YMMV / Everlasting Summer

• Awesome Music: The soundtrack by Sergey Eybog is widely-agreed to be the strongest point of the game. It's fantastic, melancholic, emotional, and in general, doesn't rely too much on the piano alone (its instruments are varied) unlike most games, which is seen as a nice change of pace by visual novel fans.
  • "Everlasting Summer", the theme played in the opening sequence.
  • "Blow With The Fires", the background music played in the main menu.
  • "A Promise From Distant Days", an acoustic track that's played in the flashbacks and extremely lonely scenes, setting the mood perfectly.
  • "Let's Be Friends", Lena's theme, is a calm song overall, thanks to the piano as its main instrument. While the melody starts off quiet and slow, it gradually gets louder as other musical instruments get included.
  • "Farewell To The Past", the theme for a lot of the good endings, manages to blend a lot of instruments quite well, and there's a noticeable transition from a somber melody and choir in the first half to a livelier melody in the latter, symbolizing how the conclusions can still be happy despite the past memories turning out to be exclusive to Semyon's dreams.
  • "Went Fishing, Caught A Girl", the track that's mostly played on the happy moments of the camp, is indeed a lively music (with the guitar and percussions) that fits the Slice of Life events.
  • "Mystery Girl", Yulya's theme, uses a lot of cymbals, irregular drum beats and pipe organ in the background, which makes it quite similar to the themes you hear in Disney's fairy tales. It just encapsulates how out-of-this world Yulya is. This "Alternative Version" is also just as long and an awesome electro music, if not better than the original.
  • "Memories", a theme that's played only in an acoustic guitar, evokes a calm feeling. Then there's also a piano version.
  • "Reminiscences"
  • "Smooth Machine, the theme that's mostly played inside the cafe. If there's a short phrase that would describe it, it's a "cozy jazz music".
• Broken Base: The novel itself has a decidedly mixed reputation on the Russian internet. People outside the demographic of "ImageBoard user who vaguely remembers Young Pioneer camps" tend to criticise it as a blatant wish fulfillment, while fans of visual novels in general point out that many people who tried Everlasting Summer out usually don't get deeper into the genre.
• Cult Classic: This visual novel has a large following on Steam, and has a dedicated modding community via the Steam Workshop. It quite benefits from being free-to-play.
• Fan Nickname: To fans who cannot easily remember the title of the "A Lone Pioneer's Story" DLC, they just call it "Zhenya DLC" or "Zhenya's route" because she's the spotlight character of that storyline.
• Friendly Fandoms: A somewhat sizeable overlap exist between fandoms of Doki Doki Literature Club! and Everlasting Summer, helped a lot by similarities between the characters of Yuri and Lena. One mod for ES, "The Music Club", has a similar setup with the protagonist joining a club packed with cute girls, and features Yuri as a new character (naturally, she's the roommate of Lena) in an extended Shout-Out.
• Gateway Series: Everlasting Summer is the first visual novel for a lot of Steam users back in the early 2010's when the playerbase wasn't that extremely high yet, and when visual novels weren't as plentiful on the gaming platform. The main driving force of this is that the game released on Steam as a free-to-play title.
• Jerkass Woobie: The Red Pioneer Semyon's tendency to treat everyone around him as Expendable Clones finally catches up to him in his last cycle. It helps that the "A Lone Pioneer's Story" DLC expands on his relationship with the real Zhenya.
• Memetic Bystander: A lonely bald pioneer◊ at the far corner of the canteen has gained a nickname Tolik, or Tolyan, and has a few fanfiction stories written about him.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Who among the girls is the best partner for Semyon? Of course, this would open up debates among the avid fans regardless of canonicity.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: When Ulyana and Semyon are watching a film which is strongly suggested to be The Terminator, the music that plays over the scene is a very good close copy of that film's main theme.
• Values Dissonance: Sexualising teenagers may owe something to how Russian culture expects youths to be more mature than, say, in the United States. This is probably what led to Valve demanding all 18+ content be removed from the game again in February 2022, despite Hentai games becoming a common sight on Steam in the years since Everlasting Summer's initial release.