Summer’s Heartbeat Review

You play as Minjun, who travels to the countryside to open a café in order to pay off some debt. Two local women help you move in, including the village leader’s daughter and your childhood crush. Another local, who used to babysit you, assists with the elders. Then a hostile debt collector arrives, demanding payment. And a young runaway needs a place to stay.

The five love interests are quite natural and likable. Their characters are also helped because each has a thin backstory or active role. Chaesol acts coy as she does her village rounds, which is endearing. Fury shows off the time capsule you both buried years ago. Ella admires how you’ve grown. Dayeon mentions her enemies when injured. And Roring explains why she ran away. This gives them all a shadow, even if they’re not quite the full three-dimensions.

The story is a skeleton, with just enough to join the dots. Minjun deals with moving in, catching a thief, helping others, trying to make the café work, and having a mini getaway. Romance is okay and there are plenty of funny moments. The countryside setting is also refreshing and vibrant. There is nothing truly memorable here, but it has enough sweet moments.

Unfortunately, when you re-explore the timeline, characters become diluted because of duplicating branches. Choices have a tendency to just swap out one love interest for another, and the resulting scene might as well be identical, even down to the dialogue. Like when you offer the first bite from the BBQ or help with a sprained ankle. This repetition is distracting and disappointing. Characters lose their uniqueness, which wasn’t strong anyway.

Endings are branching questions that test your knowledge of the personalities. The happy endings only require one item from earlier in the game, so seeing every finale is nice and easy, but there are no special conclusions. The game is a little short, taking 2.4 hrs to finish and 7 to clear everything.

The presentation is great, with a billion achievements, album extras, and BTS clips. Subtitles are good but choices can be ambiguous. Video quality is nice, without noticeable face filters. The actresses show off plenty of skin—especially Chaesol in her shorts and Ella in her cosplays. The game uses ADR, sadly, like other Storytaco games, and it is only an average implementation.

Even though the branching choices are a letdown and it is thin in terms of story and characters, Summer’s Heartbeat gives off enough steam to get things running again.