Late in 2022 I decided that for January 2023, I wanted to play Boku no Natsuyasumi one day at a time. January and August are the same length--31 days each--and escaping into the Japanese summer countryside while in the grip of the Swedish winter (a cold, dark experience where the sun is more a suggestion than a guarantee) seemed enticing.

So every day this month, usually after a long day at work and a short dinner, I sat down with my partner as spectator and I booted up a new summer day, taking on the role of Boku. Neither of us are fluent in Japanese, so we made liberal use of translation options, but much of the time I was more keen to just let the speech wash over me and try to catch what I could in meaning. I've been privileged to always have games playable in my native language, so this experience felt a lot like my partner's childhood gaming reality--playing games in a language you don't understand, doing your best to beat it anyway--and also never detracted from the overall experience.

I tried to play this game less as a game and more as a simulator. I did not reset (excluding that one time when the game froze) and I avoided looking things up as much as possible. This was, maybe, a chance for me to get back one summer of my childhood that I thought was lost forever.

I didn't actually get an ending. I still don't really understand why. But getting a specific ending wasn't really the point. The ending I really earned was a month of memories with my partner, a month of evenings (and a couple mornings) running through forests and fields, shouting "BIG!" whenever we caught a big bug, cheering when the kite cleared 120m, and dreaming about the many meals Boku tasted during his summer break.

I can never go back to my childhood, can never replace those memories, even as more of those memories slip from my grasp. But I can make new ones, and I made fantastic ones with this game. Play it if you can.