strategy and no complex controls to learn. Everything about this game seems to be aimed at making it as easy to pick up and play as possible.
This isn’t to say that the player doesn’t have anything to do in Summer Road, though. While much of it is indeed automated, it’s not like those fully-automatic mobile games that just require the player to touch a button every so often or spend currency to get past a time wall. Thankfully, none of that mobile cancer is here either. No, the player has an important role throughout each run, and that’s to keep their three summer adventurers optimally equipped at any given time.
Indeed, Summer Road follows three young friends as they venture out into the summer heat in search of adventure. As they stride ever onward toward the “mysterious light” to the east, they’ll meet “dangerous foes” like neighborhood dogs, roguish neighbor kids, bullies or woodland animals. The kids cannot allow such opponents to end their journey, so that’s where the gear comes in.
As the kids defeat their enemies, they’ll obtain gear such as hats, squirt guns, boxing gloves, shorts, bike helmets and so on. It’s all the everyday sort of gear that an imaginary adventurer needs. All of these items have ratings and the higher the rating, the more it’ll increase various stats like attack or defense. At least in the demo shown at TGS 2022, item drop rates were high, so it was a consistent process of checking and swapping gear.
The kids also happen to have a friendly cloud following them called “Megumo.” He was happy to be fed all outdated gear and transform it into better items with bonus skills. This was critical to steadily advancing through the trial level, keeping the inventory clear and eventually overcoming the boss at the end.
As for who this boss was, they were supposedly some sort of cultist who stole a blue French doll for some sort of ritual. What exactly that ritual was we’ll never know as the three properly equipped heroes easily overcame him and reclaimed the doll. After the fight, the day’s adventure concluded and it only took about ten minutes. Not bad at all.
Overall, Summer Road is an enjoyably simple game with an equally simple and pleasant aesthetic. It’s a title that easily evokes of bygone summer days gallivanting around with the neighborhood kids doing who knows what until the sun finally sets. It was a surprisingly fun find and one that many time-crunched gamers might just get a kick out of. Be on the lookout for it when it hitsSteamsometime next year.
