Kabuto Park Embraces the Joy of Summer Break
There are plenty of games that evoke the essence of summer—like those sweltering days spent in the backseat with Dragon Warrior III or cooling off in the basement while grinding through Gran Turismo races—but few actually center around the season itself. That’s what makes Kabuto Park so delightful. It beautifully encapsulates the fleeting joys of a childhood summer while delivering a Pokémon-style adventure in just a few hours.
Originally released on PC last year, Kabuto Park is now available on Xbox and Switch, with the latter being the perfect platform for this experience. The game unfolds over a single month, where you step into the shoes of Hana, a young girl climbing the ranks of the beetle battling championships during her summer break. You’ll collect bugs, nurture them into formidable fighters, and challenge other collectors in classic fashion.
Kabuto Park simplifies this process significantly. The game features just four main screens, including a map that allows you to explore various locations to catch bugs. As you progress, you’ll earn money to purchase better boots, unlocking new areas like swamps for exploration. Catching bugs requires timing your net swings just right, which becomes increasingly challenging as you encounter rarer and more powerful critters. There’s also a shop where you can buy items like honey to slow down bugs, making them easier to catch, and a collection screen to organize your bugs, feed them candy to level them up, and eventually unlock a terrarium for them.
Most of the action revolves around battles. Similar to Pokémon, you assemble a team of three bugs, each with unique stats like strength and defense, to face off against another player. The battles resemble sumo matches, where the objective is to push the opposing team out of a tambourine ring. While the bugs automatically engage in the pushing, you can influence the outcome by playing cards that temporarily boost stats or deliver a decisive kick to send the opposing bugs flying. It’s straightforward compared to modern Pokémon, yet there’s still a solid layer of strategy in team building and card play. Some matches can get quite intense, especially when teams are evenly matched.
With each battle, a day passes, allowing you to progress through both the competitive ranks and the August calendar. I completed the game in about three hours and was genuinely impressed by how Kabuto Park captures the satisfying journey of an epic RPG in such a compact format. Its brevity aligns perfectly with the theme; like the best moments of childhood summers, Kabuto Park is fleeting and leaves you yearning for more.
There’s so much to love about Kabuto Park: the charming storybook art that evokes warm afternoons, the witty and often hilarious dialogue, and the sound of cicadas providing the perfect summer soundtrack. But what I appreciate most is the rarity of games like this. Aside from the works of Millenium Kitchen, which are mostly available only in Japanese, there aren’t many titles that capture that unique feeling of childhood freedom. Now that it’s on the Switch, you can enjoy Kabuto Park’s vision of summer while soaking up the sun outdoors.
Kabuto Park is available now on Switch, Xbox, and PC.
