Summer in Mara

It's a fun game once you get used to the mechanics, but it doesn't have cloud save. This is one of the type of games I think it should since there's many quests and takes you a long while to complete.

Summer in Mara is a cozy adventure and farming sim. You play as Koa, a girl who was raised by her adopted grandmother on a tiny island where they live in sync with nature.

Before I continue: At the start, the game recommends using a controller, and from what I've read, the mouse and keyboard controls are pretty rough. So if you don't have a controller or don't want to use one, this probably isn't for you.

After a short tutorial you're on your own, and your island is a bit of a mess. The fields are overgrown and blocked with stones and branches, all buildings except the main house are damaged, and even grandmother's ship is nothing more than a wreck. You can plant trees and bushes freely on your island (some need to be on higher ground or near water though), but main structures like animal coops and farming plots are in fixed locations. You also have a limit on how many trees you can have on your island (the limit can be raised, but I don't know where it caps).

Like most farming sims you can craft, cook, and farm vegetables and fruits. You can also raise animals like chickens, pigs, and sheep. For me, this part was far too short and got overshadowed by all the fetch quests and constant sailing back and forth.

Everything you do costs stamina, which refills completely at home but only half when sleeping in a sleeping bag or on your ship. Difficulty is very low overall (passing out just respawns you the next morning with half stamina and no penalty). You also need to eat every few days or your max stamina drops.

Once you repair your ship and start exploring, you meet all kinds of different characters living on neighboring islands. Most of them are some sort of fish-human hybrid, though there are also aliens mixed in. The characters are fun, if a little bizarre, and I found interactions with them cute enough. The graphics are very bright and colorful, and the character portraits during dialogues are really well done. I genuinely liked a few of the cutscenes too. That said, the story itself is very tame and feels like it's aimed at a much younger audience.

The world is laid out on a 6x6 grid with short loading screens between sections. You start with access to just your home island and the main island, but more unlock as you complete quests. Your ship upgrades twice during the story to reach the rest of the map. Discovering new islands was enjoyable, and so was finding different fish species. Fishing itself uses a simple minigame that was okay but very easy, while diving had awful controls where you could barely move (it felt sluggish the entire time).

Fetch quests dominate most of the gameplay, and I mean A LOT of them. The main island is quite large, poorly laid out, and pretty empty. You're constantly running from one end to the other. Most NPCs just stand in place (only a few dogs roam around), and the same character models get reused multiple times. You can sprint and jump pretty high, but it still eats up time, and invisible walls and weird hitboxes pop up where they shouldn't. You also have to keep sailing back to your home island to build something or gather materials and then return to the NPC.

Fast travel is available when you're on your ship (but only to the main island), though it costs gold and you're pretty broke early on. Some quests are locked behind others, and the log will tell you when you need to advance a different quest before continuing.

What annoyed me more than the fetch quests was not knowing what was safe to sell. I sold some seashells early on only to need them for a quest minutes later. And since autosave is the only option, there was no way for me to reload. Item respawning was also really inconsistent. According to the wiki, certain fishing bait found in buckets (or occasionally in random barrels floating in water) respawns after three days. I tried everything: staying on the island for three days straight, visiting the island daily for several days, avoiding it completely for three days and then checking again. Nothing worked. Even the bait bucket on my own island never refilled during my entire playthrough, which lasted around 100-150 in-game days. Fishing for certain species became incredibly frustrating, especially the angelfish since I needed three of them and that bait wasn't even buyable. Trees and bushes were similarly unreliable. I hoped that leaving my home island untouched for twenty days would mean every tree and bush would be full of fruit when I returned, but most had nothing or maybe one piece. Only the orange trees and blackberry bushes seemed to work consistently.

The game was free on Fanatical in August 2025. It's a cute game, and I can see it working well for younger players. It just dragged on too long. I spent around 20 hours finishing all quests and achievements, but so much of that was unnecessary backtracking. It could've easily been 10 hours, and I would've liked it better. Still, it was free and not the worst game I've played, so I won't give it a negative review.

Wasn't sure if I should give it a positive or negative review but I spent over 20 hours in this and got all achievements done. Why would I lie to myself and say "don't play it!"!?
It was relaxing, cut, summery now when it's dark and cold outside. Easy quests, relaxing farming and lots of exploring to do.
A lot of conversations in text, since there's no voices, so I can admit that i fast forwarded like every quests because I got no patience to read it all. I yet found the game interesting enough and still able to understand the story line.
Decent asking price with 20 euro. Got it in a bundle so even better. It looked like a short, small game, but it was bigger then expected, wich is a positive for me!

A tentative recommend with BIG caveats:
- The game is very repetitive, mostly consisting of fetch quests, so you will likely want to have a podcast or a video running on a second monitor to not die of boredom
- The UI feels incomplete, like it was shipped mid-development. It's missing tons of button hints, UI prompts and tutorials, which makes it sometimes very confusing to understand what are you supposed to do next.
- Don't expect a farming simulator from this game, all the farming and adjacent stuff is purely in service of fetch quests and there's essentially no reason to interact with it otherwise.
Yes this all sounds very negative, but I still sorta enjoyed my time with it treating it as a podcast-game that doesn't require a big part of your brain to complete.
And the art is very cute.

