Thank You Digerati Distribution for providing us with a review code!

After a long, hard day at work, sometimes a person just wants to relax and have a chill, casual session with a video game. Put a raccoon on a longboard and just skate your troubles away, losing yourself to smooth beats and a synthwave sunset. This is exactly what developer Rewind Games did with Tanuki Sunset. Based upon a Unity web game, the console and PC versions extend the experience to become more fleshed out. 

The little trash panda has one goal in life: to star on the cover of FISH magazine. And to do this, he must skate through three cities and landscapes of Sunset Island to reach the mega ramp. It’s a long journey, but with the support of his friends Monkey, Chad, and Bob, as well as his ever-supportive mom, it’ll be a cinch to do.

Tanuki Sunset has some pretty simple controls such as moving left and right to move the longboard, and the triggers or the X button to drift corners. Speeding up you just push forward, and to slow down, you push back. Later levels will introduce other mechanics such as reverb (doing a 360) and tricks off ramps. It’ll take a while to get used to how Tanuki maneuvers because of the sense of weight while he moves.

The three levels are split between acts and checkpoints and the levels can be pretty lengthy individually. While going downhill, you’ll be avoiding cars, drifting corners to avoid falling off and collecting Tanuki Bits. Checkpoints are spaced out between each other so while there is no life system, failing can feel punishing despite being able to infinitely retry from a checkpoint. After each level or act, you can use the Tanuki Bits accumulated to buy cosmetic gear to dress up your raccoon. You won’t have nearly enough bits to afford all the cosmetics after completing the game once, so it is one way to encourage replayability if that’s your thing. 

While Tanuki Sunset uses low-poly graphics, the colors are very much inspired by the covers of synthwave music. Those neon purples, blues, and yellows help the setting pop out. The backgrounds are lively as you can almost always see the destination way over the horizon, and the purple sun in the background bumps and pulses to the beat of the track currently playing. There is some pop-in regarding the track, but I didn’t find it too distracting as you’re mostly focusing on parts of the screen. The wide variety of music genres containing lo-fi hip hop, bossa nova, electro swing, and 80’s pop funk do a fantastic job bringing you into the feeling that the setting presents. It’s almost like I’m skating on the cover of a synthwave album myself. The PlayStation versions even have additional sounds that come out of the DualSense controller, such as when you collect Tanuki Bits, adding a crunch for each one collected. The music complements Tanuki Sunset so much that whenever a minor glitch occurred that stopped the music, the experience felt much less immersive. While this glitch can be fixed simply by pausing and skipping to the next track, it’s a bit of a bummer to halt the progression—even if it is for a brief moment. 

Whether you want to skate at a breakneck pace or take your time, the experience for the story isn’t a long one taking me less than two hours to do. There is no wrong or right way to play if you just want to see the credits roll. Now getting the rest of the achievements or a hi-score is a different matter entirely. There are stickers assigned to each level that consists of not falling off once, getting a high enough score, and completing it fast enough. Achieving these goals will have you use all the tricks in the book while making sure you don’t slow down enough. You’ll be missing the sides of cars by a hair’s length. You’ll hit every ramp with a flip and a 360. Take those drifts for long periods. If you’re trying to 100% Tanuki Sunset, this is when it gets difficult. It doesn’t end there as after the completed levels and the story, you’ll unlock trials based on certain mechanics. Reaching number one on the in-game leaderboards requires  pinpoint accuracy. You can’t afford to make a single mistake while doing them—they’ll keep you busy for a while. 

“Don’t be sad that it’s over, be glad that it happened.” Tanuki Sunset is the epitome of that saying. It may not stick around for long, but it left an impression on me that few games these days do. Morally, it’s pretty light as the only notable aspect is mild cartoon violence against crabs you have to knock off your longboard in the later levels. Tanuki Sunset draws you in with its vibe and has a neat message at the end about going your way. I can recommend this to people with money to spend and to those who like to replay their games every so often.