Season: A letter to the Future a third-person atmospheric cycling road trip game invites you to immerse yourself in its environment. Leaving home to collect memories before a strange disaster sweeps everything away. Exploration, recording, meeting people, and unravelling the bizarre environment around you are central to the gameplay. Each recording tool records a distinct layer of information: noises, music, art, design and the experiences of people going through key events.

Your tools will strip away these layers until you can see the culture, history, and ecosystem behind them all. This journey brings you to the fundamental question: what season is it? Why is it coming to an end?

Tourist turned crazy conspiracy theorist

The plot revolves around a lady who is charged with leaving her remote area to warn the rest of the world about an impending “season” shift. The players are never informed what this means, but it’s an ominous prophecy that sounds vaguely apocalyptic. Equipped with just a camera, notebook and an audio recorder, you take a countryside road trip to capture as much as you can about the planet and leave a historical document for future generations to learn from in the event of an apocalypse. She is caught between being a historical preservationist and a tourist with little knowledge of areas unknown to her, thus not truly knowing what is best to ensure is preserved.

It’s about taking time to appreciate things to learn, to not always be travelling for an escape but that should take into consideration our land and the places we visit respecting different cultures. In the current sphere of the ongoing climate crisis and general worldwide tensions of economic issues, war and natural disasters. We must accept that we can not always control everything, but we can take knowledge and learn how to improve. Building connections with the surrounding world and coming together with that fear of change, but knowing that if you work together that the change could be better.

Writing a letter to yourself

Generally, a game contains objectives for players to complete. Season, on the other hand, imposes no overarching goal. It places practically all of the storyline in the hands of the player, allowing them to choose how much of the universe the protagonist character discovers. Many explorable locales in the game might be missed entirely because there are minimal narrative obstacles in place to obstruct progress if key objectives are not done. Players progress in the game by relying solely on their curiosity. The main goal here is to give the player a sense of relaxation to play a game without any real concise goal to explore with a joyful wonder; that you shall hopefully take into the real world. We are all so used to taking photos and posting them in places without giving much thought to it, but it is time we embrace our records and make sure there is meaning behind them to look back on.

Well Seasoned Atmosphere

Season: A Letter to the Future delivers a dramatic, emotional experience to its players with its bright graphic style, wide landscapes, and deep noises. Gamers equipped with a camera and an audio recorder utilise their perception of sight and sound to uncover the realities of this strange realm, allowing the environment to grab the attention of those investigating it. Its gentle hues generate sentiments of pleasure and calm, and its use of music is clever, luring players away from the main road and into the tranquillity of a softly flowing river or chirping birds. All these features combine to make Season the ideal antidote to a spiritual vacation.

It is the season to explore

With your camera in hand, an adventurous attitude, a foreboding end to tell and a questioning mind you set out to solidify the land in memory and future generations. You play as Estelle the determined preservationist recording a conversation with your mother before leaving and deciding the burn certain objects to cause forgetfulness in your mother but to ensure your protection. This is the start of why memory becomes so important to her.

You keep a journal of what you see. Each region you travel through gets two pages, and it is extremely simple to collect more images, audio recordings, drawings, and notes than can fit on those two pages, forcing you to choose what is significant to a potential future reader – you cannot include it all. There is no forcefulness in what you should take photos of this is left up to the player sometimes the game will chime in on when it feels a photo of something important was taken but this is only really for the occasional mystery.

Every person who plays this game will have a diary that is unlike everyone else’s, you can design it how you want including the photos that you feel best represent the areas of the game you visit most.

For travelling your character will mostly use a bike, it isn’t always the easiest to control but nothing too clunky or frustrating, the pacing feels nice for the type of game that it is, you move at a rather leisurely pace while on foot and when cycling you go faster but still nice enough to see the surroundings and still feel like you are getting to places at a nice speed.

Unique seasoning with an expiry date

While Season: A letter to the Future is certainly unique in its approach without you being told what to do with your journaling, but still have a reason for why you are doing it there is much more depth to the game than say Pokemon Snap or Endless Ocean: Blue World which will have you feeling more in touch with the real world and the in-game world. There are points that it misses in the way you talk to people and the fact the world is ending, not knowing anything of past seasons, the exact year the game is set in or even knowing why things are going on. It feels like the story was added on to make sure the game didn’t feel too much of a “Walking Simulator”, nevertheless overall it feels like an exploration survival game without that survival aspect and so you can relax and take it all in, like Animal Crossing without any real objectives.

Reviewed on PC, you can grab your copy here https://store.steampowered.com/app/695330/SEASON_A_letter_to_the_future/

Also available on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4,

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