season a letter to the future controversy

At points you come across memory flowers, the screen warping and rippling with their power. Memory is the central theme to Season, and it’s one that at times can become overwhelming, an idea that’s very much in tune with the game’s outlook. It’s careful and it’s touching, light and gentle, without simply becoming meaningless or vapid. They can be a work of art in themselves, and gathering enough to ‘complete’ each area offers a little more insight into the world, or the character’s experience of it.

It manages to straddle the line between satisfaction, substance and the imperceptible, and it’s carried through by your pensive wanderings.Įvery area offers a number of opportunities for gathering information and material to stick into your journal, and it’s an intoxicatingly personal task, adding in your own pictures, audio and the central character’s discoveries and adding them to the page in whatever way you see fit. The populace suffering from some kind of memory-based affliction, the presence of dangerous psychoactive materials at points, and any number of other lesser questions about how someone could leave a farm’s worth of cows to drown, aren’t fully answered, or answered at all, leaving threads hanging for your imagination to fill in. Season presents you with any number of mysteries, but it doesn’t necessarily provide you with the answers to all of them.

Their journeys, their memories, their lives all of them feel personal to you, despite the off-kilter world. The rare moments where you spend time in other people’s company are grounded by the quality of the voice acting, and it ensures that you’ll empathise for each and every person you meet. There are moments where music swells to bring a moment into fresh relief, but it’s the wind blowing, causing the grass and trees to ripple and rustle, the sound of your bicycle wheels spinning, or the river rushing beneath a bridge that is the true soundtrack to this journey.

The audio design brings the world to life, though it’s largely through the elemental soundscape as opposed to a defined soundtrack. This world unequivocally exists, and as you witness its passing, you’ll find it harder and harder to let it go. It looks like an animated feature, but it retains a realness that adds to its charm and tone. While the bicycle is a swift and characterful way to move about the world, you find yourself hopping off it every few seconds to capture another picture, whether it’s a particularly arresting sunset, or a cow, abandoned by its owner as they flee an impending flood.

Sweeping vistas, abandoned valleys and idiosyncratic settlements beg for you to explore and catalogue them. Many people will check in purely based on Season’s sumptuous visuals, and regardless of anything else they won’t leave disappointed. Estelle has decided to catalogue the world before it’s no longer in its current form, and set out on her bicycle, armed with a journal, a camera and a voice recorder, to capture this season’s final days. Whatever the cause is, this current era is slowly giving way to what comes next, but in a plaintive, melancholy fashion. The season is coming to an end, and while there’s no clear explanation as to what length of time a season is, you learn that their end is punctuated by the demise of previous regimes, the rise of illness or a destructive war. You take the role of Estelle, a young woman venturing out from her secluded mountain village for the very first time.

Season a letter to the future controversy