Let’s be honest: summer is at its best when you don’t have to get sunburned alone. No partner around right now? My Summer Love: Memories lets you chat completely freely with a Korean art student. While reviewing this FMV dating sim, I found it fascinating enough to forgive its little flaws.

At the risk of sending you straight into a panic: everything you see or hear in My Summer Love: Memories was cobbled together with generative AI. So is this just lazy AI slop? Not even close—in fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. ☝️ I’d even go so far as to say this is the most polished "lab-grown" production I’ve seen so far.

Nobody here has four fingers, a big toe for a nose, or even the tiniest wardrobe glitch. Even the AI music served up by the game doesn’t sound like a Venice tourist desperately searching for a bathroom (in other words: helpless, directionless, and moments away from a full-blown inner collapse); and Google’s Gemma makes you feel like you’re chatting with the young woman in front of you, not with a chatbot.

You only pull that off by putting in a lot of work and a lot of love. And when you pour that much love into a game that’s mostly about love, surely it can only turn out well—right? Below, you’ll find out whether this artificial art student might be the one for you.

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"Hi, I’m Kang Yuna"

The woman you’re trying to woo is called Kang Yuna—or Yuna Kang, from a Western point of view. As a student, she’s right in the classic dating-sim sweet spot; if she actually existed, though, she’d probably be a proud grandma by now.

That’s because My Summer Love: Memories takes place in the age of Walkmans, Discmans, Eurodance, and MTV; back when broadband internet still sounded like something out of Area 51 and mobile phones looked like The Great Gazoo with a number pad. And if that little Flintstones alien means nothing to you: time to fix that, because he’s about as retro as Yuna’s car from the ’60s.

My Summer Love: Memories doesn’t tell an event-packed story full of novel-worthy twists and turns. The "main plot" is trivial: after you help Yuna, who’s a stranger to you at first, with... something, she thanks you and the two of you start talking. Yes, "something." Maybe I should’ve asked what I’d actually helped her with, because the opening lines don’t make that clear.

Anyway, no big deal: depending on how the conversation between you and Yuna plays out, the next scene loads after a limited but not fixed amount of time. Which scene comes next can vary, since the game occasionally branches based on context. Your FMV date might suggest going to the art museum next or taking a walk along the city river. The choice is yours.

Other scenes include a car with the sea roaring in the background, a pretty stiff rock-concert crowd, and a traditional Korean café with an almost meditative vibe. Some locations do have that typical AI sterility and unreality to them, but all of them are wonderfully atmospheric. Naturally, there’s also a CRT effect enabled by default, as you can see in the image below. You can turn it off in the main menu.

Nothing sleazy here

In some scenes, Yuna tells little fixed anecdotes, including a teenage ghost story from her past. These short interludes won’t exactly knock you over with their originality, but they fit the mood nicely and reveal some unexpected shades of Yuna’s personality. The goal, of course, is to impress your new acquaintance with your words or actions until she falls for you. Every now and then, your progress is rewarded with tasteful bikini appearances; hentai or anything especially raunchy is off the table.

In general, it’s probably not rocket science to give a dating sim a gripping plot. But since My Summer Love takes a more realistic approach, the lack of a dramatic narrative thread didn’t bother me. I’ve certainly never been on a date where someone suddenly revealed she was the sister of an FBI agent and then climbed into a UFO. So, honestly: it fits.

As for the AI music, it’s worth noting that the instrument quality leaves something to be desired in places. Some sounds are terribly dry, almost mono—and occasionally even unintentionally distorted. Melodically, though, the songs always hit the mark, which does a lot for the overall atmosphere.

Yuna, Gemma, and the humor problem

Soul Shell’s dating sim uses Gemma 3 4B as its chat engine. In other words, it’s a free LLM that doesn’t cost you anything extra. Integrating other models is not currently possible. Now, free AI models don’t exactly have the best reputation when it comes to linguistic and thematic variety. It gets even trickier when the LLM runs locally—and that’s exactly what happens in My Summer Love Memories.

Since I’ve had some experience with locally confined chatterbox AIs, I was initially worried about whether the performance would really be enough for a dating sim. On that front, I can happily give the all-clear: Gemma does its job here far better than any other local AI I know. During my review, I barely noticed the cage at all. Even topics that would usually call for a quick bit of research mostly didn’t overwhelm Yuna.

So yes, the chat with your future sweetheart really is completely freeform. That said, she still has a few classic AI quirks. Sometimes our dear Yuna rambles a bit too much, dressing up personal impressions and scene descriptions in overly glittery language. She never dumps reams of text on you, though. The transition into the next scene, or into a mandatory story beat for that day, doesn’t always work smoothly either. You might have just asked Yuna something, only for her to abruptly change the subject.

