Été is a cozy game about bringing colour to the world around you while earning enough with your painting to live away from home in a summery Montréal. It’s a bit a of meta concept, but it’s a great game to experience in the peak of summer.

After a gorgeous opening that shows you flying into and over sections of Montréal, you’re dropped into the game playing a painter who decides to spend their summer in the city. However, your introduction to the city is far from flawless. The apartment that you have decided to rent that was supposed to be fully furnished has a mattress in the middle of the room and nothing more. After going through a few dialogue prompts with the owner of the flat, Marianne, you negotiate and decide to prepay for an entire summer’s rent. It was every dollar you had and you must now earn more to live.

Simply put, Été is a cozy painting game. However, painting extends past your in-game easel. When you start the game, there’s no colour in the world. It’s your job to paint objects in the world to bring them to life. Entering a new section of the world and painting objects is easily the most satisfying part of the game.

Imagine watercolours or a colouring book here. Fill in enough of an object with your mouse cursor (I recommend playing with mouse and keyboard) and it will light up in living colour. Droplets will then emerge from the object. When you fill the meter on your cursor, you will receive a pedal. This pedal can be used to throw a small burst of colour into the world. Rinse and repeat to add colour to each of the game’s sub-worlds. Through colouring the world, you’ll find new corners of the map to explore and collect stamps that will allow you to make more diverse paintings in your apartment

Making works of art in this game is not as complicated as you might imagine. Your paintings will be principally done by using the stamps that you have collected from colouring objects in the world. There are hundreds of stamps for you to choose from in eighteen different categories from animals and humans to buildings and abstract shapes. Despite being constrained to stamps for your art, the colour options and ability to change the size and orientation of your stamps can provide for myriad permutations of different art. You also have a swatch of colours that you can use to colour the background or your stamps. These colours are gathered by finding hidden pigments in the world and then mixing them to make a new colour for your repertoire.

To earn money, you have to paint and sell those paintings. The easiest way to get money is to engage with freeform painting at your leisure and sell your works of art at the local cafe or an art exposition. Creating a successful art exposition is your biggest quest in this game. There are side missions in Été and most of them will provide you with additional stamps for your painting. I completed the main quest of the game in about 4 hours while playing some of the side missions although a lot of my paintings were on the simple side.

Aside from painting the world, decorating is also a minor mechanic in this one. As you collect money selling your art, you will be able to buy objects at stores in the game. Marianne, who is renting you a flat, also runs a furniture store. She and a few other vendors will sell you objects that can fill your apartment and studio. You can engage with this mechanic as much (or as little) as you want in the game. I’m not a decorator at heart, so after setting up my apartment in a liveable fashion, I decided to focus my time and energy on exploring and painting the world and creating art.

I haven’t explicitly said it, but the visuals are beautiful in this one. The watercolour-like take on Montréal combined with the visual flairs you’ll see (like fully painting an object, for instance) makes this one a visual treat. Having visited the city many times, the team at Impossible has captured the vibes of multiple different parts of the city while not recreating the whole thing. This game would be the perfect accompaniment to an upcoming trip to the city. Whether you’re exploring abandoned buildings, visiting a dépanneur or exploring a commune made of junk – there’s a lot of care and life in the in-game world.

The use of sound effects was well done in Été. When objects appear in colour, there’s a great “shine” sound combined with bubble sounds as paint droplets escape from the object. As you move around the world as well, there are many small audio details to complement the visual presentation. The game isn’t voice-acted but many of the NPCs have “bark-like” language to help them emote. Being French Canadian, I also appreciated hearing that the voice actors barked in a very authentic way to Montréal.

One technical caveat about this one: is that the game is not certified (or optimized) for Steam Deck. Even when played on low settings, at the time of publication, the Steam Deck can’t handle the game well. Load times between areas are much longer (sometimes over 20 seconds vs. a few seconds on a good PC) and the game’s frame rate takes a noticeable hit. Navigating the game’s menu and using the cursor also play better on a mouse/keyboard vs. a controller, so I would recommend a PC for this one.

On PC, there was occasional stuttering when transitioning between times of day but otherwise, it worked well.

Été is a breezy game about painting that doesn’t overstay its welcome. If you’re a fan of making art and the concept of taking a virtual trip to a Montréal maquette this summer gets you jazzed, you must play this game. It’s a little lacking in depth, but it makes up for it in panache and virtual “joie de vivre”.