Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation The Endless Seven-Day Journey

My first instinct when I loaded this up was to check whether I had launched the wrong game. There are no combat systems, no UI clutter, no levelling bars. What you get instead is five-year-old Shinnosuke Nohara wandering the sun-drenched countryside of Aso, Kumamoto, catching bugs with a net, hauling wild herbs to a restaurant bulletin board, and trying to impress a university student who is very clearly not interested. That is the loop. And somehow, for most of its 15-20 hour runtime, it completely works. The game is a spiritual successor to the Boku no Natsuyasumi series - a string of Japanese-only slow-life titles that never made it west. Played through Shin-chan's lens, that concept gets a jolt of absurd energy: a mad professor traps the family in a time loop and starts summoning dinosaurs, which are friendly, because of course they are. The wacky overplot sits on top of the quiet daily rhythm rather than replacing it, and the contrast is genuinely funny. You will spend a morning growing vegetables and doing group calisthenics with the whole village, then watch a time-displaced dinosaur wander past a rice field at dusk. The writing earns its charm. On the mechanical side, keep expectations calibrated. Bug-catching and fishing are single-button affairs with none of the minigame depth you get in Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. The bulletin board fetch quests - gather ingredients for Yoyoko's restaurant, pick up items for Mott's general store, earn pocket money for snacks - are the core activity loop, and they are repetitive by design. The one genuine gameplay curveball is the toy dinosaur battles with the local kids, a rock-paper-scissors turn-based system that adds a small competitive texture to the afternoons. The photo camera Shinnosuke carries doubles as a diary, logging each day in illustrated entries that are genuinely lovely to page back through. There is also a newspaper side job writing articles for the local paper, where your choice of description - honest or embellished - actually influences the paper's quality, which is a small but welcome touch of agency. The fixed, scene-based camera is the main friction point. Moving between areas snaps the view entirely, which can disorient early on and occasionally sends you marching the wrong direction. The pacing follows suit: by the final in-game days, most side content is exhausted and the story is running out the clock. Players who need constant novelty will hit a wall around the midpoint. The game also has no in-world map, which leans into the child-lost-in-a-new-place theme but will frustrate completionists who want to tick every bug off the wildlife journal efficiently. What keeps it together is the atmosphere. The backgrounds have a painterly, almost Ghibli-adjacent quality, and the sound design - cicadas, river water, distant festival music - does heavy lifting in making Aso feel like an actual place rather than a game level. The cast is small but specific enough to feel lived-in, and Shin-chan himself is reliably funny whether he is shaking his backside at a villager or botching a heartfelt moment. Steam user reviews sit at roughly 82 percent positive, which feels accurate: the people who bounce off it tend to want more game, and the people who love it tend to forget time exists while playing.

Alex · Scout Team

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