“Find a sacred square of earth. Lay down, so you have the dirt at your back. Close your eyes. Close everything. Your ancestors are in that dirt. All the living and all the dead are holding you up. Now Stand. They’re still there, aren’t they? It’s time to move. To entangle yourself everywhere with everyone. So that next time you lay down in the dirt, you will have so much more to tell them.”
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.
I think everyone should play this game.
I don't know how to talk about it, though. How to say "I cried at least ten times not because the game was sad — though it sometimes was — but because it was so tender, so loving, so unique" without sounding like a pretentious asshole. I don't know how to talk about Kochi, a little boy who shares his memories of his father with you because there's no way to put that love to letters. I don't know how to talk about the line "It's the two hardest things to hold in your head. They were just boys, and they killed my family" without dissolving into tears.
It's easier to talk world-building and visuals and mechanics. This game has perhaps the most interesting world in any game I've played recently. The societies and values are so much like ours and yet not like ours at all. The mixture of modern aesthetics with old-world mysticism feels so wonderful and lovely. It's explicitly post-apocalyptic but also not. It's SO gorgeous to look at, and the style is so so unique and the models are so so gorgeous.
The walking is sometimes clumsy, and you can get stuck — the game knows this, and the pause screen has a helpful button for unsticking you. The bike - riding, assuming you don't end up wedged in a corner, feels good and tight and not tight at all, much the way actually riding a bike is, I spose. But the gameplay focuses less on moving through the world and more on recording it. There are a few things in the world that you must record to progress, but by and large what you record and why is purely up to you. My journal was filled with photos and sounds that were mine, meaningless nothings that don't matter, but maybe they do, because I saw them, because I recorded them, because I am a part of the world and in seeing and recording I make the world part of me. If you want fast, kinetic gameplay, this isn't it, but the game and the story wouldn't be served by gameplay like that. The gameplay is perfect for telling the story the story wants to tell.
And — it's funny, because gamer-brain initially made this very thing hard to enjoy. I wanted clearer marks of progression. I felt like I'd failed each time I took a photo that wasn't plot relevant or recorded a song that didn't change the worldstate. I was frustrated I wasn't moving fast. Games train us in all sorts of ways, and the leading games in the world now might create beautiful worlds, but they don't really want you to look at them. They want you to find the right tool, the right answer, the golden ending.
And if there's a right tool, there's a wrong one. If there's a golden ending, there's a bad one. If the world is beautiful but not meant to be seen, then the people in the world aren't real, they're enemies or allies or NPC fodder. And this game eschews all that. It's a game where the magic isn't in winning, it's just in seeing and being and loving. It was disconcerting and refreshing, how the game never "takes a side" — it observes the world, and the protagonist has the occasional curious thought about the extreme actions taken by others, but there's no judgement in the thoughts. There are no villains, just people, doing what they can to escape and survive. The game doesn't ask you to come down hard on one side of it's internal debates about rightness, wrongness, memories — it doesn't stop you, but the way the game lets you observe is so wonderful. I've seen other say the ending feels abrupt, but it's the only way for it to end, I think. Abrupt, like the end of the world, but still loving, still whole.
When I finished, my first thought was that I wanted to replay immediately. It's a short game, and I wanted to try the other dialogue options, learn more about this world and these societies that are so similar and so alien to mine. I wanted to see the other ending. But at the same time...this game isn't like that. It's not a game to devour fast as you can, to scour and scum through to achieve maximum content. It's a game that feels a little like climbing into a warm bath. It envelopes you without swallowing you and without you swallowing it. It's just...comfy, and buoyant, and sometimes you sit and you listen to the water and you feel like you're more in the world than you ever have been. I will replay it sometime, probably sometime soon, but...I want to sit with it longer first. I want to let my fingers prune and unprune. I want to let the Season end, and appreciate what it left me with.
I guess, if the game has a moral, a meaning, something you need to take from it, it's something simple: to love even in a world that is passing away, and to take comfort that this end of the world is neither the first or the last. Something new to love will come after, as it always does, and as it has again and again and again.
I don't know how to talk about it, though. How to say "I cried at least ten times not because the game was sad — though it sometimes was — but because it was so tender, so loving, so unique" without sounding like a pretentious asshole. I don't know how to talk about Kochi, a little boy who shares his memories of his father with you because there's no way to put that love to letters. I don't know how to talk about the line "It's the two hardest things to hold in your head. They were just boys, and they killed my family" without dissolving into tears.
It's easier to talk world-building and visuals and mechanics. This game has perhaps the most interesting world in any game I've played recently. The societies and values are so much like ours and yet not like ours at all. The mixture of modern aesthetics with old-world mysticism feels so wonderful and lovely. It's explicitly post-apocalyptic but also not. It's SO gorgeous to look at, and the style is so so unique and the models are so so gorgeous.
The walking is sometimes clumsy, and you can get stuck — the game knows this, and the pause screen has a helpful button for unsticking you. The bike - riding, assuming you don't end up wedged in a corner, feels good and tight and not tight at all, much the way actually riding a bike is, I spose. But the gameplay focuses less on moving through the world and more on recording it. There are a few things in the world that you must record to progress, but by and large what you record and why is purely up to you. My journal was filled with photos and sounds that were mine, meaningless nothings that don't matter, but maybe they do, because I saw them, because I recorded them, because I am a part of the world and in seeing and recording I make the world part of me. If you want fast, kinetic gameplay, this isn't it, but the game and the story wouldn't be served by gameplay like that. The gameplay is perfect for telling the story the story wants to tell.
And — it's funny, because gamer-brain initially made this very thing hard to enjoy. I wanted clearer marks of progression. I felt like I'd failed each time I took a photo that wasn't plot relevant or recorded a song that didn't change the worldstate. I was frustrated I wasn't moving fast. Games train us in all sorts of ways, and the leading games in the world now might create beautiful worlds, but they don't really want you to look at them. They want you to find the right tool, the right answer, the golden ending.
And if there's a right tool, there's a wrong one. If there's a golden ending, there's a bad one. If the world is beautiful but not meant to be seen, then the people in the world aren't real, they're enemies or allies or NPC fodder. And this game eschews all that. It's a game where the magic isn't in winning, it's just in seeing and being and loving. It was disconcerting and refreshing, how the game never "takes a side" — it observes the world, and the protagonist has the occasional curious thought about the extreme actions taken by others, but there's no judgement in the thoughts. There are no villains, just people, doing what they can to escape and survive. The game doesn't ask you to come down hard on one side of it's internal debates about rightness, wrongness, memories — it doesn't stop you, but the way the game lets you observe is so wonderful. I've seen other say the ending feels abrupt, but it's the only way for it to end, I think. Abrupt, like the end of the world, but still loving, still whole.
When I finished, my first thought was that I wanted to replay immediately. It's a short game, and I wanted to try the other dialogue options, learn more about this world and these societies that are so similar and so alien to mine. I wanted to see the other ending. But at the same time...this game isn't like that. It's not a game to devour fast as you can, to scour and scum through to achieve maximum content. It's a game that feels a little like climbing into a warm bath. It envelopes you without swallowing you and without you swallowing it. It's just...comfy, and buoyant, and sometimes you sit and you listen to the water and you feel like you're more in the world than you ever have been. I will replay it sometime, probably sometime soon, but...I want to sit with it longer first. I want to let my fingers prune and unprune. I want to let the Season end, and appreciate what it left me with.
I guess, if the game has a moral, a meaning, something you need to take from it, it's something simple: to love even in a world that is passing away, and to take comfort that this end of the world is neither the first or the last. Something new to love will come after, as it always does, and as it has again and again and again.