(Review originally written in November 2025)
pros
✔️Nice visuals that captures a very wholesome cozy atmosphere.
✔️Nice music but it can sometimes get repetitive.

cons
❌No minimap. only when ur in the boat.
❌A little annoying to always scroll through your long list of quests.
❌Game is sometimes giving u objectives in places on the map where it's yet to be unblocked.
❌At some point the game starts to get old and boring because you go back and forth. Even when you try to remember and check what area each mission is located in order to accomplish as many objectives as you can in one area. It still sends you to far away locations. It gets tedious at times. I prefer how it was in Deiland . Well it's also because Deiland is small so there's no travel aspect.

ONLY buy this game if you're interested in a prequel to the newer game "Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara" or whatever it's called... something like that anyway.
This game is intended for audiences under the age of 12. Your "heroine" is six years old and just buried her only family, her adopted grandmother. And yet somehow she is the "only one" who is interested in saving the world from greedy alien invaders who want to strip-mine the planet. And the only help she finds is a group of retired pirates who are all afraid to go outside their own homes anymore. BUT that said, most of the game is very cute, sweet, and the play style is casual. Exploring the world is easy to learn, and you'll find some interesting things out among the various islands of the world. There's farming, and fishing, mining, crafting, cooking, and hunger/energy survival mechanics too. So yeah... it's not THAT bad... except for a couple of things that really turned me off. Here's what I hate about this game:
1. The fishing minigame SUCKS SO BAD. But I found a way to FIX IT by adding a "launch option" in the game's properties from your Steam Library - just reduce your screen resolution to 1920x1080 or smaller!! Now fishing is not only POSSIBLE, it's actually EASY!! See my Steam Guide about it if you also have trouble with fishing, or also with UI or HUD buttons and objects not displaying right or being off the edge of the screen. Seriously this fixes 90% of the bugs in this game.
2. The ENERGY system sucks. A lot.
You drain energy a bit just by standing still and letting time pass. If you run, it drains faster. Every time you mine, chop a tree, plant a seed, water a plant, harvest a crop, or basically do anything at all, it drains a chunk of energy. Your energy will literally last you 2.5 hours out of every day. The bar drains TOO FAST to be reasonable. It really limits your ability to DO ANYTHING AT ALL. If you run out, you will immediately pass out and the day ends, you start the next day with just half your energy refilled. Sleeping in your boat or a sleeping bag also leaves you with only half your energy. (Sleeping at your house or the inn at the village gives you full energy but it still only lasts 2.5 hours.) To refill your energy you can sleep and end the day... or you can eat food. To get food, you need to grow ingredients on your farm and then cook them in your kitchen. But most foods only restore a small amount of energy. The ones that do a full recovery require six or seven different kinds of ingredients, and multiples of each one. SO you'll spend 3 out of every 5 days working on your farm just to feed your energy bar for all five days. It's ridiculous. But then again... you are a six year old girl so I guess you get worn out pretty quickly because you need more naps.
3. Trees take TOO LONG to grow and produce fruit.
Specifically the cocoa tree and the pineapple tree, both of which you NEED FOR MAIN QUEST PROGRESSION near the end of the game... you won't get enough fruit from them though so you'll get bored and quit before beating the game, I promise you that.
AND what's more, the chocolate quest only gives you 3 cocoa beans... the game doesn't even tell you that you're supposed to PLANT THEM, you'll probably just assume you're supposed to use them in your kitchen to make 1 piece of chocolate... but the quest needs FIVE pieces of chocolate. (Hint: cocoa beans can be found on the "Withering Island" but they take forever to respawn.)
AND what's even more than more, you don't get pineapples until you're already at the end of the game. They only grow on one island. Nobody sells them. By the time you even are able to plant your first pineapple tree you're like "Great, I just need a few more pineapples and then I can do the final mission!" But it takes A MONTH of in-game time to grow pineapples. WTF man?
SO yeah... it's a fun, sweet, cozy game. But a couple of the mechanics are SO BAD that it just gets frustrating after a while. According to Steam's statistics, only about 12% of players make it past the halfway point, the rest quit by then - probably because they didn't know how to fix the broken fishing system. There is a sequel... which is a better game in my opinion. If you want to know the history before you play that game, then try this one i guess. It's not "a bad game" really, it's just severely hampered by the fishing and energy systems, and the way some of the late-game fruit is tied into the main quest.

A very heartwarming story enveloped in a cozy casual farming and sailing game.
Summer in Mara made me forget about my real world problems for a while but also made me tear up a little bit here and there with its story, even though I felt it could have used a little more time developing some scenes and dialogues, the story beats were very solid.
Quests were mainly fetch quests with a bit of crafting here and there, the game does not hold your hand about its mechanics and in the early game, I really struggled to figure out some of its systems and some quests were vague on what to do or where to go, making me go to the internet for help, but it was ok.
As for music, the game's sound design was very strange, the first few hours had only like 2 or 3 tracks lopping over and over and it was very annoying but as you continue playing, new tracks are added and it isnt as bad.. but yeah, music in the game needs rework to make it acceptable.
As far as achievements go, pretty simple, just complete all storylines with a few special achievements requiring exploration here and there, no missables, just a little bit of fetch quest grind. You should be able to 100% this title in a week or so.
The main character is adorable and her attitude is commendable, I liked her best out of everything else in the game, brave, outgoing, hard working and reliable, they really made her super likeable.
Summer in Mara gets 31 seashells I compulsively picked up at every chance out of 47 times I went bananas looking for bananas so I can make home-made gunpowder. An enjoyable title!