The remainder continues to be unwritten

A change of the seasons is normally a time for celebration. Whether or not you’re going from the useless chilly of winter to the crisp dew of spring or abandoning the canine days of summer season for the kaleidoscope of autumn colours, the daybreak of a coming season can convey with it contemporary perspective and rejuvenation. No less than, that’s what the altering of seasons is in our world. In SEASON: A letter to the longer term, seasons don’t essentially abide by the calendar. Individuals can’t assume they know when a season goes to finish, however when it does, excess of simply the temperature will change.

SEASON: A letter to the longer term (PC, PS4, PS5 [reviewed])
Developer: Scavengers Studio
Writer: Scavengers Studio
Launched: January 31, 2023
MSRP: $24.99

SEASON: A letter to the longer term is the sophomore sport from Scavengers Studio, an indie outfit out of Montreal based in 2015. For its debut launch, the studio opted to interrupt into the free-to-play battle royale market with Darwin Undertaking. For its second outing, it’s aiming at a totally totally different viewers, one that may recognize the stillness of life and discover magnificence on this planet that others could overlook. SEASON casts gamers within the position of the Protagonist, a younger girl from a small mountain village who decides to do what no one else she is aware of would: go away. A prophetic dream from her buddy forecasted the top of the present season, and she or he desires to see what this world is earlier than that finish comes.

Seasons in SEASON are—from what I can inform, as the sport doesn’t essentially clarify them outright—what we might name eras. Earlier seasons have come and gone, altering the panorama and historical past of this world. There’s been a season of business progress, a golden season of prosperity, and a season of conflict. The season the Protagonist lives in is one marked by maladies of the thoughts, and all through her journey, she’ll hear tales of how these unseen diseases have incapacitated individuals from all walks of life.

There’s a superbly rendered world on the market for the Protagonist to discover and uncover. Touring with a tape recorder, on the spot digital camera, and sketchbook, she’ll set off on bike from her hometown to doc life because it exists now for future generations. Her vacation spot is the Museum Vault, an virtually legendary place on the finish of the world that’s allegedly protected from the altering seasons. Whether or not or not this place really exists doesn’t actually matter. What does matter is deciding the way you wish to inform the story of this world.

SEASON offers the gamers the flexibility to document their journey at their very own tempo and in their very own means. The sport encourages you to take your time, meander, and soak up each sight and sound you may doc. Every key location of the Protagonist’s journey can have its personal pages to fill with footage, recorded sounds, ideas, and little stickers. Whereas there are particular sights and sounds you’re presupposed to seize—a ringing telephone, a bit of graffiti, a cow’s moo—you’re free to fill the e-book with no matter you need. In case you assume the easiest way to doc the world because it exists now could be by filling your sketchbook with close-up footage of grass, have at it. Exterior of some pages that require particular entries, you may inform this season’s story as you finest see match.

What I like about this sport is it actually received me fascinated about life, the second we stay in, and whether or not or not the whole lot we do is price recording. Our fashionable society, or not less than the slice of it that’s perpetually on-line, is outright obsessive about documenting the whole lot we do, see, style, contact, and listen to. And I’m responsible of this too. I’ve taken a couple of image of a meal from a restaurant or no matter Change sport simply arrived within the mail.

SEASON questions such a follow. Whereas the Protagonist’s finish objective is to document life at that very second, ought to she really document each second of her life? Are there some moments that don’t belong to the ages however fairly to the right here and now? It’s a alternative you and the Protagonist should make as you fill her sketchbook, to stay within the second and expertise it because it occurs, or to doc it as some exterior observer.

There’s a lot to ponder with this sport. Recollections, legacies, and the best way through which historical past controls us are all themes which are explored. All through her journey, the Protagonist will see proof of a forgotten previous and document plans for an unsure future. She’ll uncover tales with neither beginnings nor ends and make mates with unusual, international vacationers. It is a sport that wishes gamers to consider their very own lives as they take footage of fairly waterfalls and seize the songs of music containers.

I purchased into SEASON: A letter to the longer term hook, line, and sinker. The complete idea of this sport has spoken to me because it first debuted at The Recreation Awards in 2020, and as I ventured all through this world and admired how the builders integrated the adaptive triggers of the PS5 controller into peddling the bike, I didn’t need this journey to finish. I needed to see extra. Extra misplaced villages, extra dilapidated remnants of the previous, extra the whole lot.

Nevertheless it did finish.

Abruptly.

Like, actually abruptly.

I sat down on my second day with the sport, pondering I used to be on the midway level, solely to succeed in the ending cinematic in two minutes. I used to be in such disbelief that I really had tears from laughter at how this journey wraps up, and whereas there are lots of feelings I’m certain the builders needed their viewers to really feel on the finish of this sport, I doubt laughter was wherever close to the highest of their listing.

I don’t have a problem with brief video games. In actual fact, as any individual whose motto is “ain’t no one received time for that,” I’ll take a brief sport over an extended sport any day. And at eight hours, SEASON isn’t essentially a brief sport. However by golly, does it really feel like an abridged one. Make no mistake, there’s an ending to this sport, however it comes so immediately that I couldn’t consider I’d reached it at that time in my journey. As I watched the credit roll, it felt prefer it was simply getting began, that I nonetheless had a lot to see. It was like being promised a visit to Disneyland however by no means going past Essential Road, U.S.A.

I can not bear in mind the final time I performed a sport I loved this a lot that left me this unhappy when it was over. As a result of I did actually love the whole lot about SEASON: A letter to the longer term, from the unimaginable artwork route to the great sound mixing to Maureen Adelson’s restrained efficiency because the Protagonist. It is a sport that has moved me in methods no different has, however irrespective of how a lot it gave me to consider, when it was over, the one thought in my head was, “Is that every one there’s?”

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}