Não poderia ter apreciado Season em melhor momento. Hoje é o penúltimo dia de 2023 e me pego reflexivo sobre criar mais memórias do que dinheiro e Season é exatamente sobre isso, criar memórias, viver momentos, registrar e celebrar a vida em sua mais pura simplicidade.
Perceba que escrevi "apreciei" Season e não "joguei", pois ele foi uma experiência tão única e bela que me senti, de fato, dentro daquele mundo convivendo, rindo e chorando com aqueles personagens.
Eu quase conseguia sentir o cheiro dos ambientes.
Na música do OneRepublic, Counting Stars, tem um trecho que é cantado "Eu tenho orado muito para que chegue o dia que deixemos de contar dólares e comecemos a contar estrelas".
Season é simples, uma menina, sua bicicleta e sua mochila capturando momentos.
Season é arte, uma celebração da vida, da simplicidade de viver e da complexidade do ser humano. Uma reflexão da beleza do nosso mundo e dos males da humanidade.
Algo só é belo se tiver alguém para apreciar tal beleza e estou feliz que em estar vivo para poder apreciar Season.
Perceba que escrevi "apreciei" Season e não "joguei", pois ele foi uma experiência tão única e bela que me senti, de fato, dentro daquele mundo convivendo, rindo e chorando com aqueles personagens.
Eu quase conseguia sentir o cheiro dos ambientes.
Na música do OneRepublic, Counting Stars, tem um trecho que é cantado "Eu tenho orado muito para que chegue o dia que deixemos de contar dólares e comecemos a contar estrelas".
Season é simples, uma menina, sua bicicleta e sua mochila capturando momentos.
Season é arte, uma celebração da vida, da simplicidade de viver e da complexidade do ser humano. Uma reflexão da beleza do nosso mundo e dos males da humanidade.
Algo só é belo se tiver alguém para apreciar tal beleza e estou feliz que em estar vivo para poder apreciar Season.
I think I've now found some of the words for talking about this game. So I’ll now make an effort to describe why Season: A Letter to the Future might actually be my absolute favorite video game concurrently. An effort I’ll probably return to sometime in the future.
As a person deeply interested in the topic of the archive, the base premise already resonates with me. I think the way a society preserves its history, memories and legacy is very indicative of how that society is structured and which values it upholds. History is not a given, it’s a process of writing and re-writing, at least loosely informed by the archives that hold traces of the past. But those traces aren’t a given either. Whose history does a society decide is worth recording and safeguarding? Whose history is neglected or even getting erased? The archive belongs to the ghosts - but we need it to know who we are and where we came from. There’s an intangible feeling of sadness and loss that comes with these questions, especially when talking from a queer perspective. I’m non-binary – and I do rarely find myself anywhere in what the west calls its history. Season: A Letter to the Future sits somewhere in this entangled mess of historiography, softly and calmly singing its own song.
You'd think that gamifying the process of writing about history would result in a game that you could "100%", in which you could collect all the collectibles and “win” at historiography. But Season isn't that. It's as much a game about what you do not or cannot record as it is one about what you end up recording. The tools you are given to do so are a camera, a microphone, and handwriting (or rather: handwritten prompts). What you record with them is stored in a notebook, which you can freely customize – one page per area or topic is all you are given. It’s way too little to store every information you find. The player is put in the position to center what parts are important to them and what aspects of the current season they want to preserve. They also have the power to assign moral judgements to some events, influencing if and how the next season will remember what happened. The game also adds a clever twist to its setting: It’s set in the context of already having happened. It starts with a person already reading the “finished” notebook. The parts of the game you play are narratively already in the past – this re-focuses who else might be reading the book in the future and what they are taking away from it.
Season is also about what can’t be recorded or written down, about a lot of small or big moments and their atmosphere. The roadtrip-setting of the game is one filled with endings without closure, fitting for a game about recording history. In that aspect, it’s not just about history, but also about living in it. About the people you meet and their right (not) to be remembered. But also about the people you can no longer meet, about the absences felt in this game’s world – which is brilliantly crafted. Through careful sound design, it manages to have a tangibility to it that few games will ever reach. A tangibility that makes you feel the absences even more intensely.
Season’s writing is also incredibly strong and poetic. It uses every inch of its dialogues and monologues to think about history, memory and the emotional depth that reside in those concepts. It’s beautiful. And I think that is the note I want to end on, for now. I don’t want to get into spoilers yet, as I think this game benefits from having no idea what happens next – it’s a roadtrip, after all. But I’ll return to this space, sometime in the future. Because I have so many more words to find and sentences to form about Season: A Letter to the Future.
As a person deeply interested in the topic of the archive, the base premise already resonates with me. I think the way a society preserves its history, memories and legacy is very indicative of how that society is structured and which values it upholds. History is not a given, it’s a process of writing and re-writing, at least loosely informed by the archives that hold traces of the past. But those traces aren’t a given either. Whose history does a society decide is worth recording and safeguarding? Whose history is neglected or even getting erased? The archive belongs to the ghosts - but we need it to know who we are and where we came from. There’s an intangible feeling of sadness and loss that comes with these questions, especially when talking from a queer perspective. I’m non-binary – and I do rarely find myself anywhere in what the west calls its history. Season: A Letter to the Future sits somewhere in this entangled mess of historiography, softly and calmly singing its own song.
You'd think that gamifying the process of writing about history would result in a game that you could "100%", in which you could collect all the collectibles and “win” at historiography. But Season isn't that. It's as much a game about what you do not or cannot record as it is one about what you end up recording. The tools you are given to do so are a camera, a microphone, and handwriting (or rather: handwritten prompts). What you record with them is stored in a notebook, which you can freely customize – one page per area or topic is all you are given. It’s way too little to store every information you find. The player is put in the position to center what parts are important to them and what aspects of the current season they want to preserve. They also have the power to assign moral judgements to some events, influencing if and how the next season will remember what happened. The game also adds a clever twist to its setting: It’s set in the context of already having happened. It starts with a person already reading the “finished” notebook. The parts of the game you play are narratively already in the past – this re-focuses who else might be reading the book in the future and what they are taking away from it.
Season is also about what can’t be recorded or written down, about a lot of small or big moments and their atmosphere. The roadtrip-setting of the game is one filled with endings without closure, fitting for a game about recording history. In that aspect, it’s not just about history, but also about living in it. About the people you meet and their right (not) to be remembered. But also about the people you can no longer meet, about the absences felt in this game’s world – which is brilliantly crafted. Through careful sound design, it manages to have a tangibility to it that few games will ever reach. A tangibility that makes you feel the absences even more intensely.
Season’s writing is also incredibly strong and poetic. It uses every inch of its dialogues and monologues to think about history, memory and the emotional depth that reside in those concepts. It’s beautiful. And I think that is the note I want to end on, for now. I don’t want to get into spoilers yet, as I think this game benefits from having no idea what happens next – it’s a roadtrip, after all. But I’ll return to this space, sometime in the future. Because I have so many more words to find and sentences to form about Season: A Letter to the Future.
"Should we take comfort knowing the god of forgetting will also be obliterated by time?"
I've tried for a bit now to put my thoughts into a shape, but cannot. Besides the somewhat janky walking/biking camera, this game was very nice to play. It was nice to visit beautiful locations and capture the sights and sounds with my camera and recorder.
Spiritually this game also feels in line with what I spend a lot of time thinking about. The nature of memory, trauma, remembering, forgetting. Living, here, now, in the moment. Spending time with others. Forming new connections. Building community. Passing things on to our descendants. Letting go of the past. Remembering the past. Driving change. Going with the flow. Experiencing Nature.
