Citrus Summer (橘香仲夏): Demo Review

[douqi]

Friend-of-the-comm bobbutls recently posted a review of the demo version of baihe visual novel Citrus Summer (橘香仲夏, pinyin: ju xiang zhongxia). The tl;dr summary: Great sprite art, pity about literally everything else, and also why was it built in UNREAL ENGINE??? Did they even playtest the English version????

The general premise seems to be that the protagonist receives a mysterious perfume from a talking plushie that... basically turns her gay? As the reviewer notes, this is highly questionable. Full review embedded below the cut for people who aren't or don't want to be on Twitter.

a review of baihe visual novel 橘香仲夏's (citrus summer) demo. thank you to @RSJ4k for helping me out! (the game was very glitchy and laggy for me so she's streaming for me :')) pic.twitter.com/QhVPnDJ6h5

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

if i had to rate this demo out of 5 stars, i'd give it a 1 star.

the sprite art is incredible. i love it. the artist did a fantastic job. this is the only good part about the game

the background art is mostly pictures of real places & the office looks a little weird pic.twitter.com/hmmfQUEHo2

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

for some mysterious reason, the game was built in unreal engine. it was very laggy for me, and constantly glitched out. the screen resolution was really weird.

this made it so that i initially couldn't select english as the language i wanted to run the game in

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

which ended up being a blessing in disguise. so i started in chinese bc the display was for some reason not working correctly... and it started me off where the story actually begins when i switch the language on the title screen and hit "begin". its normal.

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

but rsj picks english as her language and it just sends her into "prologue" (which technically this is all the prologue, but okay, the birthday scene is apparently the prologue). it's such a ??? experience that really makes you wonder how on earth this was coded.

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

the birthday scene, btw, is im guessing the last scene of the full demo. so for some reason, english players who successfully select english as their language when the game opens are subjected to pure confusion. note this post from someone on steam pic.twitter.com/PrpIQZTi5E

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

the english translation can only be described as... in need of a complete rework. there are grammatical errors and typos in every single sentence. i understand having a few typos here and there, but every single sentence? and a lot of lines sound very awkward pic.twitter.com/yTQj7mOTtR

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

also for some reason "ran" is always replaced with "lvy" pic.twitter.com/xQB11B3RYg

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

the UI does not fit the english text sometimes pic.twitter.com/HXP1ewCmGc

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

another major issue i encountered is that for some reason, i literally cannot fast forward to the end of a line. i have to watch the text slowly load in. ctrl doesn't work. space doesn't work. left click doesn't work. nothing works. but for rsj, space bar works

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

although according to them, the experience is glitchy, especially when the phone pops up because then space bar doesn't work and you have to use left click instead

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

i have yet to finish the demo, but the general premise is so far some weird talking plushie named lime gives the protagonist a perfume that's supposed to change her destiny. and apparently we give this perfume to the other girls too? rsj and i are both confused

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

for reference, we're currently here in the game. we don't think the protag (rachel/rayray) knows that it's a gay perfume? and i personally find the "straight girl turned gay" plotline kinda... questionable... (can we not just be bisexual?) pic.twitter.com/54sIha8TWg

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

the voice acting also sounds weird. it sounds like it wasn't recorded in a studio (there's some weird? effect?) idk how to describe it

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

i'll continue updating this thread, but so far, this is my experience. i'm very disappointed as the sprite art is truly fantastic. it's a shame such care wasn't put into the other aspects of the game. it seems like the devs haven't really played visual novels before...

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

within the game is "collect," which seems to be an assortment of definitions (half of these are not necessary)

the definitions are ripped straight off of baidu. the differing quality of english "translations" seen here also makes one suspect... certain tools were used... pic.twitter.com/TYY8pyECSX

— bobbu (@bobbutls) October 4, 2025

If anyone has thoughts on this or other baihe games, feel free to make a post! For instance, I know some people were interested in Love Curse, another baihe visual novel which was released a few months ago, so it would be great to have your thoughts on that if you've played it!

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Oh dear. That sound like such a mess!

I haven't played many visual novels, and I don't think any baihe ones yet (the closest I've played is probably A Summer's End - Hong Kong 1986, which I just started). Love Curse sounds neat - I'd love to hear what people who've played it think (and I'm curious about the state of baihe games in general)!

[douqi]

bobbu knows a lot about baihe games, so hopefully they'll post about them more! I know Sweet Home has been getting a lot of buzz on social media recently, but the English localisation of that isn't out yet (the developer did promise one, I believe).

[ein_myria]

Have you tried Road to Empress? (link to Chinese trailer / English trailer) It's a FMV choose your own adventure palace drama based on Wu Zetian. I finished playing it earlier today (it's about 8-10 hours of gameplay) on steam, pretty fun (haven't laughed so hard at a game in a while while dying so much). Do note the storyline is part 1 of 2.

I was surprised by the danmei couple and the baihe option in the game (none of it vague or subtext at all). I won't spoil the game, but thought the writing and acting was pretty good, and the production quality being quite good too. FYI, I recognize a couple of the actresses from the mini-drama series translated by douqi on youtube.

[douqi]

I know a few comm members are playing (or interested in playing) Road to Empress, and several more people on the c_ent comm who are playing it now! It's definitely attracted quite a bit of buzz on Chinese social media as well. The director of the live-action segments is Zhi Zhu, who as directed a few short baihe films, and is now doing more long-form work. She also directed An Ancient Love Song, which was pretty popular a couple of years back.

[ein_myria]

Ooh thanks for the info! Had not realized that about the director of the live-action segments, but it makes sense that she works with actors that she knows and can perform well.