Kabuto Park captures the fleeting joy of summer vacation

There are a lot of games that remind me of summer — hot days in the backseat with a copy of Dragon Warrior III, cooling off in the basement while grinding Gran Turismo races — but there aren’t a lot of games that are actually about summer. That’s part of what makes Kabuto Park so charming. It’s a game that manages to not only capture the fleeting moments of a childhood summer, but also cram a Pokémon-style adventure into a game that lasts only a few hours.

Kabuto Park actually launched last year on PC, but it’s available now on both Xbox and the Switch, the latter being probably the ideal platform for it. It takes place over the course of a single month, and you play as Hana, a young girl who is working her way up the competitive ladder of the beetle battling championships while on a summer vacation. You do this in traditional fashion: by collecting bugs, raising them to be strong, and pitting them against other collectors.

But Kabuto Park streamlines this process quite a bit. There are only four main screens in the game. One is a map, which you use to venture to a handful of locations to catch bugs. As you progress, you’ll earn money you can use to buy better boots, which lets you explore new areas like a swamp. Capturing bugs involves swinging a net at just the right moment, which is something that gets more challenging as you come across more rare and powerful critters. There’s also a shop where you can buy things like honey to slow down bugs, making them easier to catch, and a collection screen where you can organize your bugs, feed them candy to level them up, and eventually unlock a terrarium to house them.

Most of the action takes place in battles. Like in Pokémon, you build a team — in this case, each squad is made up of three bugs, all with distinct stats like strength and defense — and pit them against another player. The actual battles play out a lot like a sumo match, as the goal is to push the opposing team outside of the ring (which, adorably, is a tambourine). The bugs will do the pushing automatically, but you can turn the tide of battle by playing cards that do things like temporarily raise stats or give a quick, decisive kick to knock the opposing bugs across the ring. It’s relatively simple, at least by the standards of modern Pokémon, but there’s still a decent amount of strategy to building your team and playing cards at the right moment. Some of the matches can be very intense, particularly if the teams are evenly matched.

With each battle, time moves forward a day, and so you progress both through the competitive ladder and the August calendar simultaneously. I managed to beat the game in around three hours and was particularly impressed by how Kabuto Park managed to capture the satisfying arc of an epic RPG in such a compact package. Its brief nature also fits perfectly with the game’s theme; like your best childhood summer moments, Kabuto Park is short-lived and leaves you wishing for more.

There are a lot of things I love about Kabuto Park: the adorable storybook art that feels like a warm afternoon, the charming and often hilarious dialogue, the whining cicadas that provide the summer soundtrack. But what I love most is that there are just so few games like this. Outside of the works of Millenium Kitchen, most of which are only available in Japanese, there’s not much else that captures that very particular feeling of childhood freedom. And now that the game is on the Switch, you can experience Kabuto Park’s vision of summer in the actual outdoors.

Kabuto Park is available now on the Switch, Xbox, and PC.