I think I will continue to think of this game for a long time.
I've tried for a bit now to put my thoughts into a shape, but cannot. Besides the somewhat janky walking/biking camera, this game was very nice to play. It was nice to visit beautiful locations and capture the sights and sounds with my camera and recorder.
Spiritually this game also feels in line with what I spend a lot of time thinking about. The nature of memory, trauma, remembering, forgetting. Living, here, now, in the moment. Spending time with others. Forming new connections. Building community. Passing things on to our descendants. Letting go of the past. Remembering the past. Driving change. Going with the flow. Experiencing Nature.
I think I will continue to think of this game for a long time.
I do not yet have the words to describe why I love this game so much. I may never find them. Until then, I'm gonna entangle myself everywhere with everyone, so the next time I lie down in the dirt, I will have so much more to tell you
SEASON: A letter to future is a game about loss. About change. About the preservation of memories with those that you love and the inevitability of losing those memories, and sometimes, those people that you love.
SEASON immediately piqued my interest with just how beautiful the game is, a quality that holds just as true in hour 5 as it does in the opening 15 minutes. You play as a young woman, sent from her village to document the world as she chooses to see it - capturing the sights, sounds, and people that you feel are worth remembering.
You’re equipped with a polaroid camera, a field audio recorder, and a journal, whose pages you fill with sketches, ruminations, and your scrapbooking. I had never considered that I might enjoy scrapbooking, but having the opportunity here to collage my collections of photos, sketches and stamps was positively delightful. I meticulously screenshot each page of my journal upon completion because I was proud of what I had made. It felt like an experience and expression that I chose - not one that the game directed me to.
More than anything, the game is just evocative. You run the gamut from tender tears as you say goodbye to your mother, or help a grieving widow; gleeful excitement as you crest a hill, revealing a dazzlingly beautiful vista kissed with golden sunlight; and somber quiet stillness, as you walk through a war memorial, or a village that simply no longer is.
I’ve played photography games. I’ve played exploration games. I’ve played emotional games. I’m not sure I’ve played a bicycle game, but that’s besides the point I’m trying to make – I don’t think I’ve played a game like SEASON, that so directly and explicitly directs the player to contend and grapple with the prospect of fleeting memories and cherished moments.
This game had me crying more than any other piece of media this year. Happy tears, sad tears, bittersweet tears. When it comes to games, or any other piece of media, really, I’ve always treasured those titles that are capable of truly evoking real, meaningful feelings.
So in a year with the epic scope of Baldur’s Gate, the bombastic action horror of Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space - SEASON is one of my favorites. A quiet contender for Game of the Year, one that I wholeheartedly recommend you check out.
SEASON immediately piqued my interest with just how beautiful the game is, a quality that holds just as true in hour 5 as it does in the opening 15 minutes. You play as a young woman, sent from her village to document the world as she chooses to see it - capturing the sights, sounds, and people that you feel are worth remembering.
You’re equipped with a polaroid camera, a field audio recorder, and a journal, whose pages you fill with sketches, ruminations, and your scrapbooking. I had never considered that I might enjoy scrapbooking, but having the opportunity here to collage my collections of photos, sketches and stamps was positively delightful. I meticulously screenshot each page of my journal upon completion because I was proud of what I had made. It felt like an experience and expression that I chose - not one that the game directed me to.
More than anything, the game is just evocative. You run the gamut from tender tears as you say goodbye to your mother, or help a grieving widow; gleeful excitement as you crest a hill, revealing a dazzlingly beautiful vista kissed with golden sunlight; and somber quiet stillness, as you walk through a war memorial, or a village that simply no longer is.
I’ve played photography games. I’ve played exploration games. I’ve played emotional games. I’m not sure I’ve played a bicycle game, but that’s besides the point I’m trying to make – I don’t think I’ve played a game like SEASON, that so directly and explicitly directs the player to contend and grapple with the prospect of fleeting memories and cherished moments.
This game had me crying more than any other piece of media this year. Happy tears, sad tears, bittersweet tears. When it comes to games, or any other piece of media, really, I’ve always treasured those titles that are capable of truly evoking real, meaningful feelings.
So in a year with the epic scope of Baldur’s Gate, the bombastic action horror of Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space - SEASON is one of my favorites. A quiet contender for Game of the Year, one that I wholeheartedly recommend you check out.
I’ve never understood what exactly is meant when they say that scent is the sense most intimately linked to memory. How can that be? How can one sense be the tether that ties us to memory like that? What do we meant when we say that? Do we mean that scent is the siren, the call to the shore? Maybe. The first thing you do in Season: A Letter to the Future is divide memory into senses. In attending to our senses, we ground ourselves and our experience in material sensation. But then we extrapolate, we use our senses as a sail, and go into a story.
There’s a scene in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou where Alpha, the android, is watching the water at sundown with an older woman. It grows dark, and under the water, lights flicker on. Lamps hanging over city streets, now totally flooded. In this moment, we are made acutely aware of climate collapse that led to the world of its fiction. But to say that story, or Season, are post-apocalyptic, or apocalyptic at all, is wrong, in my view. Apocalyptic fiction is obsessed with a very specific conception of apocalypse. Apocalypse, originally, referred to revelation of any sort, but the eschatology of Christianity is known to be a little grim and scary, brimstone and all that. Apocalyptic fiction follows suit; apocalypse is a dystopic, irreversible catastrophe that does not just transform but annihilates. And it is what is left, what is unannihilated, where the meaning of these apocalypses tends to reveal itself. Apocalyptic fiction is always oriented toward the past, because in order to understand itself as apocalypse it must sanctify the past and damn the future.
Things like Season and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, meanwhile, envision futures transformed but by no means marred by annihilation. There are no gritty and dusty drifters or doomsday cults. Season is not post-, pre-, or mid-apocalypse, not in the sense of apocalyptic fiction. It is made very clear that this is a season, not a world being demolished, but a period of time like any other, coming to an end. This isn’t so terrifying. The war has been over for years. The Grey Hand, a sort of charitable corps, wants to help everyone get through the process, even if they are a bit paternalist. Things will be okay. This world may be gone soon, but the world will continue.
But what is at risk is memory. Your mission is simple. Document the season. Memory is fragile, but documents are durable. Memory is not the past, but an imagination of the past. A document transmutes phenomena into noumena. As Flusser says of the photograph, it turns history into something ahistorical, atemporal. Take a picture. It will last longer.
But then there’s what Suzanne Briet says: that an antelope, taken into an archive, becomes a document of antelopes. And suddenly, the feeling of violence creeps in. Memory in Season is sacred, but it can also be painful. There is only so much we can bear to remember. If I had the time, if I had the memory, if I had done the reading, maybe I could say something about clever about Heidegger or Proust, instead of relying on my shallow well of sophomoric readings, misremembered quotations, written under sleep deprivation and without editing. Even now, I want to write more than I’ve written, plumb some deeper meanings, even though I know it does not all need to be given a life longer lasting than bronze. In Season, Memory can even be found involuntarily embedded in the world, in crystals called Harpik. People lose sense of time and space, totally incapacitated by memory. Is it wrong to pluck things from this world, bury them in this book? Should some things be forgotten? War, grief, soda bottles, crass jokes, ugly romances? What is worth remembering?
