I confess, I hadn’t heard about Season: A letter to the future before today, and maybe you hadn’t either, which is why I’m writing this yarn.
Season is a game about a young woman from a secluded village by a dam, exploring the town on her bike and talking to its inhabitants before a major cataclysm washes them all away. It’s a game about finding and capturing little moments, while you can.
The game came up on the PlayStation Blog this morning, with a letter from developer Scavenger Studios’ creative director Kevin Sullivan and a full story trailer. The trailer gives a clear look at the game’s painterly art direction. Certain frames look like they leapt right out of a Ghibli film. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but I’d love to talk to them about it.
“Most of the themes of Season: A letter to the future are expressions of the anxieties of our age,” reads Sullivan’s post. “We’re heading towards a future we know will be worse than the present. As this becomes more certain, it has an attendant thought that feels even darker: These awful years are also the good times. The story exists to give some kind of poetic expression (poetic meaning barely under control, the subconscious has the wheel) to these thoughts and feelings, to defamiliarize them, tear them up and put them back together in a fantasy world.”
This is all great gear. I love a game with a lot on its mind. The most basic tenet of any work of art is that it should have something to say.
Then there’s the other side of Season, which relates to how it utilises the five senses. Here, the game finds a way to apply its thesis of looking for the little things to its core design. Consider the main character’s bike, her main method of transportation. What’s the best way to communicate riding a bike in a video game? You can add varying degrees of pressure to the PS5 controller’s triggers. In this way, you can simulate pedalling as the bike travels over terrain of different types and elevations.
One of the game’s mechanics involves recording short snippets of audio. Not only can you play the audio back so you can hear it, but the DualSense controller will vibrate with it, informing the shape of the sound.
And then there are the people, each of them in what the game calls a moment of quiet crisis. They are facing the most monstrous existential problem imaginable: their impending and unavoidable demise. Your goal is to construct a clear picture of these people. Who they are and where they’re from. Their hopes and regrets. The sound of their voices, the shape of their faces, their mannerisms and tics. The questions you choose will guide your path to the end of the season, and control what you learn about the world and when. Curiosity, and the recording of your findings, it seems, are their own reward.
Season: A letter to the future launches January 31st for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Windows PC.
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