From small indie team FaceIT in Zaporizhzhya of Ukraine here we have the mystical driving game Summer Catchers.

It’s an endless runner with a lot of pixel art heart. Set in a wintery landscape, your goal is to make it to the far coasts and experience summer for the first time. Neato!

Summer Catchers and the Beautiful Need to Bloody Well Grind

Okay, so Summer Catchers balances its time between an endless runner and an inventory management game.

The endless runner genre sees you hurtling endlessly to the right, a genre perfected in the indie game scene by titles such as Runner2 (2013) and The Alto Collection (2020).

Whilst those two are utterly inspired and deliver the gaming formula to perfection, Summer Catchers does fall a little bit short.

We do think this is more suited to mobiles than PC (we got the game for 92p on Steam), as it’d benefit from the touchscreen pattern matching that it requires.

When you’re hurtling to the right in your trusty wooden car, it’s quite tricky to time everything right when you’re using a keyboard and mouse.

So, if you want to play this game… we recommend you get it on mobile!

But your goal? You have to go along a path, try and solve some pre-set missions, and then you can advance from one level to the next. As you do so, collect many mushrooms so you can level up your gear. It goes like this!

There is a demanding challenge here if you seek one, although that time commitment does bring with the experience various frustrations.

At its core, the gameplay does require a lot of grinding (in gaming lore, that means repeating levels tediously to gather enough resources to progress).

We guess this was done to artificially enhance Summer Catcher’s play time.

On the plus side, the game looks gorgeous with its majestic pixel art style. There’s also an appealing retro soundtrack to bop along with it, one that’s quite reminiscent of 2018’s Metroidvania classic Celeste.

The music was by Moscow studio Geek Pilot Soundworks, who worked on 33 mini-tracks between late 2015 and 2018.

An indication on the level of effort that goes into these tiny indie games.

But, yes, Summer Catchers is essentially an arcade experience of a mobile game that’s also been ported over to PC. We have reservations on that and ended up a bit frustrated with its offering.

However, it can also be such a charming little number. Its snappy dialogue is cute and complements the appearance and music, both of which ooze appeal.

But we do recommend picking it up on a sale price, as opposed to the rather high £10 being asked for it on Steam.

It does pack in a lot of gameplay for that price tag. Again, though, that’s partially through artificial means.

We wanted to love this. Unfortunately, we just got a bit annoyed with it asides from occasional bursts of fun and cooing at its retro gaming pleasantries.