For years, I've had the sensation I can't shake that as time goes on, we're more and more, as a society, unable to get our heads out of the past. Cultural memory as a pseudohistory can be intoxicating. Vaporwave and hauntological pop is always striving towards the past, always in search of a present that was never there. Fascists and reactionaries are obsessed with the past, but so are their opponents, just with different fixations. Just today, I heard an opinion from Nietzche saying that an excess of history will drain us of life. It can be intoxicating to imagine pasts, when the future, so distorted by visions of apocalypse and dystopia, seems to have disappeared entirely. I look at the art that has come out for the past decade, and I see so many ruins, overgrown and ancient. The present can only be understood as something that will, inevitably, be reduced to ash. Maybe it's because the present imagined is always a present remembered. Never a present as it is. Not was, but is.
Forgetting, just like memory, is sacred, too, in Season, though not without fear. Forgetting is powerful, but necessary. The people of Tieng Valley revere the unfathomable past. Forgetting is a quiet sacrifice. By forgetting, we revoke the past of its hold over us, free ourselves from the grip of memory. And then, there is sleep, what Season refers to as the unification of remembering and forgetting. But I think, in a sense, sleep is the abnegation of the present. The past is gone, the future is unknown, and the present is invisible. All vestiges of time, of any kind of history, disappear in the pool of sleep.
But there’s tension here. There is virtue in memory, in forgetfulness, in sleep. But how can we embody all these contradictory virtues? There’s no reason to fear olam haba, it’s good to accept the world to come, but I still can’t bear to accept forgetting. Surely, it’s better to remember, right? All of this, this “archive fever”, is a war against death, isn’t it? Isn’t that a good enough reason? But there’s never enough time, never enough memory. Things will be forgotten. There’s no question. The flood will come, and the valley will be scrubbed of everything but Harpik. I don’t know if I can bear it, but it’s going to happen anyway. The visions of a cruel apocalypse are wrong, but whenever I try to imagine the future, I’m always beset with a singular dread of everything being forgotten. Everything I care about, everything I’ve done, everything that matters to me. Only so many things can fit on the page of a scrapbook. I look at Season, and know that I should attend to my senses in the present, should be at peace with sleep, that I shouldn’t fear the future, that I should be to strive to be remembered, and be grateful to be forgotten. But I can’t hold it in my heart, can’t feel it for real. Not yet. Maybe in the next season.
There’s a scene in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou where Alpha, the android, is watching the water at sundown with an older woman. It grows dark, and under the water, lights flicker on. Lamps hanging over city streets, now totally flooded. In this moment, we are made acutely aware of climate collapse that led to the world of its fiction. But to say that story, or Season, are post-apocalyptic, or apocalyptic at all, is wrong, in my view. Apocalyptic fiction is obsessed with a very specific conception of apocalypse. Apocalypse, originally, referred to revelation of any sort, but the eschatology of Christianity is known to be a little grim and scary, brimstone and all that. Apocalyptic fiction follows suit; apocalypse is a dystopic, irreversible catastrophe that does not just transform but annihilates. And it is what is left, what is unannihilated, where the meaning of these apocalypses tends to reveal itself. Apocalyptic fiction is always oriented toward the past, because in order to understand itself as apocalypse it must sanctify the past and damn the future.
Things like Season and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, meanwhile, envision futures transformed but by no means marred by annihilation. There are no gritty and dusty drifters or doomsday cults. Season is not post-, pre-, or mid-apocalypse, not in the sense of apocalyptic fiction. It is made very clear that this is a season, not a world being demolished, but a period of time like any other, coming to an end. This isn’t so terrifying. The war has been over for years. The Grey Hand, a sort of charitable corps, wants to help everyone get through the process, even if they are a bit paternalist. Things will be okay. This world may be gone soon, but the world will continue.
But what is at risk is memory. Your mission is simple. Document the season. Memory is fragile, but documents are durable. Memory is not the past, but an imagination of the past. A document transmutes phenomena into noumena. As Flusser says of the photograph, it turns history into something ahistorical, atemporal. Take a picture. It will last longer.
But then there’s what Suzanne Briet says: that an antelope, taken into an archive, becomes a document of antelopes. And suddenly, the feeling of violence creeps in. Memory in Season is sacred, but it can also be painful. There is only so much we can bear to remember. If I had the time, if I had the memory, if I had done the reading, maybe I could say something about clever about Heidegger or Proust, instead of relying on my shallow well of sophomoric readings, misremembered quotations, written under sleep deprivation and without editing. Even now, I want to write more than I’ve written, plumb some deeper meanings, even though I know it does not all need to be given a life longer lasting than bronze. In Season, Memory can even be found involuntarily embedded in the world, in crystals called Harpik. People lose sense of time and space, totally incapacitated by memory. Is it wrong to pluck things from this world, bury them in this book? Should some things be forgotten? War, grief, soda bottles, crass jokes, ugly romances? What is worth remembering?
For years, I've had the sensation I can't shake that as time goes on, we're more and more, as a society, unable to get our heads out of the past. Cultural memory as a pseudohistory can be intoxicating. Vaporwave and hauntological pop is always striving towards the past, always in search of a present that was never there. Fascists and reactionaries are obsessed with the past, but so are their opponents, just with different fixations. Just today, I heard an opinion from Nietzche saying that an excess of history will drain us of life. It can be intoxicating to imagine pasts, when the future, so distorted by visions of apocalypse and dystopia, seems to have disappeared entirely. I look at the art that has come out for the past decade, and I see so many ruins, overgrown and ancient. The present can only be understood as something that will, inevitably, be reduced to ash. Maybe it's because the present imagined is always a present remembered. Never a present as it is. Not was, but is.
Forgetting, just like memory, is sacred, too, in Season, though not without fear. Forgetting is powerful, but necessary. The people of Tieng Valley revere the unfathomable past. Forgetting is a quiet sacrifice. By forgetting, we revoke the past of its hold over us, free ourselves from the grip of memory. And then, there is sleep, what Season refers to as the unification of remembering and forgetting. But I think, in a sense, sleep is the abnegation of the present. The past is gone, the future is unknown, and the present is invisible. All vestiges of time, of any kind of history, disappear in the pool of sleep.
But there’s tension here. There is virtue in memory, in forgetfulness, in sleep. But how can we embody all these contradictory virtues? There’s no reason to fear olam haba, it’s good to accept the world to come, but I still can’t bear to accept forgetting. Surely, it’s better to remember, right? All of this, this “archive fever”, is a war against death, isn’t it? Isn’t that a good enough reason? But there’s never enough time, never enough memory. Things will be forgotten. There’s no question. The flood will come, and the valley will be scrubbed of everything but Harpik. I don’t know if I can bear it, but it’s going to happen anyway. The visions of a cruel apocalypse are wrong, but whenever I try to imagine the future, I’m always beset with a singular dread of everything being forgotten. Everything I care about, everything I’ve done, everything that matters to me. Only so many things can fit on the page of a scrapbook. I look at Season, and know that I should attend to my senses in the present, should be at peace with sleep, that I shouldn’t fear the future, that I should be to strive to be remembered, and be grateful to be forgotten. But I can’t hold it in my heart, can’t feel it for real. Not yet. Maybe in the next season.
It is a really relaxing game about the passing of time and the stories of people in the world. If you're looking for puzzles or action, there is none, this is more like a walking simulator with photos, sound recording, and biking, but it's just so good. You'll either love it or not.
A Season of remembrance..
Seasons: A letter to the future has a deeply affecting story. A meditation on history and memory. Profoundly human in its nature. On one hand, the story is very melancholic because you meet many people who mourn the past. But you are responsible for documenting these sad stories, or the hidden beautiful aspects of their lives.
The possibility to personalise your own journal through photos, recordings, quotes and sketches allows to engage more meaningful with the world of Seasons.
