TANUKI: Pon's Summer is Shaping Up to be Both Relaxing and Engaging - Preview

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Tanuki: Pon's Summer is all about making deliveries in a small Japanese town as a bicycle-riding Tanuki. This is definitely a game that falls into the "Cozy/Wholesome" game genre. A demo is out now for you to try for yourself, which lets you play the first day of deliveries (the final release promises 4 weeks). I gave it a try, so you can see my impressions and analysis of performance on the Steam Deck below.

Tanuki: Pon's Summer (Demo) - Gameplay Impressions

Tanuki: Pon's Summer starts you off at the Post Office, where the first gameplay mechanic is introduced, a puzzle mini-game to organize your parcels in your inventory. Each parcel is a different shape, so you need to build the grid and fit all your parcels in. It's pretty basic stuff, but it does keep you engaged and switches up the gameplay from just bike riding.

Speaking of bike riding, that's what you'll be doing for the majority of your time in Tanuki: Pon's Summer. The riding mechanics are dead simple, with the left analog being used for movement, the A button for jumping, and the triggers for speed control. It's worth a side mention that the bike is a BMX, so you can do tricks if you wish, although for the most part, there's not really a need to; it's just a fun addition to keep you entertained on your travels.

It's not just a case of simply making deliveries, however. Once you do reach a customer and drop a package off, they'll usually want to talk to you and ask you to partake in an activity, which can be anything from Sumo Wrestling to serving drinks at the bar.

At the end of the day, when you've made all your deliveries, it's time to head back to the Shrine, the reason why you took the job at the Post Office in the first place. Using your wages earnt, you can buy decorations and build up the Shrine back to its former glory in whatever way you like. You don't get to experience much of this in the demo, but the areas that you can build in are pretty large, so I'm sure the creatives among you will get a kick out of this portion of the game, as it's pretty open with what you can do here.

There were a couple of issues with the demo. Sometimes interacting with people is a little hard right now, with having to adjust positioning and camera to get the "talk" prompt sometimes, but that should be an easy fix.

Also, it would be nice to see how far away objectives are on the compass, as it can be a little disorientating at times, figuring out where your destination is.

Tanuki: Pon's Summer (Demo) - Steam Deck Performance Tested

The demo of Tanuki: Pon's Summer sadly has no graphical settings to adjust, besides resolution. The game does support 1280x800 as a resolution, so we avoid any black borders. Unfortunately, while the game does run at 60 FPS most of the time, when looking in certain directions, we get frame drops down to 40 FPS. On the plus side, this is in specific circumstances, so we could well see optimizations allow the game to run at a stable 60 when the final release comes.

Final Thoughts

Tanuki: Pon's Summer is shaping up to be a really good game to relax with. It's got a variety of promising gameplay mechanics in the works, with deliveries, various minigames, BMX tricks, and Shrine decorating all coming together to keep the gameplay loop from getting repetitive.

Performance on the Steam Deck is decent, but I'm really hoping we can hit a solid 60 FPS in the future, which I think might be doable if some optimizations are brought in for the final release.

You can play the demo yourself right now, which lets you play through the first day of the game.

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