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.

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: 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.

Difícil falar muito sobre Season sem estragar a experiência.

Um jogo sobre viver o momento e registrar memórias.

A temática conversou demais comigo e sai do jogo bem emocionado.

Facilmente um dos meus jogos favoritos da vida

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

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.

The developer had lots of horrible work allegations and laid most of the studio off after release.

Palettes and shapes come out strong without any PBR mucking it up. Lots of interesting foliage and architecture and topology to take photos of.

The writing is dense and sentimental, with very resonant ponderings on the good and the bad of inevitably fading memories.

It's a game thatj takes a lot of energy to play. I would like to finish it, but I probably won't. The area I'm in is very large and overwhelming, and the total story isn't very urgent. Some things have stuck with me since playing it and that's pretty good in my book.

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.

Potrebbe sembrare una premessa ridicola ma sin da quando sono ragazzino qualsiasi luogo dovessi raggiungere, che fosse per lavoro o per questioni sociali, mi sono sempre e comunque dovuto muovere in bici. Dall'esterno questo ha sempre generato un po' di ilarità/stranezza, non poche volte mi sono dovuto sentir dire "ma quindi sta macchina cocozza quando la prendiamo?". La patente la presi a 20 anni e dal giorno dopo non ho mai più guidato in vita mia.
A volte, soprattutto quando dovevo uscire con qualcuna, mi sono ritrovato a pensare che spostare le mie spese sull'acquisto e l'utilizzo di un auto sarebbe stata la cosa migliore, ma non potevo causa le eccessive responsabilità tra le spese di casa e per lo studio. Ancora adesso non posso usare un auto ed ogni circostanza la vivo sempre in bici, questo perpetuo viaggiare con tale mezzo mi ha sempre obbligato ad una certa accettazione della fatica che uscire di casa implicava (un po' di più rispetto ai coetanei di mia conoscenza) per me, tanto più man mano che la mia vita si spostava verso i grandi centri urbani.
Questa premessa serviva a far capire come mai un gioco così lento, così impuntato a farti guardare attorno mentre ti muovi in bici dandoti relativamente poco in quella quasi decina di ore, fosse per me piuttosto "naturale" permettendomi quindi di superare quello che è un gameplay forse un po' noioso per molti. Perchè oltre a dover muoverti in bici per molto tempo è fondamentale guardarsi attorno, il gioco non sempre è immediato e anzi spesso ti invita ad esplorare non solo la via principale, anche per via di tutti i misteri a parte del mondo di gioco, ma pure tutto ciò che vi è attorno dandoti a tutti gli effetti un mondo piuttosto denso. Anche la meccanica del field recording può essere pesante, lenta, ma è funzionale sempre a quella che è una esplorazione completa di un mondo che non solo è perfettamente disegnato ricordando lo stile dei dipinti a olio, così come può essere pesante a tutti gli effetti una esplorazione di un qualsiasi ambiente irl con la finalità di evocare memorie (o collezionarle). Giocare a season non mi ha solo ricordato quello che ogni giorno vivo esplorando un mondo in bici, ma anche quello che mi ritrovai a vivere quando iniziai ad andare in escursione in toscana dove mi misi a filmare ogni piccolo spazio che ancora adesso evocano memorie non solo rilegate a quei luoghi ma meccaniche che tendono a risolvere la tristezza che mi ha portato ad allontanarmi dalle cose per andare lì.

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.

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.

Season is a game with an admirably creative premise, leaving a scrapbook of memories for a future world, but the game ends up being more about exploring a place in the brink of extinction than anything else. Still, through its premise it makes exploration and discovery feel worthwhile and by the end, it definitely manages to resonate with the player, a commendable achievement for such a short experience.

Art design is surprisingly on point here, with some parts of the game being genuinely stunning, and some of the side stories within the world are frankly quite interesting.

Combined with fun characters and a perfect runtime, Season is a wonderful experience that leaves a great taste in your mouth. It's not doing anything revolutionary, but what it does, it does very well.

Played from – to: (2023-02-07 – 2023-02-18) – PC controller.
‣ 5/10 – *1* *2* click
‣ Thoughts: Season is definitely a journey. A journey across an interesting, beautiful world and unique views on daily life. I really enjoyed traveling across the land and writing down things I see, neatly arranging how my journal looks and what is in it. Like I mentioned before the world looks beautiful and it’s thanks to the superb art style. However, I know this game was not for me. I did not find the story or its characters interesting and what was there did not make me want to keep going. This said, I don’t want my taste in games to damage how Season is rated, but I just did not enjoy this game enough to finish it.