Review for Été

Été means ‘summer’ en français and is an appropriate name for this game, which takes place in Montreal over the course of a summer. You play as a painter (presumably from some more rural place in Quebec), and you have recently moved to Montreal to establish yourself as a fine artist. I will now indulge myself as an Ugly American New Yorker: why you would move to Montreal for this purpose rather than, say, New York or Paris, is beyond me. Maybe Montreal makes sense if you’re Canadian; I couldn’t say. The developers are, of course, Quebecois, and there’s much to be said for setting a game in a place you know and can portray well.

Initially there is a strong narrative drive behind Été, and conversation with NPCs is important, which should be appealing to adventure gamers. But much of the overall experience involves painting, in two ways. Firstly, the locales you encounter are initially black-and-white drawings, but you can bring them to life by imbuing them with color; your multi-hued inventory comes from interacting with the environment and then using the pigments you capture to spray the surroundings, which grants you even more tints to use. Painting trees seems to be most useful; they produce a lot of additional color.

Secondly, in your apartment, you can bring up a user interface that allows you to create individual paintings. Initially, you have only a small number of colors in your available palette, and grinding to unlock more variety is definitely a thing. “Creating paintings” is a matter of selecting images you’ve previously encountered in the game (this bird, that tree) and placing them in the picture you are designing. These forms can be moved, rotated, scaled, and recolored; some are animated, and you can step through the animation to select the frame you want to use, e.g., have the bee flap its wings and use this frame of the animation in your painting. You can also tint backgrounds and change the colors within images. This sounds fairly set-piece-like, and when I played, it was mostly to provide art that met quest objectives, which I succeeded in doing despite my limited artistic skill. However, I looked at examples on Steam that others uploaded and was amazed at how stunning some were; this limited system is capable of beautiful art.

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Été’s soundscape is enjoyable. There’s no voice acting, but there is ambient audio (background sounds), and the music is quite nice in an unchallenging way. It’s from a small ensemble of classical instruments (piano, strings, and woodwinds) and somehow has a very French feel.

Pretty early in the game, you meet a cafe owner who will display and sell your art; this provides some initial income, which allows you to unlock more colors, but finding more images to use in your art requires you to explore the world and interact with various characters. You also encounter people who give you, in effect, art quests: for instance, they want a painting that has specific elements in it, and fulfilling their request both gives you income and advances the story.

Your ultimate goal is to create a gallery and become a renowned artist in the city, which will likely take you more than ten hours of gameplay, even if you are striving toward that without doing side quests. Été is not an inexpensive purchase, so it may seem a little pricey for the playtime, but it’s gorgeous and absolutely worth the full price, if you don't find that daunting.