Tanuki: Pon’s Summer Review

Frost hasn’t yet replaced New England’s morning dew, but cold air is starting to settle in. Days feel short, and the sun sets before I’ve signed off from work for the day. I complain all summer about the heat, then want it back just as it starts to fade: Long, meandering days that are full of potential. It feels fitting – and maybe a bit ironic – that as soon as my mind (and maybe yours) starts wandering back to summer, Kyoto-based studio Denkiworks released its homage to summer in rural Japan with Tanuki: Pon’s Summer. It’s a game that feels just as warm as the summer depicted, and a nice reprieve from the looming cold.

Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is set in an idyllic Japanese countryside that’s centered around an aging shrine. Pon, the tanuki tasked with tending to it, let the shrine’s grounds crumble while he ate chips and played video games. Tanuki gods bully Pon into getting his act together and fixing the shrine before a big festival. But that’ll cost money, and money comes from a job. Pon’s skills are limited, but he does have a BMX bike. To the post office it is! You play through a month of Pon’s summer, delivering the island’s mail to earn money to fix the shrine, and days are all marked on a calendar. Along the way, it so perfectly captures the lazy opportunity of summer in its moment-to-moment about a relaxed town.

The island is not big, but it’s quite dense with several distinct, lively parts of town and Pon must figure out how to get around efficiently on his bike. (You can walk; Pon can’t jump on foot, but can on his bike, so walking for even short distances is not effective.) Conveniently, the island is bike-friendly, especially BMX bike-friendly with the makings of a skatepark. So, delivering mail is not just a thing you do – it’s the draw.

Each day, Pon picks up the mail from the post office, stacking them in a basket through a Tetris-like minigame that feels like a welcome ritual each in-game day. Then, he heads out. Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is open-world in the sense that you can make deliveries in any order, but the storyline is linear. Some of the packages are simple dropoffs, but others have an activity or a storyline attached to them and to the people of the island. Among them are rival sushi and yakitori chefs, a creatively-stifled photographer, and a tough guy with a soft spot. All of these characters are delightfully weird, and their stories follow suit.

Those rival chefs, for instance, have some longstanding beef between each other, and aren’t initially very nice to Pon, either. They know him as a lazy tanuki who let the shrine crumble, and throughout Pon’s month as a mailman, their attitudes toward each other (and Pon!) soften. Pon’s adventure, too, helps reunite an estranged father and daughter, who are both artisan makers. Tanuki: Pon’s Summer may have Pon in the name, but it’s hardly Pon’s story that’s being told. It’s a charming one that’s more focused on the relationships between people on the island and the community they make together.

Crucially, each of these island residents needs help with something, which is where Tanuki: Pon’s Summer’s minigames come in. And there are a lot, like skewering meat and veggies to make yakitori, stacking pieces of sushi to order, sanding logs, serving shaved ice and foamy beer, checking out customers at the convenience store, playing the drums for a local musician, hitting home runs at the local baseball field. Minigames like these (and a bunch others) mimic that sort of delight of childhood summers in which anything seemed possible. They’re the sorts of small adventures that break up drifting days in the summer heat.

But not all of these minigames are as joyous, though. Several of them feel like a monotonous drag where Pon sands down logs at a snail’s pace or another that forces Pon to cut down far too many bamboo stalks. Sure, we had to do chores on a summer break, but I resented some of the minigames for taking me away from the excitement of riding Pon’s bike around town and many of the other things I’d have rather been doing.

You could put all sorts of descriptors on it, whether that’s a mail delivery simulator, a BMX freestyle game, or a cooking game. And oftentimes, this approach brought a lot of whimsy and a steady variety from moment to moment. But there were a bit too many where I wanted Tanuki: Pon’s Summer to let me get back to the thing I liked most about the game: Riding around on Pon’s bike.

The core of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is getting from place to place on his bike while making an extreme sport out of it. He bunny hops over small cliffs, grinds down handrails, and pulls off tricks over gaps and soars over sunny rooftops. Tricks are simple enough to pull off by directional stick movements and button inputs while in air, but stringing them together for combos is a bit more tricky. Optional challenges dotted around the island offer a chance to test your skill, but otherwise the game doesn’t ask Pon to prove himself, aside from the occasional request where a resident asks Pon to do some tricks, under a time limit, to reach a certain number of points. (All tricks amass points, which typically don’t mean anything. It pops up on screen even if you’re doing a barspin into a wheelie on your way to just deliver a model kit.) It doesn’t necessarily need to ask, because the BMX freestyle itself is a blast. On deliveries, I longed for long stretches of road to see how far I could make Pon wheelie. I used helpfully placed ramps to look for new routes and bounced from roof top to roof top just to show off.

The worst of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer’s minigames either lingered for too long or felt dull compared to the fun of his bike. Although they are relatively short, those select minigames (emphasis on mini) dragged in a way that broke up the momentum I’d have from riding around town and doing tricks on my way to the next delivery. Most of them don’t repeat – Pon is asked once, for instance, to balance and roll boulders through a tricky maze or to pour the perfect beers from a bar’s tap. Once Pon’s done, he’s done. He’s moved on to the next task, and whoever asked for his help won’t ask him to do that particular chore again, but they may ask for some other sort of help.

The last piece of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer to talk about is the shrine decor, which is entirely optional. People who enjoyed decorating their Animal Crossing: New Horizons islands may be drawn to this in particular. Slowly, more of the shrine opens up big, empty swaths of land you can decorate – up to you whether or not it’s worthwhile. Pon collects decor and furniture from the quests he’s set upon by islanders, but he can also purchase stuff from the kitsune lingering around. His overarching goal is about getting the shrine together for the big festival, but the decorating simulator felt extraneous for me. There’s no real parameters here to guide the direction or to make the feature feel consequential in any way – it’s just something to do. Again, it felt like a slower piece of the game that took me away from the parts I liked best.

Playing through Tanuki: Pon’s Summer took about 10 hours. Most of this time was following the storyline, doing challenges, and messing around on the bike, but some of this time was redoing days lost from game-breaking pre-release bugs. The autosave feature is not so generous, and it’d be smart to make frequent use of the manual save feature in case bugs persist past the launch window.