The controls are janky, the performance is mediocre, but I couldn't care less about that because the feeling I got while playing outweighs everything. Fantastic.
Seasons: A letter to the future has a deeply affecting story. A meditation on history and memory. Profoundly human in its nature. On one hand, the story is very melancholic because you meet many people who mourn the past. But you are responsible for documenting these sad stories, or the hidden beautiful aspects of their lives.
The possibility to personalise your own journal through photos, recordings, quotes and sketches allows to engage more meaningful with the world of Seasons.
The controls are janky, the performance is mediocre, but I couldn't care less about that because the feeling I got while playing outweighs everything. Fantastic.
Totalmente ridículo quem dá 3 estrelas ou menos pra esse jogo. "Ai pq não é pra todo mundo" caralho meu parceiro, óbvio que não é, a gnt pode falar isso pra absolutamente TUDO!
Season is a beautiful, contemplative experience, where the moments between gameplay are often more impactful than the gameplay itself. It's in that quiet time, spent biking through the woods and reflecting on what you've just seen, that Season truly comes to life.
Its only real failure is in feeling comparable to better games. I was frequently reminded of other titles like Outer Wilds, Firewatch, and Paradise Killer, all of which have an extra bit of magic that Season is lacking.
Still - this is a good game, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Its only real failure is in feeling comparable to better games. I was frequently reminded of other titles like Outer Wilds, Firewatch, and Paradise Killer, all of which have an extra bit of magic that Season is lacking.
Still - this is a good game, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Really simple game with a confusing story.
Not as wonderful as the media and other reviews want it to be. It's one of those cases where everyone seems to praise because it is an "intellectual" thing and if you rate it low you are labelled as someone that can't understand the beauty behind it. Whatever.
Not as wonderful as the media and other reviews want it to be. It's one of those cases where everyone seems to praise because it is an "intellectual" thing and if you rate it low you are labelled as someone that can't understand the beauty behind it. Whatever.
Contemplative game
Season: A Letter to the Future was a short, charming game with a simple premise. You leave your village to ride around on your bike; learning about the world you live in, talking to people, taking pictures, and recording the sounds of the world before the season (era) ends. That's really it in a nutshell. Never became bored with it. Enjoyed the journey.
A short but pleasant game about biking through a small valley, documenting its history and people to preserve for the future before the season ends and everything is swept away in a coming flood. The art style is lovely, and I was really into the meditative atmosphere with its focus on simply taking in the moment with photos and drawings. Tieng Valley is an interesting setting to explore for the time you spend in it, and I enjoyed that you’re free to go wherever you like once you arrive
If there’s one notable flaw it’d be performance since there’s quite a few FPS drops throughout that took me out of it a bit. Hopefully this can be patched but otherwise I really enjoyed it
If there’s one notable flaw it’d be performance since there’s quite a few FPS drops throughout that took me out of it a bit. Hopefully this can be patched but otherwise I really enjoyed it
One of the more beautiful games I’ve played, and a thing that feels like it was destined to find me at this precise moment of my life, as I grapple with the recent passing of my dad. This gentle journey through the most bittersweet and bucolic post-apocalypse I’ve seen, armed with nothing but a camera, a field recorder, and a bicycle: this is what I needed
Everything in Season is poetry. The familiar world tinged with a hint of magic. The far-reaching thoughts of the main character as she opens her eyes to the life, culture, and history of her surroundings. The understated character work and voice acting. The richly layered thematic material. Here is a game deeply concerned with memory and loss, while always keeping a hopeful, if anxious, eye toward the future. I love the tone that’s captured here so much
Games like this often focus on their writing, their art, their vibes, but Season deserves recognition for the mechanics on display as well. Whipping out a device and capturing a moment feels effortless, and the world has been assembled with such fastidious care that every shot I took felt like a minor masterpiece. I cannot overstate how important this was. Compared to a game like Umurangi, where I rarely felt like I’d actually taken a “good” picture, Season made me feel like a photographic genius. The lighting and composition always fall right into place like magic. I walked away from this thinking “gee maybe I should take up photography!” (I won’t). And although at the start of the game I was worried that assembling the scrapbook might get old and tedious, it never did. I loved finding new ways to arrange the elements of each page, I loved the mix of open-ended and goal-oriented pages, and it was a really special moment to flip back through the whole thing at the end
And then there’s the bicycle: it was such a simple and rich joy to just coast across this world. I also loved how my fingers would actually get a bit tired when biking up hills from having to pump the triggers filled with DualSense tension
I was hoping for just a little bit more from the ending, but this is dangerously close to a perfect game to me
Everything in Season is poetry. The familiar world tinged with a hint of magic. The far-reaching thoughts of the main character as she opens her eyes to the life, culture, and history of her surroundings. The understated character work and voice acting. The richly layered thematic material. Here is a game deeply concerned with memory and loss, while always keeping a hopeful, if anxious, eye toward the future. I love the tone that’s captured here so much
Games like this often focus on their writing, their art, their vibes, but Season deserves recognition for the mechanics on display as well. Whipping out a device and capturing a moment feels effortless, and the world has been assembled with such fastidious care that every shot I took felt like a minor masterpiece. I cannot overstate how important this was. Compared to a game like Umurangi, where I rarely felt like I’d actually taken a “good” picture, Season made me feel like a photographic genius. The lighting and composition always fall right into place like magic. I walked away from this thinking “gee maybe I should take up photography!” (I won’t). And although at the start of the game I was worried that assembling the scrapbook might get old and tedious, it never did. I loved finding new ways to arrange the elements of each page, I loved the mix of open-ended and goal-oriented pages, and it was a really special moment to flip back through the whole thing at the end
And then there’s the bicycle: it was such a simple and rich joy to just coast across this world. I also loved how my fingers would actually get a bit tired when biking up hills from having to pump the triggers filled with DualSense tension
I was hoping for just a little bit more from the ending, but this is dangerously close to a perfect game to me
Sometimes, a flawed game can be a perfect encapsulation of a single concept.
Season: A Letter to the Future is laser focused on the tragedy of memory.
The gameplay loop is simple. Go through a place, take pictures, record audio, assemble a couple scrapbook pages, write some notes, move on.
Aside from a few pages that must be filled out to progress the story, nothing is mandatory. You can leave entire pages blank. You can take the worst pictures in existence. The only person to judge how much you failed to care is you.
I can see why this game failed so hard the studio had to downsize months after the game's release. It is slow. It is dependent on non-tangible, non-trackable player investment. And if you do invest in what it has to teach, you will likely feel sad.
The first page you make is a tribute and farewell to your mother. I had no idea how important scrapbooking was to what this game was trying to do, so I stuck her picture in a corner, slapped the gaudiest clip-art over the remaining space and called it good so I could move on. It looked like crap.
The second page you make encapsulates your entire home town. This seemed much more manageable. There were so many other places and things to take pictures of! Sounds to record, trinkets to tape in! It was a fun, healthy-feeling variety of stuff.
I started to grasp what the game was doing once I left town and got my bicycle. I had a whole page for... the mountain I biked down. There wasn't anything there! I whizzed by it all in a couple minutes! What was I supposed to fill all that space with? This, with its goats and abandoned construction cranes, got as much space in my journal as my whole hometown?
In my search to fill space, I found postcards and stamps. I took wide landscape shots to fill space. And I realized that in my job as chronicler, I had to choose what was more important to me - artifacts and context of the culture that used to be here, or the experience I had moving through what existed in the here and now. Did I write observations factually and accurately, or was it important to show some of the color of my character's emotions as she moved through this space?
