Can video games match the warmth of summer? No, but an Odyssey and a Wildlife Adventure are the next best thing

Image credit: Eurogamer / Ubisoft

I was born in the UK, and I’ve lived all my life here, but I’ve never quite been able to reconcile myself with the weather.

Most of the year passes in a grey, eternally chilly manner, often paying host to a weak drizzle of rain. The sun is simply known as a stranger in a strange land that visits during summer, but there are no guarantees of that either. I wake up, day after day, to an ashen tone outside the window, and I try to keep myself warm by bundling up under a duvet that I tug up to my chin. Even when it’s warm inside, it’s still miserable to look out at the grey world through that window, and it gets particularly grim in Autumn, when darkness arrives as early as five o’clock in the afternoon, and soggy leaves and mud cover pavements.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Story Creator Mode Trailer – E3 2019

An Assassin’s Creed Odyssey trailerWatch on YouTube
When we do get real heat and sunshine, however, the feeling is almost indescribable. Life is suddenly more exciting, the outside world is something to be savoured instead of avoided. I feel as if my body is somehow deriving power, Superman-like, from the Sun. After one particularly unpleasant visit to the dentist last summer I remember walking home and basking in the sunlight and the heat that blanketed my skin. It felt genuinely therapeutic. Unlike Autumn – or any other season for that matter – I could walk down a street in the evening and it still be light and warm. Weather can be misleading here, mind. I distinctly remember an unusual sunny day where I was so enthused to head outside due to the weather that I started playing the cheerful ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by The Beatles while I prepared to leave the house. Just as I was ready, the rain started. There Goes the Sun.

As technology has advanced, and another unreliable summer rolls by, I sometimes wonder if games can fully capture that invigorating sensation in place of the real thing. One of the few times I actually felt like a game came close was when I played Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. You play as Alba, a little girl who is visiting a Mediterranean island to see her grandparents. She sets off to explore the island, taking pictures of animals and chatting to the people that live nearby. The game has a wonderful balance between abstraction and realism; the soft visuals are not intended to emulate reality like many big games, and yet there is something very grounded about them too, which you can see in the little details like purple flowers growing on the side of a building, or an elderly man sitting in the shade of a tree as he stares into the distance.

Image credit: Eurogamer / Ubisoft

There’s a cartoon-like spirit: everything is warm, idealistic, and cheerful, with people eager to help you. That sense of joy and excitement that I feel when I’m out walking on a gorgeous day is communicated by imbuing it within the characters as well as the landscape, the bright weather reflected with a kind of brightness in soul, and thus it captures the look of summer, but also the feel of it. It’s the only game I’ve played where picking up litter to put it in the bin feels good. The developers, Ustwo Games, wanted to revisit their childhood summers, and Alba was their way of trying to return to those better days. The island in the game is, they note on their site, “the next best thing” to going back.

I have such a love for sunshine that it has even recently convinced me to play something I normally wouldn’t: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. I don’t have a great deal of interest in playing as an assassin in games; I’d rather be almost anything else, to be frank. Odyssey, however, demanded my attention when I actually saw footage and pictures of its green and vibrantly sunny world. What a beautiful looking game.

Image credit: Ustwo Games

As Kassandra or Alexios, the story (from what I have played so far) focuses on your attempts to work as a mercenary while also digging into your character’s family issues. But what really stands out to me is the visuals of the world. Where Alba aims for abstraction, Ubisoft focused on realism to stunning effect. The aquamarine blue of the sea is impossible to resist, and I often skip through the foamy shallows and then swim. I slowly float in the water, and when I position my camera overhead, I see a rippling, impressionist canvas of emerald sea, yellow sand, and dark stone. I’m in the middle of a Monet painting. When I emerge onto the beach again, my skin glistens. My character casually walks around in loose, short clothes, letting the sun rest upon their calves and forearms. Wearing so few layers is something I would almost never dare to do in London. I only venture outside without a jacket a couple of times in a year, if that.

Ubisoft’s Discovery Tour mode, provided as a separate product in itself aimed at teachers and students, is aimed at education, but I also see it as a way to peacefully experience the allure of the world. The odyssey in this game isn’t in assassination and death, but in the beauty of the place; it’s Romanticism hiding behind bloodshed.

Image credit: Ustwo Games

I don’t know if Romantics such as John Keats – who delighted in nature – would have cared for the idea of a simulation of it, but I certainly do. Games are forever concerned with the accuracy of their simulation – one hurdle they face is the obvious fact that a player cannot actually feel the heat of a summer day, and so an intriguing patent arrives that could make controllers actually feel hot to touch. That’s probably a little unnecessary. What games offer, beyond a literal recreation, is a lovely reminder of that sensation and reality. When you live here in London, you cherish these reminders a little more.

As I write this, August has just arrived. There’s one month left of summer, and then a return to a world of pale grey and chill, with t-shirts under jumpers under coats, and hoods ready in case of rain. I think I’ll continue to play both Odyssey and Alba as a kind of solace from the incoming misery. There are more games out there too, of course, which to which the weather suddenly brings new context. During a conversation about this topic, Chris Tapsell mentioned Mario Sunshine to me – but also the decidedly grittier Grand Theft Auto 5. GTA is a series I wouldn’t normally play, but, like with Odyssey, I’m learning to keep an open mind. Games may not be like returning to the real days of summer themselves but, as the Ustwo developers put it, they can be the next best thing.