Summerhouse is one of those rare little gems that I’ll always return to on PC, content to while away a bit of time and unwind between the stresses of real life, building tiny buildings in this tiny game. Sometimes, though, the idea of trudging downstairs to my office and firing up my desktop just for the purpose of relaxation feels at odds with itself. Which is why it’s delightful to finally have developer Friedemann’s gentle, calming voice greet me on a platform that’s even easier to get comfy with – my PS5.
If you’ve never played or been made aware of Summerhouse before, fret not, for it doesn’t take much explaining. It’s less a game, more a window into a beautifully-pixelated canvas with which to place an assortment of blocks that may or may not come together into quaint buildings. There are no objectives, no timers, no fail states and very few restrictions, like emptying out a crate of construction toys onto a warm, fuzzy rug and dreaming up worlds where your imagination is the glue.
Offering relatively few unique components with which to craft house, buildings, streets, whatever it is that you can dream up at a fixed angle, Summerhouse argues that less is more, that limitation begets ingenuity. And it’s probably right. More stuff for the sake of it would conjure much too high of a ceiling, and our human nature would begin to desire a ladder. But we’re not here to build ladders, we’re here to build lives, and so – save for a few hidden interactions that spawn new bits to tell those stories with – it’s mercifully slight.
It can actually be a somewhat confronting thing, I’ve learned or re-learned, to sit and stare at one of these four picturesque locations on offer and feel completely unbounded. It can require some undoing of learned patterns and ways of engaging with media that inform the culture as it is now, and being conscious that I had to actively ‘turn on’ my own sense of imagination and play to get the most out of it has really thrown me – even more so now than it did when I first played Summerhouse on PC back in 2024.
Perhaps it’s because I associate my PS5 with capital G ‘Gaming,’ with the dark patterns and Pavlovian stimuli of trophies, some imaginary bargain struck between my emotional mind and the working class toll keeper that says I may only seek entertainment in the form of progression. A PC almost seems a safer place to engage in this, where distraction is a reward for those that first sat and relented to the Work, where an ‘app’ can look like a ‘game’ and vice versa, blurring the lines enough that I can ignore the detail or purpose of what I’m clicking on and just consider that I was clicking.
There’s also the way that a controller and the distance of a couch create an extra layer of separation from Summerhouse’s collection of vacant lots. There’s a connection to the structures that you get from a mouse-type interface, and I do feel its loss, especially when attempting to take an action for the first time is an exercise in blindly tapping buttons until the correct thing happens. You’re supposed to want to poke and prod at everything to figure out all of the functions and interactions, that’s the deal here, but perhaps I’d have liked a little instruction. Or just the option for it.
But maybe you’re here because you simply can’t or won’t play Summerhouse on a computer. That’s okay! That’s what makes the porting of this game to consoles (it’s also launching on Switch and Xbox alongside the PS5 version) something to celebrate. What Friedemann has concocted here is a genuinely fun, lovely-looking and perfectly relaxing creative kit that asks so little of your money, time, effort or patience, and it’s a wonderful thing to have installed on your machine of choice.
Reviewed on PS5 | Review code supplied by publisher
Great
- A distraction-free, goal-free chill time
- Pixelated vistas and structures look lovely on a big telly
- An affordable, lightweight addition to your game library
- Lack of complexity inspires creativity and imagination
Not great
- A controller just isn't the optimal way to play this game