When I first saw that there were note options that contained no factual information, but only the protagonist's musings, I thought, "what a waste, why is that here?" But as I assembled artifacts and observations without her in it, the enterprise felt wrong. I wasn't capturing what it felt like to be in those spaces. Her experiences didn't line up perfectly with mine, but it also felt like I was missing something important by being so clinical in my approach.
These myriad decisions are where the primary form of engagement comes from Season: A Letter to the Future. How actively memory is created, and how easily the means of communicating memory completely warps the goal that fueled it in the first place.
I have some background in graphic design, so I loved adding some clip art at jaunty angles, or leaving some blank space so that photos I took could really pop. But whenever I looked at those pages later, I couldn't help but think, "why didn't I take more pictures?" From a pure utilitarian perspective, I should have been plastering every page like a checkerboard. And it still wouldn't have been enough.
For some spaces, I thought, "this place is interesting, but I'll be here again later." Then when I returned later, the sun had moved, the lighting was completely different, and my photos looked like crap. I wasted so much good sunlight not taking pictures!
Normally when games have dialog trees that progress regardless of your choice, I often feel myself ask, "why did you need to give me the illusion of interaction at all?" But in Season, I could clearly see that each decision was a fork in the conversation. Did you try to ask people about what historically happened, or what it felt like to live through those events? And true to the flow of conversation in real life, you never get to go back to those moments again when someone might have been vulnerable enough to open up to you. And sometimes, you feel instant regret with the non-answers you get.
Watching other characters actively creating memory, watching yourself make recordings of their creations. I'm floundering to make sense of my experience of this game here, now. I want to find a reason to talk about a music box I made a recording for where I was so lazy I didn't make a second recording when the first didn't start at the beginning. Later when I listened to it, besides being mad at my past self, I noticed the microphone had picked up the rain in the background, something I had completely forgotten was happening when the recording was made. A recording I made!
I want to edit this review a million times. I want to not touch it at all. Which is the more accurate way of doing things? A memory carefully conserved with thought and deliberation, or flying by your whims and coughing out whatever flows naturally?
I saw a promotional video for photo manipulation AI recently that showed how someone added clouds and a cabin to a picture he took of himself in the woods. How the speaker was putting forth the idea that photos will soon be beyond reality. That the idea of a memory will no longer be to convey things as they happened, but how it felt like they happened. Cameras now already do this, with their tricks to edit out the people and noise around you, leaving a sterilized world with a face seen more perfectly than any human can. But we still have a tether on reality, a shared understanding for what kind of concept a photo is trying to gesture towards. What happens when the cultural exchange of memory is merely the ideas of feelings of places and activities?
Most of the locations in Season: A Letter to the Future, while pretty, didn't feel like much while I was wandering through them. But when I saw my incomplete journal entries for those spaces, I was offended on my own behalf. How could I capture the nature of the winding path from the new cemetery, when any one photo could not capture more than a single bend obscured by trees? How could I have forgotten to take a picture of the other side of the bell tower where the bell would have actually been visible??? I never took a picture of her house! Or his van! I never took a picture of a single road, even though my whole life was spent on my bike 5x more than it was at any destination!
At the end of the game, you are given a final opportunity to look through your journal, to reflect and rearrange. There was a somber sinking devastation as I was forced to realize the disconnect of how my brain was justifying every bad choice I'd made. That anyone I showed this to, I could explain why there aren't any pictures of fruit from the fruit farm. Or how this shrine looked so much better in the early afternoon light, not this murky twilight. Because the point was that anyone seeing this wouldn't have my insight, my excuses, my regrets. The only clues they would have about that world, or the evidence about my life, would be exactly what I gave them. The stilted, terribly cut audio. Historical photos half-obscured with dumb-ass stickers. Patterns and rituals photographed but never explained. People captured in a moment with no context given to who they were, why they mattered to me.
When I saw my first page, with my mom's face crammed into one corner, I cringed out of my skin. I deleted everything and gave her as much space as I could. That picture I took of her at the start of the game was the only proof of the home I had.
Season: A Letter to the Future is laser focused on the tragedy of memory.
The gameplay loop is simple. Go through a place, take pictures, record audio, assemble a couple scrapbook pages, write some notes, move on.
Aside from a few pages that must be filled out to progress the story, nothing is mandatory. You can leave entire pages blank. You can take the worst pictures in existence. The only person to judge how much you failed to care is you.
I can see why this game failed so hard the studio had to downsize months after the game's release. It is slow. It is dependent on non-tangible, non-trackable player investment. And if you do invest in what it has to teach, you will likely feel sad.
The first page you make is a tribute and farewell to your mother. I had no idea how important scrapbooking was to what this game was trying to do, so I stuck her picture in a corner, slapped the gaudiest clip-art over the remaining space and called it good so I could move on. It looked like crap.
The second page you make encapsulates your entire home town. This seemed much more manageable. There were so many other places and things to take pictures of! Sounds to record, trinkets to tape in! It was a fun, healthy-feeling variety of stuff.
I started to grasp what the game was doing once I left town and got my bicycle. I had a whole page for... the mountain I biked down. There wasn't anything there! I whizzed by it all in a couple minutes! What was I supposed to fill all that space with? This, with its goats and abandoned construction cranes, got as much space in my journal as my whole hometown?
In my search to fill space, I found postcards and stamps. I took wide landscape shots to fill space. And I realized that in my job as chronicler, I had to choose what was more important to me - artifacts and context of the culture that used to be here, or the experience I had moving through what existed in the here and now. Did I write observations factually and accurately, or was it important to show some of the color of my character's emotions as she moved through this space?
When I first saw that there were note options that contained no factual information, but only the protagonist's musings, I thought, "what a waste, why is that here?" But as I assembled artifacts and observations without her in it, the enterprise felt wrong. I wasn't capturing what it felt like to be in those spaces. Her experiences didn't line up perfectly with mine, but it also felt like I was missing something important by being so clinical in my approach.
These myriad decisions are where the primary form of engagement comes from Season: A Letter to the Future. How actively memory is created, and how easily the means of communicating memory completely warps the goal that fueled it in the first place.
I have some background in graphic design, so I loved adding some clip art at jaunty angles, or leaving some blank space so that photos I took could really pop. But whenever I looked at those pages later, I couldn't help but think, "why didn't I take more pictures?" From a pure utilitarian perspective, I should have been plastering every page like a checkerboard. And it still wouldn't have been enough.
For some spaces, I thought, "this place is interesting, but I'll be here again later." Then when I returned later, the sun had moved, the lighting was completely different, and my photos looked like crap. I wasted so much good sunlight not taking pictures!
Normally when games have dialog trees that progress regardless of your choice, I often feel myself ask, "why did you need to give me the illusion of interaction at all?" But in Season, I could clearly see that each decision was a fork in the conversation. Did you try to ask people about what historically happened, or what it felt like to live through those events? And true to the flow of conversation in real life, you never get to go back to those moments again when someone might have been vulnerable enough to open up to you. And sometimes, you feel instant regret with the non-answers you get.
Watching other characters actively creating memory, watching yourself make recordings of their creations. I'm floundering to make sense of my experience of this game here, now. I want to find a reason to talk about a music box I made a recording for where I was so lazy I didn't make a second recording when the first didn't start at the beginning. Later when I listened to it, besides being mad at my past self, I noticed the microphone had picked up the rain in the background, something I had completely forgotten was happening when the recording was made. A recording I made!
I want to edit this review a million times. I want to not touch it at all. Which is the more accurate way of doing things? A memory carefully conserved with thought and deliberation, or flying by your whims and coughing out whatever flows naturally?
