Little by little, the ordinary tries to swallow the extraordinary: having to deal with a card game tournament becomes more important than looking for the bus that brought you to the camp the embarrassment from running into a naked girl becomes more prevalent than the suspicion about that girl not existing at all in the first place. What we have is the “down the rabbit hole” approach to storytelling, enhanced by how the summer and the camp’s light atmosphere contrasts Semyon’s crestfallen demeanor and lifestyle in the “real world”.Īs you are introduced to the camp’s crowd, routine, and lifestyle, you are invited to forget the mystery behind whatever circumstances led you to Sovyonok. Worse still, no one bats an eyelid – the camp leader, Olga Dmitrievna, was actually expecting him. Here is what we are getting into: after having strange dreams night after night and then falling asleep during a (beautifully portrayed) mysterious bus ride in the winter, Semyon finds himself as a teenager in the 80’s who somehow ended up in a Soviet Young Pioneer camp in the middle of nowhere named Sovyonok.

Not without reason – Everlasting Summer features an expansive and mysterious setting that ensures multiple storylines are completely different from one-another and an interesting cast, which makes the game lively, yet surprisingly cozy in its atmosphere. Sure enough they can be proud of the 600,000 people that own their title on Steam, and it might be safe to say it’s one of the most popular non-Japanese visual novels to date. I wonder what Soviet Games, the makers of this title, think of this comparison. “The Russian Katawa Shoujo” is how Everlasting Summer was nicknamed by the visual novel community upon its English release in 2014, mostly due to how it originated as if spontaneously from an imageboard.

Everlasting summer steam