Summertime Madness (PS4)

Summertime Madness is a maze game masquerading as a puzzle game. Every now and then it may include something that truly involves logic or figuring out clues, but its true focus throughout tends to be on navigating winding 3D environments where the “puzzle” will be hitting some fashion of switch to open or close more paths to tromp down. While mazes in 3D spaces can already be accused of wasting time since they often just involve gradually trying paths until you find the right one, Summertime Madness truly makes wasting time the point as this first person adventure literally has a time limit hanging over the entire experience.

Before that clock starts ticking though, we’re introduced to an artist in Prague, the bombing of the city during World War II happening right outside his home. While trying to escape reality through the painting of lovely landscapes in his loft, a devilish figure appears, offering to make that escapism very literal. A Faustian bargain is made, the artist allowed to enter one of his paintings and reside in there, but should he not leave the painting in six hours, he will be trapped within forever. We never get to know the artist too well, but immediately the conditions seem rather strange, especially after you enter the painting and find yourself on a very small island in the shadow of a lighthouse with not much to do beyond catching butterflies. A step up from huddling for cover in a bombed city to be sure, but the game seems to make immediately working to try and escape the painting the goal, our silent protagonist’s lack of input not even able to potentially frame this as perhaps an immediate realization of the poor bargain he’s made or perhaps an immediate understanding that a false reality holds nothing of value for him. We do nearly get some hint at the artist’s life as you work on trying to escape, heading into more surreal spaces that perhaps hint at some painful love in his past that eats at him, but while some of the imagery, particularly some large statues, works in isolation, it mostly paints a pretty generic and broad story of love lost that doesn’t add great depth to this unexciting narrative that is barely present.

When you stop chasing butterflies and get to work trying to get out of the painting, the game funnily enough starts off with perhaps the best puzzle it will concoct and one that admittedly is a touch maze-like. A large steamship docks near the island and you climb aboard the empty vessel to find you need to pull switches to open gates, lower cranes, and otherwise adjust the accessible areas onboard the small vessel. However, activating a switch to make one door open often closes another, so you need to start figuring out the right sequence of events to let you get where you need to be to access new levers. The ship unfolds as you work too, making it a touch more interesting than going back and forth repeatedly to figure out the logic at play, and this could have been a perfectly serviceable start if more of the game was about making spaces like these into essentially puzzle playgrounds.

Unfortunately, we quickly move onto one of many tedious mazes, this one featuring boardwalks high in the sky where you need to repeatedly rotate their arrangement to reach other places to rotate different parts. This is but the first of many of the game’s “puzzle mazes” where the puzzle will often be some alteration to an area where you’ll be doing long walks to get to where you need to be, although again the game starts kinder and more manageable as the rotating switches at least give you a nice overview of the maze. Later, we’ll get things like an M.C. Escher inspired range of staircases where doors lead to illogical places, the “puzzle” there just being eventually finding the way to two levers, after which you then need to go over the maze again as a set of symbols are scattered around and you need to find the proper ones.

Mazes continue to be more about walking rather than figuring things out, the game having a section that almost sounds neat until you realize how it unfolds in the form of Prague itself. An idealized version of the city exists with empty streets to walk through, but there are hourglasses you can flip to turn it into Neo Prague, a neon vision of a cold future where much of the nicer visual touches have been washed away in favor of uniformity. Perhaps this could represent the artist’s fears of a future for the city after the bombings, but what it mostly manifests as is a way for certain gates or bridges to be present or absent and even when you’re exploring the areas around these spaces, you’re just scouring for switches to open the way to more switches. The scope of these places is only getting larger without any additional creativity and there are less tools to orient yourself, but the most offensive maze is near the game’s end where you climb staircases in a dark void to cross translucent bridges. The bridges are high enough in the air that you sometimes can’t see them from a distance, meaning to find your way onward can often involve slowly walking down paths in the hopes you’ll at least see a possible way forward and then trudging all the way back to take another path that hopefully connects to the one you saw. Any pretense of a puzzle is gone from this final and most annoying maze, it purely about just guessing your way forward until you see if you’ve picked right, although Summertime Madness at least had the dignity not to use any walls here so you can sometimes see in advance you’re going down the wrong path.