I saw a promotional video for photo manipulation AI recently that showed how someone added clouds and a cabin to a picture he took of himself in the woods. How the speaker was putting forth the idea that photos will soon be beyond reality. That the idea of a memory will no longer be to convey things as they happened, but how it felt like they happened. Cameras now already do this, with their tricks to edit out the people and noise around you, leaving a sterilized world with a face seen more perfectly than any human can. But we still have a tether on reality, a shared understanding for what kind of concept a photo is trying to gesture towards. What happens when the cultural exchange of memory is merely the ideas of feelings of places and activities?
Most of the locations in Season: A Letter to the Future, while pretty, didn't feel like much while I was wandering through them. But when I saw my incomplete journal entries for those spaces, I was offended on my own behalf. How could I capture the nature of the winding path from the new cemetery, when any one photo could not capture more than a single bend obscured by trees? How could I have forgotten to take a picture of the other side of the bell tower where the bell would have actually been visible??? I never took a picture of her house! Or his van! I never took a picture of a single road, even though my whole life was spent on my bike 5x more than it was at any destination!
At the end of the game, you are given a final opportunity to look through your journal, to reflect and rearrange. There was a somber sinking devastation as I was forced to realize the disconnect of how my brain was justifying every bad choice I'd made. That anyone I showed this to, I could explain why there aren't any pictures of fruit from the fruit farm. Or how this shrine looked so much better in the early afternoon light, not this murky twilight. Because the point was that anyone seeing this wouldn't have my insight, my excuses, my regrets. The only clues they would have about that world, or the evidence about my life, would be exactly what I gave them. The stilted, terribly cut audio. Historical photos half-obscured with dumb-ass stickers. Patterns and rituals photographed but never explained. People captured in a moment with no context given to who they were, why they mattered to me.
When I saw my first page, with my mom's face crammed into one corner, I cringed out of my skin. I deleted everything and gave her as much space as I could. That picture I took of her at the start of the game was the only proof of the home I had.
Unfortunately, Season does little to emphasise the nature of journeys outside of animating vast beautiful landscapes that conform to meanings that impress, homogeneously, the overwritten narrative laboriously pounded into your ears. The talkiness of the story, dully delivered by some sleepy performances that suffer from totally absent direction (or convincing character motivation), completely eats up any sense of player empathy with the characters; the vistas become postcards with absent scrawl on the back, written by a backpacker convinced of the cosmic significance of staying in hostels and eating "local cuisine" served out of tourist traps.
Normally I say, "verbs, not vibes" for designing the delivery of how a game should feel in conveying its tonality, but the aggressive nature with which Season commodifies its world through the gathering purpose (poorly framed as archival bedrocking, something which totally goes against the current efforts of archival practices wresting free of the nature of highly authored "cornerstones" of import in many institutions of the past) it builds all interaction around the vague, ethereal nature of journeying - literally, leaving things behind - is wasted on the acknowledgement of the game as a product. It's not the developers fault that game clipping and sharing is now a highly commercial enterprise external to games as art, but given the antiquity of that facet of community nowadays, they should have realised the optics and feel of such a scaffolded feel when moving through their spaces.
Spaces being here a very general term. The game is sidewalks: paths are enclosured, and any trying to feel less like a zoo animal will immediately bring more to mind the feeling of playing Super Mario Bros than Sable. You can follow motion through forward or back, but regardless of what you feel is pushing you in a direction, the developers do not allow the desires of the player nor of a player narrative to create expectation, payoff, or ambiguity of the journey outside of the highly rote, terribly cliched, experience.
And as a capstone, the animatic cutscenes have some of the worst examples of stealing the component parts of comics to "cut costs" I've ever seen in a game. The lettering is atrociously mechanised, creating a horribly ugly script that has no life or wit to its line, yet it draws all attention to it by being placed in awful MS paint ovals that consider not at all the composition of the frame they are put in. The models at rest in each 'frame' are not composed on beats of the scene, but at dim relaxations of muscle, taking all life out of the image, rendering the screen a puppet show lost for a puppeteer.
Normally I say, "verbs, not vibes" for designing the delivery of how a game should feel in conveying its tonality, but the aggressive nature with which Season commodifies its world through the gathering purpose (poorly framed as archival bedrocking, something which totally goes against the current efforts of archival practices wresting free of the nature of highly authored "cornerstones" of import in many institutions of the past) it builds all interaction around the vague, ethereal nature of journeying - literally, leaving things behind - is wasted on the acknowledgement of the game as a product. It's not the developers fault that game clipping and sharing is now a highly commercial enterprise external to games as art, but given the antiquity of that facet of community nowadays, they should have realised the optics and feel of such a scaffolded feel when moving through their spaces.
Spaces being here a very general term. The game is sidewalks: paths are enclosured, and any trying to feel less like a zoo animal will immediately bring more to mind the feeling of playing Super Mario Bros than Sable. You can follow motion through forward or back, but regardless of what you feel is pushing you in a direction, the developers do not allow the desires of the player nor of a player narrative to create expectation, payoff, or ambiguity of the journey outside of the highly rote, terribly cliched, experience.
And as a capstone, the animatic cutscenes have some of the worst examples of stealing the component parts of comics to "cut costs" I've ever seen in a game. The lettering is atrociously mechanised, creating a horribly ugly script that has no life or wit to its line, yet it draws all attention to it by being placed in awful MS paint ovals that consider not at all the composition of the frame they are put in. The models at rest in each 'frame' are not composed on beats of the scene, but at dim relaxations of muscle, taking all life out of the image, rendering the screen a puppet show lost for a puppeteer.
I have a new appreciation for recording memories and writing down my name on everything I own
A truly beautiful experience I won't soon forget.
Thinking about forgetting, about mortality, about the impermanence of life, and how precious and important it is to me, of how much pain can be felt in losing it, and how much beauty there is in truly taking the time to SEE it...
Thank you for this.
In the words of the writer, "it's never too late."
Thinking about forgetting, about mortality, about the impermanence of life, and how precious and important it is to me, of how much pain can be felt in losing it, and how much beauty there is in truly taking the time to SEE it...
Thank you for this.
In the words of the writer, "it's never too late."
I was waiting for this game since the 2020 Game Awards and was not disappointed. Season immerses you into a unique world seamlessly, granting you a lovely balance of freedom and structure as you learn more about your surroundings. This game has so much heart; I haven’t felt this engaged with a game in quite a bit.
Also, I want to start a Polaroid scrapbook now.
Also, I want to start a Polaroid scrapbook now.
Season is at its best when dealing in broad emotional strokes and focusing on player expression, which for me were both prevalent and strong enough to get me to spend 8 hours in its world in a single day. Framing the camera for perfect photos, capturing audio, and ultimately arranging a narrative of each area in a scrapbook, especially if you buy into the premise of telling the world's story for future generations, is a tantalizing offer. Minor moments reminded me of Sable, though as an expression of a character's journey this doesn't quite live up to that.
Unfortunately, I think a big part of why is because Season also gives a little too much attention to its own presentation of the world's story. Some of the specifics of the plot can get pretty goofy and probably shouldn't have been allowed to interfere with what makes the game work, and the journalistic objectives you're occasionally tasked with are only nice in that they add pages to your journal, not so nice in that there are large portions of them that are effectively already authored. These "mysteries" you can solve are presumably optional, and are likely intended as direction for players who aren't as comfortable with self-motivated goals [or those who want more definitive lore], but pulling on a certain string in the world and being presented with a checklist of objectives isn't a great feeling in a game that otherwise isn't terribly concerned with how you decide to portray the locales.
