Tanuki: Pon’s Summer Gamescom demo preview — Tony Hawk in a small furry body

One of my favourite booths to visit in Gamescom was Critical Reflex’s showcase of some of their upcoming games. This is definitely a name to watch, as they’ve proved their eye for talent in their established catalog. You’ll know them for publishing the famous Mouthwashing earlier this year, and other titles like Buckshot Roulette, Arctic Eggs, and the upcoming No, I’m not human. From this, you’ll probably guess they specialize in the obscure and some horror, but they also dabble in cuteness.

 Tanuki: Pon’s summer is a sweet game where you play as a Tanuki postman. You work for a delivery company in a small town, and it's up to you to deliver important goods to NPCs and drop off parcels and letters. The demo was a short 20 minutes, so I don’t know how the day cycle works, but the day starts with you collecting parcels and letters and slotting them into your bag, like a mini slot puzzle. After this, you’re free to do your job on your wicked BMX bike. The game provides you with a tutorial on how to ride and do tricks on your bike, but you’re free to skip it. Basically, you can accelerate and tap buttons to do tricks, like a backflip in the air. This is more to make your journey around the village more fun, and I found myself grinding rails and flipping across bridges on my travels, which was really fun. The town itself is quite large, with a few areas to have fun in, like a skatepark, or you can just go straight to your destination.

Apart from mundane drop-offs, you can deliver special items to special NPCS. In the demo, you can drop off an item to a sumo wrestler who is getting ready for the upcoming festival. After this, he offers to teach you how to sumo in a minigame. It seems like these are the breaks in Tanuki’s day, as every special NPC you deliver to often has a unique minigame. I got to go to the local bar, where I did a shift pouring pints for their customers, talk about working double time! These minigames were fine, but I'm worried about their varying quality. The drink game, especially, felt way too long and just a bit boring. I wanted to rush through it just to get back to doing tricks on my bike.

As I said before, the demo was really short, but from what I’ve seen, I feel like this will be a nice chill cozy game for those looking to scratch that management itch – think of games like Mika: the Mountain Witch. Hopefully, the minigames will be better than the ones I’ve seen, but for now, I’m excited for this cozy adventure.

For all Tanuki Pon’s Summer, stay tuned to GamingTrend!