I recently bought a new laptop — it was time; my old one was from 2018 or so — and I decided to pick up a few games from GOG — Good Old Games — because I could get them for relatively low prices and I knew they would work on my laptop without overheating it. One of the games I found was called Summer’s Gone. It looked interesting — it deals with mental health issues, it has multiple paths and endings, and it doesn’t require a joystick or a lot of pointing and clicking.

Apparently it also really, really likes (conventionally) hot girls.

(This and all images in this post are from Summer’s Gone.)

Look, I get it: the main character is an 18-year-old guy (who kind of looks like Squall Leonhart) and as such he tends to see things through the male gaze. But so does the game’s designer; every female character in the game is (conventionally) hot, almost to the point of distraction.

I haven’t gotten far enough in the game to see the above screenshot — I pulled it off the GOG shop page — but, I mean… boobs.

And here, in a scene that I actually have seen in the game, we see the main character dealing with a panic attack. Unfortunately there’s a very distracting ass shot blocking him.

This is Mila, one of the girls the main character meets at college. She’s actually an interesting character, but also… boobs.

Now, the game does contain some fairly gratuitous nudity (including a scene where the main character and one of his female roommates share a bathroom while she is topless and he is naked — they are platonic, so it’s not a sex scene), and I’m okay with a little gratuitous nudity here and there, but the designer was making a game about serious mental issues: anxiety, depression, loneliness, loss, and so on. But it’s distracting because every character is (conventionally) hot — even the guys.

Look, I’ve been to college. There are a lot of (conventionally) hot people there. But there are also some not-hot people, and that demographic is missing from the game. And, I mean, they’re all conventionally hot — not a single Nicola Coughlan or Jack Black in the bunch. (And before you say “Jack Black can’t be a romantic lead, let me point you toward The Holiday.) I also noticed a dearth of non-white characters and (as best as I can tell) no Hispanic or Latino characters either. There is an Asian in a fairly major role though. Summer’s Gone, however, focuses on a very specific type of college student (and professor, and psychiatrist, and mom, and older sister). Now, maybe — probably — this game doesn’t take place in the US (I kind of get a central European vibe), so the type of diversity may be a little different than what I’m expecting, but still… this is a college. There are lots of different types of people no matter where in the world you are.

Everyone in the town where Summer’s Gone takes place can’t possibly be (conventionally) hot, can they? Sure, it’s just a game, but it’s not realistic. And that’s probably the most frustrating part — the unrealism of the character designs takes away from the plot and story.