Frost has not yet replaced New England’s morning dew, but cold air is beginning to settle in. The days seem short and the sun sets before I leave work for the day. I complain about the heat all summer, then want it back just as it starts to fade: long, winding days full of potential. It seems fitting – and perhaps a little ironic – that as soon as my mind (and perhaps yours) begins to drift back to summer, Kyoto-based studio Denkiworks releases its homage to summer in rural Japan with Tanuki: Pon’s Summer. It’s a game as warm as summer depicted, and a nice respite from the impending cold.
Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is set in an idyllic Japanese countryside centered around an aging shrine. Pon, the tanuki charged with looking after it, let the floors of the shrine collapse while he ate chips and played video games. The Tanuki gods intimidate Pon into getting his act together and repairing the shrine before a big festival. But it will cost money, and the money comes from labor. Pon’s skills are limited, but he does own a BMX bike. At the post office it is! You play for a month in the summer of Pon, delivering the island’s mail to earn money to repair the shrine, and the days are all marked on a calendar. Along the way, it so perfectly captures the lazy opportunity of summer in its present moment in a relaxed city.
The island isn’t big, but it’s quite dense with several distinct, bustling neighborhoods and Pon has to figure out how to get around efficiently on his bike. (You can walk; Pon can’t jump on foot, but he can do it on his bike, so walking even short distances isn’t effective.) Ideally, the island is bike-friendly, especially BMX bikes with the makings of a skatepark. So delivering the mail isn’t just something you do: it’s a draw.
Each day, Pon collects mail from the post office and stacks them in a basket as part of a Tetris-like mini-game that feels like a welcome ritual each day of the game. Then he leaves. Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is open world in the sense that you can make deliveries in any order, but the storyline is linear. Some packages are simple deposits, but others are linked to an activity or scenario, as well as the inhabitants of the island. Among them are rival sushi and yakitori chefs, a photographer with stifled creativity, and a tough guy with a weakness. All of these characters are delightfully strange and their stories follow suit.
These rival bosses, for example, have long-standing relationships with each other and aren’t very nice to Pon at first either. They know him as a lazy tanuki who let the shrine collapse, and throughout Pon’s month as a mailman, their attitudes toward each other (and toward Pon!) soften. Pon’s adventure also helps to reunite a separated father and daughter, both artisans. Tanuki: Pon’s Summer may have Pon in the name, but it’s not really Pon’s story being told. It’s a charming film that focuses more on the relationships between the island residents and the community they form together.
Basically, each of these island residents needs help with something, and that’s where the Tanuki: Pon’s Summer mini-games come in. And there are plenty, like skewering meat and vegetables to make yakitori, stacking pieces of sushi to order, sanding logs, serving shaved ice and frothy beer, checking on customers at the convenience store, playing drums for a local musician, hitting home runs at the local baseball field. Mini-games like these (and many others) emulate that kind of fun from childhood summers in which anything seemed possible. These are the kind of little adventures that break up days of drifting in the summer heat.
But not all of these mini-games are so joyful. Several of them resemble a monotonous drag where Pon sands logs at a snail’s pace or one that requires Pon to cut way too many bamboo stalks. Sure, we had to do chores during summer vacation, but I was unhappy with some of the mini-games that took me away from the excitement of riding Pon’s bike around town and many other things I would have preferred to do.
You can put all kinds of descriptors on it, whether it’s a mail delivery simulator, a freestyle BMX game, or a cooking game. And often, this approach brought a lot of fantasy and constant variety from moment to moment. But there were a few too many where I wanted Tanuki: Pon’s Summer to let me get back to what I loved most about the game: riding Pon’s bike.
The heart of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is moving from place to place on your bike while making it an extreme sport. His rabbit jumps over small cliffs, crushes handrails, performs tricks over gaps and flies over sunny rooftops. The tricks are fairly simple to perform through directional stick movements and mid-air button inputs, but stringing them together for combos is a little trickier. Optional challenges scattered around the island offer a chance to test your skills, but otherwise the game doesn’t ask Pon to prove himself, aside from the occasional request where a resident asks Pon to do a few laps, within a limited time, to reach a certain number of points. (All tricks accrue points, which usually don’t mean anything. It shows up on screen even if you barspin into a wheelie on your way to just delivering a model kit.) There’s not necessarily a need to ask, because freestyle BMX itself is awesome. When making deliveries, I wanted to drive long stretches of road to see how far I could get Pon to roll. I used conveniently placed ramps to find new routes and bounced from roof to roof just to show off.
Worst thing about Tanuki: Pon’s Summer’s mini-games lingered too long or seemed boring compared to the fun of his bike. Although relatively short, these select mini-games (emphasis on mini) dragged on in a way that interrupted the momentum I’d have walking around town and doing laps en route to the next delivery. Most of them aren’t repeated – for example, Pon is once asked to balance and roll boulders through a tricky maze or pour the perfect beers from a bar’s tap. Once Pon is done, he’s done. He has moved on to the next task, and the one who asked for his help will not ask him to do that particular task again, but he may ask for another kind of help.
The last element of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer to talk about is the shrine setting, which is entirely optional. People who enjoyed decorating their Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands may be particularly drawn to this. Slowly, more of the shrine opens up to large empty expanses of land that you can decorate – it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it or not. Pon collects decorations and furniture from the quests given to him by the islanders, but he can also buy items from the kitsune who hang around the area. Its overarching goal is to bring the shrine together for the big festival, but the decoration simulator seemed superfluous to me. There are no real parameters here to guide direction or to make the feature feel like it has consequences in any way – it’s just something to do. Again, it felt like a slower part of the game that took me away from the parts I liked best.
Playing Tanuki: Pon’s Summer took about 10 hours. Most of that time was spent following the storyline, completing challenges, and playing on the bike, but some of that time was redoing the days lost to game-breaking pre-release bugs. The autosave feature is not that generous and it would be wise to use the manual save feature frequently in case any bugs persist beyond the launch window.
Gn tech
