Summer Cycle — an honest story about a game that owns your evening

Sometimes the simplest-looking game hooks you harder than a blockbuster. This is exactly that case: the rules take a minute to learn, and putting it down is much harder.

What this game is

Summer Cycle is a meditative browser game about riding a bicycle through the Japanese countryside, drawn on Three.js in the watercolour spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai. You roll down a narrow country road between flooded rice paddies, old wooden houses, camphor trees and lines of telegraph poles that stretch into an endless summer — no finish line and no losing. There are no points for speed and no crash: the only goal is to keep pedaling, look around and listen to the cicadas. The whole world is generated procedurally in the browser — not a single raster asset: the mesh, textures, foliage, water in the paddies, sky, clouds and even every sound (pedals, tyres on asphalt, wind, the bell, the cicadas) are synthesized from code on WebGL2 with post-processing — soft bloom, watercolor wash and anti-aliasing.

How to play, in short

1. Summer Cycle is a meditative browser game about riding a bicycle through the Japanese countryside, drawn on Three.js in the watercolour spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.

2. You roll down a narrow country road between flooded rice paddies, old wooden houses, camphor trees and lines of telegraph poles that stretch into an endless summer — no finish line and no losing.

3. There are no points for speed and no crash: the only goal is to keep pedaling, look around and listen to the cicadas.

4. The whole world is generated procedurally in the browser — not a single raster asset: the mesh, textures, foliage, water in the paddies, sky, clouds and even every sound (pedals, tyres on asphalt, wind, the bell, the cicadas) are synthesized from code on WebGL2 with post-processing — soft bloom, watercolor wash and anti-aliasing.

Controls

Controls: W pedals, S brakes, A and D steer, Shift sprints, mouse looks around, V first person, C cinematic cameras, F get off and get back on, T changes the time of day, B rings the bell, M mutes, Esc pauses. On a phone there are two analog sticks (left throttle and steering, right look) and large sprint / on-foot / view / time-of-day / bell buttons; tapping the title starts the ride.

A few final tips

• Check out the demo mode on the game page — the AI shows how it is played, and repeating it yourself gets much easier.
• Play in short sessions: the best results come with a warmed-up head.

Simple on the surface, deep underneath — exactly the kind of game that never ages. Ready to try? "Summer Cycle"