Tanuki: Pon’s Summer review – an adorable raccoon mends the world, one parcel at a time
Nintendo Switch/2, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/series X/S, PC; Denkiworks/Inpleron Limited
This gentle game of fixing and fetching, in which you play as a furry post office worker on a BMX, has a slow, calming magic that delights in routine and restoration
Arriving alongside November’s blue wave, Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is a game of quiet restoration that feels perfectly suited to the current moment. Tasked with repairing an ancient shrine in the weeks leading up to a local festival, you’ll find yourself cleaning out trash, mending broken arches and slowly bringing a small rural community back together.
It sounds a bit like JL Carr’s compact but enchanting novel A Month in the Country, except instead of shell-shocked veterans of the first world war you’re left exploring the rich inner life of a Japanese racoon dog who can ride a BMX. Even so, the mixture of steady progress and general low stakes proves intoxicating. This is a short game, but it’s hard not to linger over it.
At the heart of it all is a sense of daily ritual. To pay for the shrine’s restoration, you’ll be taking a job at the local post office, which means that every morning – except Wednesdays and the weekend – you’ll bike over to collect your packages, and then spend the rest of the day riding around the snug open world making sure they all end up in the right places.
Your reward for a delivery is often a bit of cash and some local gossip. Sometimes, though, you’ll be roped into a mini game: fishing for an impatient sushi chef, say, or chopping down trees and then sanding the logs. These games can be somewhat clumsily implemented, particularly if they involve aiming, since there’s no on-screen reticule. Regardless, they provide a little bit of variation to the gentle flow of each in-game day, while reminding you of the richness and variety of the little town you’re starting to call home.
This process of coming to understand the town better each day carries the game through to the end. While it’s nice to level up and earn money, all while restoring the shrine’s big ticket items, the truest sense of accomplishment here comes when you discover that you can stop using the in-game map because the paths to and from the post office have started to become genuinely familiar.
And once you feel comfortable in the world, you can step away from your objective, thin as it is, and simply explore the space, unlocking new shrines, enjoying the local architecture and performing stunts on your BMX. (The BMX, incidentally, is one of the game’s secret stars, not just providing enough joy in its movement to keep you from fast travel, but also connecting to the wider environment with jumps and grinds, and showing you fresh opportunities for path-making in the landscape all around you.)
Whether you’re fiddling with the escapement and crystal of an old mechanical watch in Assemble With Care or rebuilding a gloriously seedy business in Promise Mascot Agency, it’s astonishing how much magic games can find in the disparate aspects of restoration and reinvention. Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is a reminder that, for all the destructive powers of video games, some of the medium’s greatest potential lies with the pleasing business of putting things back together again.
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