Summertime Madness Reviews

Lovely visuals, a great first hour before sadly descending into a level-pulling misadventure that hops between worlds but gives you so little clue as to what does what that you easily get lost. Spent an hour walking in circles before giving up.

Excellent music with both elegant story and narration, but tragically falls short in classic indie fashion. An art style that's too obsessed with appearing simple and charming. It instead comes off as lifeless, and at it's worst, such as the levels "Memories from the Future," and "The Castle," this and the chosen color palette become downright hideous. I should clarify that this isn't damning on it's own and I don't think it comes from a place of incompetence, but for a game that insists you run around and double back as much as this one, the problem becomes glaring. The loudest issue however is the puzzles, too many of which gain their difficulty from tricking the player rather than displaying a real challenge, one of which is laughably gimmicky, and nearly all of which feel incredibly drawn-out. Most levels consist of much, much more walking and time wasting than actual puzzle solving, which might provide thematic tension to an ever-ticking clock, but is a terrible detriment to a long-term puzzle game. This culminates in a final level that feels like a personal insult, which includes jarringly confusing graphics that are purposely meant to waste time, terribly bored "puzzle" design, with very little time needed to think about the solution but a whole hell of a lot of time needed to complete, not to mention [spoiler] a timer that speeds to 15 minutes remaining, nullifying your performance in the rest of the game up to this point [/spoiler] . A portion of this critique might sounds similar to popular sentiments about The Witness, and I want to make it clear this is a different beast. While The Witness is often griped for having a lot of relative time spend walking and time wasting, it's typically spent exploring the largely open-world play area. Summertime Madness is extremely linear with no exploration, and entirely level-based save a couple brief visits to the 'hub' area. I couldn't fit this sentence anywhere else and it doesn't worsen the experience, but this game also includes the absolute worst fucking easter eggs I've ever seen in a video game. Just bizarrely bad. Overall I'm disappointed by the puzzle design and artificial difficulty by length, but if you're more disposed toward the low-poly graphics or are even properly charmed by them, I imagine the length I complained about might just be a positive. However, I still can't recommend the 13 dollar (11 dollar at time of purchase) price tag.

Summertime Madness appeared to be a game that is just up my alley. It has all of the elements - art, music, and puzzles. It also has an optional timer for achievements. It started out great... figuring out how to get off a boat, turning platforms to build a path. And, then it took a downhill turn for me. The game evolves into a series of mazes and switches in an Escher-like house, a time-warped train station, a series of doors, and (seemingly) endless stairs/paths. To add insult to injury, I was well on my way to making a successful 6 hour run when I selected the wrong door and my clock advanced to a quick 'game over.' Evidently, I was not the only frustrated player because the development team listened and released their 1.2 patch which made these areas less punishing. In view of this responsiveness on their part and the improvements made to these areas, I am changing my opinion from 'do not recommend' to a 'recommend with caveats.' Summertime Madness has some nice features. It can be played without a time limit and there are some very creative moments and interesting mechanics along the way. The artwork is enjoyable and there is a diversity of puzzles and scenery. For completionists, it is apt to be frustrating as there are mazes that must be executed quickly to meet the more challenging achievements (completing the game in 3 hours and then in 1 hour). Despite the game update, I continued to find the final stairway/maze section very confusing and I ran out of game time more than once. The good news is that there is no penalty for starting a chapter over. I did finally resort to a walk through (thank you, Sigmar's Sausage!) to see what a successful maze journey looked like. With this in mind, I was able to complete the game to earn the 'done in 6 hours' achievement. Turns out, there is a new feature that I could have used to avoid this time squeeze, but I did not fully understand the mechanics. I am now planning to circle back through, without time limits, and pick up a number of missed achievements. Perhaps I will do some maze mapping and try for a 3 hour run...