Then there’s the sensitive issue of humor. Several times, she took my joking remarks completely at face value. That’s a problem because Yuna has two status bars—one for positive emotions and one for negative mood. They fill up depending on your performance and her thoughts. Meaning: even if you’re having a great conversation with the girl, her negative mood can still rise, for example when she talks about her late grandfather and gets melancholic.

Sometimes demanding, never absurd

Of course, that’s also a gameplay trick; winning Yuna over shouldn’t be too easy. Still, My Summer Love never feels unfair, since the game auto-saves after every scene and offers multiple save slots. Personally, I found the difficulty level pleasant. Sometimes a little demanding, because the negative mood bar fills faster than its counterpart. But that also struck me as realistic—try saying something truly wrong on a date. 😉 Seen that way, I found my companion pretty tolerant.

Still: you can blow it with her. It happened to me, too. Move too fast with this fairly sophisticated student and you’ll crash just as fast. While the generally very sweet AI girl does adapt to your behavior to some degree, I got the impression that she definitely has her own ideas about what a date should look like. So if you manage to push Ms. Kang’s negative mood bar high enough, the game slaps you with a game-over screen. After that, you either load a save or start over from scratch.

If that still sounds too easy, you can activate the Flappy Bird-inspired minigame Flappy Heart in the main menu. Once enabled, you occasionally have to use the space bar to steer a fluttering heart through a course of broken pillars, each representing a preset response. Hit a pillar and your character automatically answers—often with a pretty awful line. And that hits Yuna’s mood hard. I think the Flappy Bird clone is actually pretty well done; honestly, it’s no less fun than the original.

Despite a few small shortcomings, I had a very good time with my random acquaintance; and the "review dates" definitely won’t be the end of it. Thanks to the freeform chats and a solid number of available scenes, the replay value is very high. The average length of a single run isn’t easy to estimate, but I’d put it at around 3 to 4 hours.

Even the loading times feel like the ’90s

During my review sessions, My Summer Love: Memories didn’t always show its prettiest technical side. I ran into a few minor (cosmetic) issues, for example:

• When I said something "wrong" in the first scene, Yuna was literally left speechless—meaning no visible reply appeared anymore. The main program kept running in the background, though, so I could more or less type my way into the next scene on instinct, where everything worked again.
• In one beach scene, Yuna occasionally hits a large ball back. Her movements take place outside the inner display area, meaning her arms get cut off at times.
• The music consistently suffered heavy slowdowns during loading.
• The option to mute the music didn’t work reliably. Every scene played one full song with music muted before finally going silent as requested.

Loading a new scene seems to give the game trouble, because on my system, the loading times also brought back memories of the Windows 95/98 era. The excellent video quality, which I’ll happily praise, probably plays a role here—but it seems to come at the cost of extremely large files.

Playing the individual videos, on the other hand, worked almost perfectly. I only noticed minor stutters here and there, for instance in the background of a scene. Yuna herself was unaffected, and her video loops are almost invisible.

Bottom line: you can clearly tell that the developer put a lot of care into My Summer Love: Memories. The custom engine just needs a bit more optimization before the last little rough edges disappear.

Verdict: Exactly the dating sim we’ve always wanted

My Summer Love: Memories feels like a love letter to the dating sim. It isn’t just another fleeting romance built from canned responses, the kind the market is already stuffed with. The lovingly crafted presentation alone made me feel from the very first moment that I was dealing with something special.

Setting aside the smaller bugs and cosmetic hiccups, this game provides the perfect framework for free, believable chats with an AI woman who, for once, isn’t overly submissive. I found that refreshing, too.

With this game, developer Soul Shell also does an excellent job of showing what AI can open up in games—and how to keep it under control. The experience never drifts into shapeless nonsense just because the artificial chatterbox has been given too much rope.

Despite all the freedom, there’s always a clear sense of direction, a goal, and a real challenge. In short: if you like dating sims, My Summer Love is impossible to ignore. And if you’re skeptical about AI in games, this might be your best chance yet to quite literally learn to love it.

8.4

This is how dating should feel: fascinating, free, and beautiful.

You’ll just have to forgive a few small technical quirks.

• Story7/10
• Gameplay8/10
• Tech7/10
• Originality7.5/10
• Presentation9/10

Value:10/10

Alex Nitschke

I’ve been into video games since 1982, spending 12 of those years in professional games journalism. I’ve also been developing games since the early ’90s, starting with a humble C64. Outside of code and keyboards, I’ve been a musician since 1989. Man, I have no idea how I can still be alive...

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