Which is not to say that the game's authored moments always miss--they can speak poignantly enough to ideas of loss, memory, and lived experience, most effectively in the opening sequence. And the visuals are certainly striking! I'm very glad to have had a pleasant, chill Sunday with it.
Unfortunately, I think a big part of why is because Season also gives a little too much attention to its own presentation of the world's story. Some of the specifics of the plot can get pretty goofy and probably shouldn't have been allowed to interfere with what makes the game work, and the journalistic objectives you're occasionally tasked with are only nice in that they add pages to your journal, not so nice in that there are large portions of them that are effectively already authored. These "mysteries" you can solve are presumably optional, and are likely intended as direction for players who aren't as comfortable with self-motivated goals [or those who want more definitive lore], but pulling on a certain string in the world and being presented with a checklist of objectives isn't a great feeling in a game that otherwise isn't terribly concerned with how you decide to portray the locales.
Which is not to say that the game's authored moments always miss--they can speak poignantly enough to ideas of loss, memory, and lived experience, most effectively in the opening sequence. And the visuals are certainly striking! I'm very glad to have had a pleasant, chill Sunday with it.
This is 100% a vibes game that either will work for you or won't. For me, everything just worked. The world is incredibly interesting, the characters you meet along the way are all interesting, the music is great, the feel and look are all top notch.
The gameplay is pretty nonexistent. You will find yourself walking, biking, recording audio, taking pictures, and filling out a scrapbook so again, feelings will carry you through this or this stuff will probably not work for you.
The game is a little buggy, traveling around on your bike can sometimes lead to some weird hiccups with hit detection and the camera but the game does feature an unstuck option if you do get stuck (I only had to do it once so it's not frequently bugging out but it's nice to have as an option) along with the ability for your bike to be transporter to you wherever you find yourself which is super helpful.
Again, this game is a vibe check that either will work for you or doesn't, for me it worked to near perfection with only a few rough parts to deter me a bit
The gameplay is pretty nonexistent. You will find yourself walking, biking, recording audio, taking pictures, and filling out a scrapbook so again, feelings will carry you through this or this stuff will probably not work for you.
The game is a little buggy, traveling around on your bike can sometimes lead to some weird hiccups with hit detection and the camera but the game does feature an unstuck option if you do get stuck (I only had to do it once so it's not frequently bugging out but it's nice to have as an option) along with the ability for your bike to be transporter to you wherever you find yourself which is super helpful.
Again, this game is a vibe check that either will work for you or doesn't, for me it worked to near perfection with only a few rough parts to deter me a bit
Um dos jogos mais lindos que já joguei. É aquele tipo de jogo que te lembra como essa mídia pode ser poderosa, é algo único, com uma mensagem linda. Apesar de ter um monento um pouco mais baixo que o resto, e a trilha sonora não ser tão memorável quanto poderia, não impede de ser excelente.
Uma pintura controlável com uma sensibilidade impar.
Uma pintura controlável com uma sensibilidade impar.
Subtracted a star cuz no ramps to do stunts on.
This review contains spoilers
Emotionally, this thing pays out like a slot machine, but I found a lot of the mechanical choices to be at odds with the thematic nature of the story.
Specifically, when you find a shrine to a god, I found the mechanics to that scrapbook entry to be a bit esoteric, and not in a fun way.
Maybe this is heresy, but I think I would've liked this more without the scrapbooking: just riding a bike around and talking to folks, which is already the best part of the game. When you help the lady pick things to take with her, the scrapbooking is basically an afterthought, and I thought that was the high point of the experience.
Specifically, when you find a shrine to a god, I found the mechanics to that scrapbook entry to be a bit esoteric, and not in a fun way.
Maybe this is heresy, but I think I would've liked this more without the scrapbooking: just riding a bike around and talking to folks, which is already the best part of the game. When you help the lady pick things to take with her, the scrapbooking is basically an afterthought, and I thought that was the high point of the experience.
This game had a really positive effect on me. As someone who likes exploring game worlds and attention to detail, this game had me paying extra attention. Listening to each sound, ready to record. Looking for interesting details, to take pictures of. The whole journal aspect really makes you pay attention to the game's world, and has you asking the same questions as the protagonist.
I would highly recommend this meditative, and beautiful game.
I would highly recommend this meditative, and beautiful game.
I suppose if you're at a point where your main gripe is "I wish there was more game" that means you must have had a good time with it. That being said though, I remember distinctly imagining this game having a much larger scope when I saw the trailers, and the prologue and world building early on seemingly confirmed that assumption.
It wasn't until late that I realized my time with Season would end with just one doomed little valley to record, which in itself is not a bad thing, but even in the short amount of time the game has I feel like I could have seen more.
In a way I think the medium of a video games is working against the story, compared to say a novel, both in terms of the constraints that expensive video game production but also how literal the interpretations of events are and narrowing to our ability to imagine the wider fictitious world.
It wasn't until late that I realized my time with Season would end with just one doomed little valley to record, which in itself is not a bad thing, but even in the short amount of time the game has I feel like I could have seen more.
In a way I think the medium of a video games is working against the story, compared to say a novel, both in terms of the constraints that expensive video game production but also how literal the interpretations of events are and narrowing to our ability to imagine the wider fictitious world.
I'll be thinking about this one for a while. There aren't a lot of 3D open world games without combat, and while Season's game world is relatively small, it's make the most out of its short 6-10 hour runtime.
Season's gameplay loop feels novel. Rather than just be a walking simulator, it gives the players creative control to take photos, record sounds, and design journal pages as they see fit. It's a really clever way to tell the game's story while also serving as a visual indicator of the player's progress.
Narratively, Season is more interested in asking questions than it is providing answers. I was impressed by the topics it dealt with and the grace with which it explored those subjects. Like many games with multiple endings, I was worried I might make the wrong choices and get the "bad" ending, but after seeing both endings on YouTube, it doesn't seem like the game purports one to be better than the other. I think that's actually the secret ingredient of the game. It doesn't want to tell the player what to think as much as it just encourages the player to think.
The art direction is gorgeous and often cinematic The music is understated and ambient and compliments the game well. I did find some of the character designs to be inconsistent and out of place at times.
This really is one of those, "what you make of it" type games. Some people will be sure to pass it by quickly, while others may deeply connect with it. Personally, I wish there were more games likes Season.
Tech note: I played this on Steam Deck and it had some issues. Despite being verified, I had to lower the settings to get a decent frame rate and battery life on the Deck. Stick to PS5 and or a high-end PC and it should be fine.
Season's gameplay loop feels novel. Rather than just be a walking simulator, it gives the players creative control to take photos, record sounds, and design journal pages as they see fit. It's a really clever way to tell the game's story while also serving as a visual indicator of the player's progress.
Narratively, Season is more interested in asking questions than it is providing answers. I was impressed by the topics it dealt with and the grace with which it explored those subjects. Like many games with multiple endings, I was worried I might make the wrong choices and get the "bad" ending, but after seeing both endings on YouTube, it doesn't seem like the game purports one to be better than the other. I think that's actually the secret ingredient of the game. It doesn't want to tell the player what to think as much as it just encourages the player to think.
The art direction is gorgeous and often cinematic The music is understated and ambient and compliments the game well. I did find some of the character designs to be inconsistent and out of place at times.
This really is one of those, "what you make of it" type games. Some people will be sure to pass it by quickly, while others may deeply connect with it. Personally, I wish there were more games likes Season.
Tech note: I played this on Steam Deck and it had some issues. Despite being verified, I had to lower the settings to get a decent frame rate and battery life on the Deck. Stick to PS5 and or a high-end PC and it should be fine.