Shanghai Summer similar games & best alternatives

Shanghai Summer - shanghai-summer_1.avif
Shanghai Summer - shanghai-summer_2.avif
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Shanghai Summer - shanghai-summer_6.avif

Shanghai Summer

PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch • 2024

Should you play it?

Shanghai Summer is an adventure game set in the millennium. Our protagonist, Baichuan, goes through a series of "anomalies" over the length of twelve days. In his pursuit of the truth, he found that his hopes and regrets from the past finally seem to converge. Will he be able to "fix" it for good?

What works

  • Emotional and reflective narrative
  • Beautiful hand-drawn art style
  • Atmospheric and fitting soundtrack
  • Multiple endings and branching storylines
  • User-friendly flowchart for story navigation

Things to keep in mind

  • Short gameplay length
  • Translation issues in some languages
  • Limited gameplay mechanics and interactivity
  • Some find story pacing slow or confusing
  • Lack of voice acting and animation depth

What to play next

Top picks

Games that feel the closest overall

  • Your Diary +

  • Bai Qu: Hundreds of Melodies

  • Stiff Neck

  • 千面 Melancholy Love

  • Monsters of Little Haven

  • Perfect Gold - Yuri Visual Novel

  • Heaven Will Be Mine

  • Asphyxia

  • Stay! Stay! Democratic People's Republic of Korea!

Search more ->

Hidden Gems

Less popular games with surprisingly high similarity

  • The Forest of Drizzling Rain

  • Letters - a written adventure

  • AIR

If you liked…

Recommendations by what you enjoyed most

  • Story

    OPUS: Prism Peak
  • Escapism

    Serena
  • Growth

    Love in Summer

Similarity map

Explore nearby similar games and see why they’re close.

How to use the graph

Similarity map

Each dot is a game. They are arranged from the game’s motivation profile. Closer dots usually mean more similar reasons to play (exploration, competition, relaxation, etc.)—not that one game is “better” than another.

  • Purple star: this page’s game — everything on the map is relative to it.
  • Coloured chips: click to highlight games that mainly differ on that motivation; click again to reset.
  • Dotted line: link between this page’s game and the one selected for comparison.
  • Hover a dot to preview that game in the panel on the right; click to keep that comparison.
  • Scroll or double-click the chart to zoom out and see more games.

Why don’t the axes read like a score? This view uses t-SNE: it only keeps who is close to whom. The scales are not “good to bad” or hours played—they separate groups on the map. Read distance between dots, not the axis numbers (hidden on purpose).

Shanghai Summer: Broadly representative of its motivational profile, with a few distinct shifts. Motivations that often define this kind of title include Survival, Violence, Competition, Thrill. Here, the score leans higher than usual among comparable games on Fellowship, Intimacy. It leans lower than usual among comparable games on Strategy.

Last update: 26/07/2026