Review: Été may mean “Summer”, but it might as well mean perfection as far as I’m concerned

Été has been on my list for a long time, but I’m a reviewer. So, I don’t really sit down and analyze a game before I’m given a code. Things move fast over here at Comfy Cozy Gaming. So, when I tell you that Été makes me want to slow down and enjoy my time is a huge thing for a game to achieve.

My head is constantly filled with new games and embargo/release dates, but I’ve invested almost 6 hours into Été and I wouldn’t even necessarily say that I’ve gotten into the meat of the game. I’m only on day 4 and that’s because I was forced off the easel one of those days. 

So, let’s talk about Été and what makes it an amazing cozy game.

Été – the French word for Summer – is an exploration game at its core. There are a lot of elements that are fun, but the foundation of the game is peeking into every corner to see what you can find.

You play as a newly arrived tenant who has decided to rent a place for the Summer in Montreal. Of course, you’ve never seen the place, so when you answer a listing for a furnished apartment, you expect it to be furnished. Right?

Well, it seems that good ol’ Marianne – our landlord – might’ve borrowed pieces from her parent’s antique shop and, understandably, her parents don’t want to leave those expensive items in the care of a subletter.

This creates an issue where we’ve traveled with nothing but the suitcases we could carry and there’s only a bed to show for it. This can create a bit of contention between yourself and Marianne, but you do get a good deal on rent out of it and you get to decorate the apartment anyway that you see fit.

Conveniently for the game, but inconveniently for us, this means that we are broke and must sell paintings for cash.

Luckily, we have an easel that we get straight to work with. In Été, you paint with what you see, basically. When you arrive at the apartment, you start outside and you’ll notice that the world has been bled of color. By clicking the mouse and dragging it around, you’ll deposit color into items and cause bubbles of color to pop up that we can collect.

I’ll be totally real and honest with you guys, I still don’t know what these bubbles represent. I know they fill up a meter, but my ADHD clung to this game really hard and I spent all of my time running around and putting color into literally everything. So, I didn’t make as much progress as I might normally in this amount of time. 

I will not stop until all the bubbles have been acquired.

From what I can tell, you can pretty much put color into everything, but some things will bleed back out which makes for an interesting art style. Everything is done in gorgeous watercolor, so the bright whites that bleed of color look very stylistic in the end.

Marianne suggests that we should create a painting of birds since everyone likes those and that we can sell the painting at the Cafe in the Marketplace.

This is the part where if you didn’t go off on a totally random side-quest like I did and fill every inch of space with color – including the sky – you’ll need to find birds as a subject matter. When you color something in, it gets added to your album as an item that you can use in painting.

To create in this game, you don’t have to have any artistic talent. So, you don’t have to worry about fiddling with the mouse to get the right strokes. Été runs off of using stamps. When you fill in a car or an apple, it creates a stamp of that item that you can use in your painting.

I know when I think of stamps, I think of the stamp tools in paint programs and my experience with those was not very fluid. But, in Été, you can twist the designs any way you want. With my sparrow, I could have it from the profile, front view, or even underneath. I could make it bigger or smaller, and if it has an animation to it, you can sift through the motions to get just the right pose.

Personally, I had some beef with Marianne at this point, so I made a sparrow stomping on a trashcan and pretended it was Marianne. Ironically, you can unlock a stamp of her later, so I might have to make a new painting with the correct subject. Maybe. Marianne has since grown on me. 

Behold, my magnum opus!

Once you finish your painting, you take it to the café, pop it on the wall there, and by the next morning you’ve made money. It’s really that simple. You can make as many paintings as you want, but only three can be displayed at one time.

As you unlock people and places, you’ll notice that some of them will request special paintings. These commissions come with specific desires for subject matter and I thought they were fun to indulge so that I didn’t have to think too much.

I’m never going to go for the serious painting, so it was fun to see how I could twist what they asked for into something silly and ridiculous.

It’s in the painting aspect where you’re rewarded for being so attentive to depositing color into things. So far, I’ve never had a request that I didn’t already have the item unlocked for.

Overall, Été is kind of a simple game in theory. You paint art and deposit color into your environment. But, it’s actually a lot of fun.

Scattered around, you’ll find some swirling vortexes of color. When you collect those, you’re collecting pigment. When you find three, you get to unlock a color on your paint palette. There are several options and these can be used as background colors on your canvas or on items in your home.

What I love about this is that – yes, you may be locked out of some colors, but once you unlock a pigment – you get the whole hue range of that color. All the lightest and darkest shades of that paint are yours to use and that makes it so much more rewarding to unlock them.

The only other thing I want to touch on is the store that I mentioned earlier. Marianne runs an antique/furniture store that you can visit to buy items. I love the fact that each item rotates every day, but if you want something and don’t have the funds then you can put a reserve on it. 

Convenient that she suddenly has furniture, but I respect the hustle.

This means that while everything rotates out, this one item will stay reserved until you cancel the reservation or buy it. So, if you don’t have the money on a given day, you’re not missing out.

There are more shops to enjoy like the bike shop, but I’m serious when I say I’ve only just scratched the surface several hours in. I’ve been having the best time exploring and making goofy paintings, so I’m not making much progress in furthering the story yet.

I may be missing some finer points because I lost my notes during a power outage, but just trust me when I say that I absolutely loved Été and it’s going into my little category on Steam where I stash games that I want to keep playing.

This game is a little graphic intensive and my dino-computer had a hard time, but I was able to fiddle with some settings to make it workable. I only ran into one glitch where I fell through the world, but I couldn’t repeat it. And, since I was working from a pre-launch version, I’m not really counting it as a hard knock to the score.

If you want to try out Été, you can – RECORD SCRATCH – Hi, it’s me inserting myself like some early 2000’s sitcom. Think of me like your comfy cozy Ron Howard. Anyway, I had to pull up the e-mail to figure out the price since I didn’t know it off-hand. You guys, they project that it’s a 5-10 hour game to complete.

If you suffer from goblin brain, you’re going to get SO much more out of this, I promise you.

Okay, now… if you want to try out Été, you can grab it on Steam starting July 23rd for —-. If you want more of a sense of adventure, then you know I’m going to point you to my staple recommendation. Everyone say it with me… Smushi Come Home.