A Summer with the Shiba Inu Review (Nintendo Switch)

Review code provided with many thanks to Ratalaika Games

The Past May Haunt You

In A Summer with the Shiba Inu, you play as Syd, a Shiba who is returning to her long-abandoned life on Shiba Island. Though the reasons for her abandonment still hover over her head, her need to find her missing brother outweighs her need to run. This interactive visual novel has a storyline with multiple endings, depending entirely on how you choose to navigate Syd’s relationships throughout the story.

Island Immersion

As dogs are the dominant species in this game, a lot of world-building needs to take place. At first, the method of world-building seems to be immersion, as the game progresses without explaining much about Syd or the world she is in. However, when the explanatory phase does come, it arrives in lengthy bouts of info-dumping that interrupt the flow of the story. This, along with the sheer number of dog puns in the script, can disturb the player’s suspension of disbelief throughout the story. (Syd has just returned from Canine-da instead of Canada, and orders Awoolong tea rather than Oolong.)

Speaking of the story, it’s much darker than might be guessed from the promotional material. The “dark past” hinted at in the trailer dominates the plot. It is frequently revealed in flashbacks that jump back and forth in the timeline in a way that confused and disoriented me as a player.

2D Dogs

The graphics are pretty simple. The characters appear behind text boxes and float in front of the background. The characters all seem to be edited photos of dogs in shirts, and the backgrounds are very detailed but the city shots are often reused.

Conducting your Canine

While the main controls are pretty easy to remember—A to confirm, and the left joycon stick to choose between options—the rest are a bit less intuitive, even though they’re laid out on the bottom of the screen. “B”, rather than being “back”, shows the dialogue log. “R” is skip, “Y” is Auto, and “X” is for the Menu.

The Journey’s End

The length of this visual novel is pretty satisfying. I made it from the beginning to one of the endings within an evening. While that’s pretty short, the many endings give the game plenty of replay potential.

Final Thoughts

In a visual novel with sparse mechanics, the story element of the game is key. However, the confusing world-building, unexpectedly dark tone and timeline jumping will keep me from picking the game up again.

Final verdict: I’m not sure