The puzzles in this game is... well... mostly flipping switches... not that it's not fun... just.. a little simple. The "hard" part of the game are the illogical part where it's impossible to solve without the hint from the pocket watch... so i wouldn't call those a puzzle imo... The art work is pretty but some part of it could be an eye sore... The music just isn't my type most of the time and pretty depressing than relaxing. So it turned out to be a "meh" experience for me in overall... kinda hard to rate the review on this one really.. more like a 50/50.

Difficulty : 2/5 (Normal) Global : 0.5/5 (Bad) Summertime Madness is a 3D puzzle game, you're a painter trapped in his painting and you solve puzzles to escape. The game has a timer, or rather you're supposed to play with a timer (the lowest "difficulty" disables it fortunately). I don't understand the timer thing when you have a world to explore and collectibles to find but whatever. Even with the worst timer (3h) you should be good. The island you see in the screenshots can be explored but the game is not an open world, it's linear with puzzles appearing one by one. Now what are those puzzles about? What's the special mechanic? Well, there is none. The majority of them consists of slowly exploring a big maze and pulling levers that activate things. And that's why I can't recommend this game. Maybe if the running speed was 2 or 3 times faster, the game would've been decent. That's a shame because it's not VERY bad, the mazes are not totally braindead but the gigantic amount of time you waste walking is just not acceptable. Summertime Madness is a collection of tedious and not very interesting puzzles, and games that blatantly try to waste your time are a big no.

i wanted to enjoy this game. played it during a indie fest iirc and only got around to playing it 2 years later. but the puzzles arent really puzzles, more of a test of endurance. nothings intellectually stimulating and just feels like a bore. not to mention, the controls for some of these are really jank making the puzzles much more infuriating than they otherwise should be (looking at the flower scales specifically here). yeah i could look up answers just to get through it quickly to see what the end is but the story isnt interesting enough for me to care to do so. game does look really nice though, especially with the paint effect ill give it that

I watched some streamers test the game and I decided to give it a try. There are several quotes to some of my favorite painters and the music really helps you to relax and to focus on the game. The puzzles are quite challenging and they are never trivial: it is a pleasure to explore this surreal world in all his corners. Totally worth its price.

This game is beautiful but not a good puzzle game. Maybe i'm just too acclimated to these kinds of game but i often found them to be either really easy to do or really confusing because this is a game full of really simple puzzles wrapped in winding level design that seems designed to waste time in the worst way. Also you have 6 hours to work with in a game that would take around 2-3 so using hints doesn't really impact much, not like you'd need them for most puzzles.

Summertime Madness has some good things going for it, with some nice visuals and soundtrack which can help relax in the game's early-mid stages. However, while some puzzles have good ideas behind them, most do not seem fully fledged. At no point did I ever feel a true sense of accomplishment for solving a puzzle, and one of the puzzles in particular is absolutely awful in concept. Furthermore, I spent the majority of the game walking, which is pretty slow relative to the size of game's areas even when running. I expect to spend the majority of a puzzle game trying to solve puzzles. Finally, the time limit mechanic seems to directly contradict the theme of the game. Sure, it fits in the narrative, but the narrative is essentially just a cap of cutscenes at the start and end of the game. But thematically, the game seems to be begging you to relax and enjoy the scenery and to take your time with it. But then they whack a 6 hour time limit on to it, which is plenty generous for a game that took me around 2 hours but I always had that sinking feeling that if I didn't rush, I might end up frustrated and have to restart the whole game. And re-doing puzzles that are primarily walking already, isn't my idea of fun.

This is not a good puzze game, it is a mediocre one. The areas are made so you want to explore a bit, bu you're on a timer, so you run looking for puzzles and their solutions, while on the run. To make it worse, you have to travel a long way from one puzzle to another, like up a very tall spiral staircase, or a detour along a circular maze bridge. Not to mention that unless you have an ear for music and know how to read notes, the only way to solve the piano boat puzzle is if you do it correctly by chance. This game is badly designed, and poorly executed.