Farmita:Summer

Title: Faramita:Summer（彼岸：夏）
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2006964004
Author: 彼岸花
Survivors: L4D2
Notes: This is a somewhat puzzle-based campaign with exploration elements.

Faramita:Summer is a single-map Chinese campaign that feels like a decent first effort by a mapper. As with a few other Chinese campaigns, this starts off taking place in some kind of dorm room or apartment building. The setting seems somewhat based on a real-life place, but the design is more free-form. The first thing you'll notice is that there's a long intro cinematic that shows you first lying in a bed on your side and then looking up at the ceiling. This intro is long enough to give special infected a chance to spawn in the moment you do.

When you're able to take control, you'll notice that everyone takes a significant chunk of damage at the start. Everyone will have 36 HP, which is kind of an interesting idea, but in practice it doesn't play out so well when you're either playing with bots or you have players who are get annoyed if they don't start at full health. It's only kind of a pain because the bots tend to heal in this range, so when they find a healing item, they're going to use it. It could also bring about a bad start if you get unlucky with a spitter in close quarters. Fortunately there are supplies close by, however, you're going to have to look around for them.

Going into this campaign blind, the first thing I did was go to the basement where there are some basic supplies (a magnum and pump shotgun), as well as objects you can interact with to boost your health. A shower replenishes about 10 HP while cooking vegetables (using a refrigerator, frying pan, water, and picking the vegetables) boosted me by 80 HP all the way up to 125, so it's worth doing some interaction to get your health up. This is one of the main features for the campaign, which is finding objects to interact with, objects of course that aren't highlighted.

To escape the dorm section, you need to climb a staircase, find a ladder, and place it. It's a bit confusing to figure out how the author intended you to use it (you need to press use to not only pick up the ladder but also place it in the right spot and climb it). Proceeding forward, there are some larger rooms with beds, a truck, a bathroom, and a locked door. This was the most frustrating part of the campaign for me, which was finding out how to open the locked door. There is a crowbar in the truck that you absolutely need to press "use" on. I was running around for ages trying to break, jump on, and press use on everything until I stumbled upon the crowbar that doesn't function like a typical crowbar but is instead needed to progress. There is a hint in the map's Steam Workshop page description that tells you about this, but I wasn't going by that and on the basis of the campaign alone, this needs to be indicated better.

When you open the door you can go outside, and it feels like a breath of fresh air and almost like a regular campaign. After breaking down a few barricades you'll run into a new area that has a highlighted image of five gas cans, indicating you have to run around the new outside location to collect them. The five cans are located in disparate places, and fortunately you only have to press "use" on them, you don't have to bring them back to the spot like you would with normal scavenge cans.

The cans tend to be somewhat hidden, so you'll need to do plenty of searching to find them all. This was probably the second most annoying part of the campaign. When you have three or four of the gas cans and you're running around to find the last asinine place where the author hid it, it's annoying to say the least. Probably the most obscure location in my opinion is one that's hidden behind a gate that isn't immediately apparent you can open. For some reason there was also a hidden something or other in the grass that you can use, which says "What does it do?" but it wasn't really clear if pressing use on it did anything at all.

After collecting all five gas cans and igniting the path, you have a two-wave holdout. It's odd but the bots were surprisingly effective in the obvious holdout spot (on top of a truck by the ammo pile), since it takes a couple of seconds for any special infected to get to from that point, and the bots can get kills relatively well. The tanks approach from the opposite side of the fire so they tend to ignite themselves quite easily. All in all it's a relatively easy ending. 

Difficulty: The hardest part about this campaign is also its most annoying, which is in finding out what to do. There generally isn't enough of an advantage for infected in most places for them to pose much of a challenge. It's significantly harder to deduce how to open the locked door and to find out where all of the gas cans are. Although it starts off by putting survivors at a disadvantage, resource distribution is on the more generous side, with more medkits than usual. As it's a single map, experienced players may want to choose Advanced to start.

Final Verdict: Faramita:Summer isn't a particularly bad campaign, but it doesn't have much of an appeal to me. The aesthetic and design is simple and it feels lacking. More importantly, having to press "use" on absolutely everything to figure out the way forward may be fun for some people, but not for me. The most fun part was actually killing zombies, either in the side areas while looking for gas cans or during the holdout. Both instances don't really justify the aggravating time trying to figure out how to progress. There are even campaigns that take place in Chinese dorms and schools that have better gameplay. Skippable.

Rating: 2.3/5.