A walk on the beach, a conversation in a café, a game of chess - you'll find all these things in this virtual reality simulation/interactive computer progam/notgame/game from Tale of Tales, who previously brought us The Path, Fatale and The Graveyard. Bientôt l'été , or 'It's nearly summer', has just been released for $10 (with an 'extravagant' edition going for $40), and in all likelihood it's the most French game ever made.
"Smoke, drink, play music, play Chess™, speak French (to others!), walk along an Earth sea shore and discover its strangely absurd and picturesque secrets. All from the comfort of your orbital station's polypurpose deck" is the quite extraordinary description on the website - or one of them, at least. I haven't had a chance to play Bientôt l'été, but videos and screens show a lot of soulful beach-walking, drinking and smoking, conversations and of course chess. In this part - well, if you're online - you play against another random person over the internet, who is "presumably playing your lover."
Bientôt l'été can be purchased from the Tale of Tales website . I've included a couple of their explanatory videos below, though I'm not sure how explanatory they are.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.