As mentioned, Summertime Madness does take place with a ticking clock hanging over the entire adventure, an inherently bad element for a game so reliant on mazes that must be navigated by walking through them rather than potentially figuring them out in the way one can with a 2D maze’s map. However, perhaps because of the slow and lifeless slogging around multiple mazes, the six hour time limit is thankfully pretty generous with the game likely to be finished with an hour or two to spare. There is another way time can be used in Summertime Madness though, and that is as a resource to sacrifice for hints. Don’t expect this to give you a nice way to navigate mazes, but this can come in handy for some of the few short puzzles that are tossed in from time to time. For example, one part has you use a little organ to play a few specific musical notes, and while you can find what you need to play, the organ doesn’t have the normal amount of keys nor are they marked, so you either gradually guess your way through it or naturally have a good sense for what a musical note should sound like coming from an organ. A more mundane test of trying to make two scales level with a limited set of flowery weights is again guesswork as you need to find out through experimentation how much the flowers weigh, there admittedly a sound logic test but not an exciting or involved one since you’re just shuffling the weights around. Where the small time sacrifice might really come in handy is the one puzzle where the game just full-on acknowledges its nature as a video game when it comes to the solution involving the pause menu, this the only moment the game breaks the fabric of its reality and not in a clever or meaningful way. The puzzle could be interesting in a game that asks for such out of the box thinking, but when this game is mostly about figuring out how to move in a space properly, including an out of left field solution with no true hints almost feels like a way to force you to use that time sacrificing mechanic at least once.

It’s still unlikely the timer will be a true concern despite how tedious and slow the navigation is even if you do lean on hints often, but the fact the timer exists at all feels like an unnecessary slap to the face in a game that clearly isn’t in a rush to get anywhere. You languish in repetitive areas trudging from switch to switch hoping the next you flip causes true progress, and while some environments do look nice, you come to resent them because of the part they play in making this experience so dull. Perhaps the meaning can be gleaned there, that the artist now loathes the painting interior because, just like his reality, it seems hostile and almost futile to engage with. This may be a straw I’m grasping for, but it would at least add some meaning to the mess, since otherwise things look nice and might wear a simple theme like the pain of love or the fear of the future but not combine into some compelling statement to consider. There are some secrets to find, hidden instruments, inscriptions of the name Emilia, and some easter eggs, the game’s chapter select at least making it more feasible to scrounge around for them if you do fear the timer, but it’s hollow work mostly meant to provide PlayStation trophies rather than exciting extra tasks. Like most things in Summertime Madness, it feels like it could have meaning or substance, but all the creativity went solely into some admittedly nice artwork and architecture.

THE VERDICT: Summertime Madness will surely drive you mad with its unfortunate insistence on 3D mazes being the bulk of its gameplay. Wandering around large spaces to flip switches isn’t particularly entertaining when your mind isn’t really being put to work beyond remembering where you’ve already been, and even when the area you’re exploring is a bit pretty or surreal, it loses its charm when you spend so much time doing nothing but walking around. The story doesn’t go anywhere particularly deep, guesswork even appears in its better puzzles, and a pretty confusing game direction in general struggles to figure out what it even wants to provide, Summertime Madness a slog that places a few interesting visuals around so that its artsy side can maybe hide how uncreative and lifeless it truly is.

And so, I give Summertime Madness for PlayStation 4…

An ATROCIOUS rating. There are moments in Summertime Madness that can work in isolation, this particularly true of that early steamboat puzzle as well as some of its art. In a more focused game with stronger puzzles or a clear message, they’d be nice additions to a grander work, but this piece is a slapdash effort where a focus on using the environment as a puzzle instead just ultimately made most of them into obnoxious mazes. If this game was more about narrative exploration, you could scatter some meaningful notes or visuals around these spaces, make it more about what you’re learning than doing, but even with situations like the two versions of Prague, you can glean the possible intent just through the initial introduction of the swapping mechanic and then you’re left to mosey around the city looking for switches while closing and opening gates. The few true puzzles that do show up are often flawed in concept or are often of the kind where you either know what to do immediately or basically guess your way through it as well, one of the few that actually comes out pretty clean being one where you need to figure out how gears on a door need to spin and there are true clues to follow to the answer. The time mechanic almost feels insulting though, it most likely ultimately irrelevant but still feeling like it might have contributed to the slow maze navigation and how obtuse some puzzles can end up being. The game includes this element of needing to clear it in six hours not because it enhances things, it almost feels like it’s there to make things more miserable. There are ways to make a full adventure time limit have purpose, Splatterhouse 3 is about figuring out the best path and trying to fight efficiently, repeat runs inevitably going faster. Winback: Covert Operations lets you decide if you’ll retry a mission as you try to be efficient like an infiltrating agent with a looming danger should be. Summertime Madness, even once you know the answers to its few puzzles, is mostly going to be about walking through mazes slowly still, memorizing switch placement not exactly a compelling way to speed things up either.

3D mazes are already a risky gamble if you’re not going to have clues to help navigate or a purpose beyond just finding the end, so Summertime Madness including them in such an uninspired way was already a recipe for disaster. Having its actual puzzles often be fairly rough as well leaves you wondering why you’re wandering around this painting interior anyway, and the story isn’t giving you much to chew on since it doesn’t have much to say. DP Games can conjure some memorable imagery but chose an awful way to present it, some of their best work unfortunately marred by association since any attempt to present it elsewhere will now carry the stigma of being tied to this miserable work of art.