SEASON: A Letter to the Future Review: A Magic Trick Without the Prestige

SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls attention to its intentions.

SEASON: A Letter to the Future
Photo: Scavengers Studio

SEASON: A Letter to the Future pivots on a change in the titular season, which in the context of the game represents an era of history. Here, the last eight hundred years have been defined by five seasons, each of which has ended with a major change to the world. This latest season has been predicted to end soon, and you’ve volunteered to leave your remote village high in the mountains to document the way things are right now, lest they be forgotten.

In the world of Scavengers Studio’s atmospheric road trip game, memories have magical powers and people are plagued with strange maladies of the mind like time misperception. Much has already been lost to time, leaving you to guess at what happened to places that lie in ruins as you bicycle through them. SEASON captures the fragility of history by basically leaving it up to you to decide what to investigate and, after you’ve put your camera and audio recorder away, what to scrapbook into your journal so as to preserve history for future generations.

It’s a bold choice to eschew the traditional gameplay mechanics that would normally hook a player, such as combat and time trials. SEASON trusts in the beauty of its cel-shaded art style to do carry the day, and for a few hours, it’s a pleasure to uncover little stories and mysteries. But it’s impossible to shake the feeling that game ends as it begins, with the words of your journal being read aloud: “You can know me by what I put down in these pages.” That, though, isn’t true, because the game demonstrates how difficult it is to actually know another person.

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Each individual moment here is beguiling and full of life. You bicycle through towering wheat fields, gaze upon ancient statues, and visit shipwrecks. You participate in your village’s quaint departure ceremony and take note of the music boxes left behind by a small settlement, commenting on how they may have been used as sleep aids. There’s even a parking lot filled with soldiers that have been sleeping since a once-upon-a-time war, ageless and mysterious.

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But even when the game prods you to look for specific answers to the questions you write in your journal (such as “Who is the god of forgetting?”), successfully filling out a page with the required photos, recordings, and documents only allows you to choose which conclusion you write down. No matter how much work you do, the game never confirms whether you were right or if the hard-earned memories that you’ve collected make a difference to those who will read them in the next season. You could say, then, that SEASON is a sort of mystery game that feels as if the final act has been withheld from us, or a magic trick without the prestige.

SEASON’s most satisfying sequence is its largest and only nonlinear one, which takes place in the Tieng Valley. Until this point, the routes from your village have felt largely prescribed, with obvious points of interest to investigate and not a single human in sight. The valley, by contrast, is wide open, filled with looping paths and the region’s last few inhabitants. It’s such a large area, in fact, that you’re given a map, a black-and-white sketch that your protagonist proceeds to color in for each new area visited, such as a dig site where you can get a little more information about why the Grey Hands might really be flooding the valley and evacuating its people.

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There’s a sense of importance to every mystery and task in the game, and navigating the Tieng Village itself is never less than fun to navigate. But you don’t have nearly as much freedom with the people you meet. The majority of your interactions with them come down to choosing between one of three items, and while your selections are what end up going into your journal, the impact of these mundane decisions, from which piece of clothing to pack to which piece of art to preserve, remains unclear. Everything is largely viewed at a kind of objective remove, with the exception of one moment, in which you bond with a child who’s also lost a parent, where you’re given the option of keeping that interaction private (that is, out of the journal).

SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls too much attention to its intentions, especially with fussy dialogue like “I feel a dulcet tension in the air.” Then again, it does capture the soothing sensation that comes from immersing oneself in another world and learning about it, and with the exception of the game’s final encounter, it’s nothing if not consistent. In the end, SEASON isn’t about answers so much as it is about coping with loss. As one character puts it, repeating one word like a mantra, time always moves on: flow, flow, flow.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Evolve PR.

Score: 
 Developer: Scavengers Studio  Publisher: Scavengers Studio  Platform: PC  Release Date: January 31, 2023  ESRB: E  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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