I started off with a pretty high opinion of Summer With Mia but by the end had some interesting issues. The biggest being that I see few if any characters to root for. The main character; Mia; Emma; the mother; the father; Sam; they are all in some way shape or form kind of scummy. I have played plenty of adult visual novels before this and I can’t think of one that I couldn’t find some common ground to relate to the characters before. The story itself also lacks much choice. It is not a kinetic novel but there is very little branching involved and let me tell you there were plenty of times I wanted some. Some of the few choices you get are even faux choices where really out of three there is just one you can pick. The models and animations were pretty good overall. There were few times where the graphics were weird such as in class where outside of the main character and Sam the rest of the students were black silhouettes. I would say that there was a time where the scene didn’t match the text in that after a party the room is described as trashed but it looks as clean as it always did. There was also very little music in the game and few sound effects. There was also a time where when there was music it started playing into the next scene and it really didn’t suit it as well as the previous one.
I played the first season of Summer with Mia on Linux. It never crashed. I did notice six spelling errors. You can manually save whenever you want and there are fifty four save slots. The game did lack a lot of little options that other visual novels have such as not having the option to go back or skip text.
Graphics Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.8.1895
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: GOG Build 1.0
Disk Space Used: 3.5 GB
GPU Usage: 0-58 %
VRAM Usage: 986-1639 MB
CPU Usage: 2-20 %
RAM Usage: 1.8-2.3 GB
I’d say that there are plenty of worse visual novels out there but also quite a few better ones. I finished the game in five hours and thirty eight minutes and paid $11.49 CAD for it.
My Score: 6.5/10
My System:
Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.4 | Solus | Mate 1.27.0 | Kernel 6.1.5-229.current