A Summer With The Shiba Inu from Publisher Ratalaika Games and Developer Quill Studios
A long story with a nice soundtrack. Convenient mechanics for scrolling back to reread passages. Lots of Dog puns.
A Visual Novel with Puns
This is a visual novel set in a world of dogs. It is riddled with canine puns which are amusing at first but some of them seem to be trying a little too hard at times. They used a lot of flashbacks to tell the story which made it a little confusing at some points and hard to follow. It would have been better with less re-reading needed if there was a clearer indication of what is a flashback and what is present day. We actually restarted the game at one point to try and see what we had missed because we got lost about what was happening. There is a button on the bottom of the screen that will show you to see all of the conversation logs as well as the choices you made. We used this several times later in the game when we got confused and needed to go back and reread what happened. This became almost overwhelming toward the end as the story is over 70,000 words long.
The game has several endings for the story. The choices you make while playing through the story will determine the ending you receive. This adds a level of replayability to the game.
They have an auto-play mechanic that allows you to be hands free and just read along with the story. The dialog is purely text based. There is no voice acting. The only sound you’ll hear is the soundtrack and an occasional “dog sound”. We found the soundtrack to be pleasant and varied. It added to the relaxed feeling of sitting back and reading a novel.
The art work for the backgrounds looks a lot like photographs that have had an effect applied to them to make them look painted. The characters also looked a lot like photos with painted effects added just not to the same degree. Oddly, the clothes that the dogs are wearing looked like they’d been photoshopped onto the animals without having the blurring painted effect applied to them.
A Summer with the Shiba Inu is available on Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. A digital copy of this game was provided to SimpleGameReviews for the purposes of reviewing the game.