I’m used to games primarily functioning as stories. As a fan of visual novels, I’ve come to enjoy watching the main character change over the course of a series of events, usually involving a group of friends or a mystery.
Season: A Letter to the Future is not a visual novel in the traditional sense. Instead, the main character tells other people’s stories. As the end of the world approaches, it’s up to you to make sure their stories are told for years to come.
Season: A Letter to the Future is based on the idea that memories stay with us and can help us through difficult times or influence the way we make decisions. Most memories are full of strong feelings, and sometimes we need to talk about them with other people.
This story takes place somewhere between the present and the future, in a world that has gone through many difficult times or ‘seasons’. But the people are at peace now, even though you don’t see many of them going far from home.
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You play the role of a young woman trying to capture the world as it is before the season changes, which will be bad. So it’s a sad goodbye when you talk to your mom and talk about your friends and family before you go out into the world.
The rules for playing a game are easy to understand and rarely require any real puzzling or intuition. You have a journal where you can write about important places. In some places the diary will ask you to add certain landmarks or sounds.
A camera and a sound recorder are your tools. Filters and macro adjustments let you get creative with the camera, and most shots end with a brief commentary from the main character.
This is also in the recorder, which you can use in different ways during the game. When you hear something new, you can pull out the recorder to hear a trail of animal sounds, rain, or a fleeting memory trapped in magical flowers. This is as much your story as theirs. She and the player both get to know this world. Any feeling of being alone, scared or interested is a shared experience that makes the experience better.
Interacting with the other people you meet along the way is another part of the game. Even though there is nothing special about these conversations, they are very deep. Instead, these are everyday people telling the story of their lives and how they interact with the world or what brought them here. This gives a strange sense of immersion that you wouldn’t think would work, but I found each character charming and wanted to know more about their stories.
But for this to work, you also need the right type of player. The whole thing happens at a pace so slow that if you rush through it, it won’t mean much. As you walk through your town and learn about the creator, you’ll probably know within the first 30 minutes if it’s for you. It builds slowly and feels like a cross between a work of art and an adventure game.
I was ready for an adventure like this, but there were times in the game when I would have preferred to sit on a couch and listen to the wind rather than advance the story or listen to long scenes of dialogue. The good thing is that you don’t have to do anything in a certain amount of time.
The best parts of the game happen as you move from one place to another. The developers at Scavengers Studio really went the extra mile to create a spooky landscape that looks like the end of the world. It is so real that you can almost feel the warmth of the sun on your skin when you ride your bike over an old bridge. The game can be completed in 8 hours, but I don’t think that’s enough time to see and do everything in this world.
Some details of Season: A Letter to the Future were tweeted alongside the show’s trailer:
Start your journey in SEASON: A Letter to the Future today @Playstation #PS5 & #PS4and on PC @steam & @EpicGames! #PlaySeason 🚲
This has been an incredibly exciting and humbling journey for us, and we thank everyone who came along for the ride. Enjoying! #TrailerTuesday pic.twitter.com/oxrRYOYD17
— SEASON: A letter to the future (@SeasonTheGame) January 31, 2023
Now that you have your tools, you can start setting the scene and taking on the responsibility of telling the story of this world before it ends. It’s going to be more than a game, and while I can be cynical about games that try too hard to be artsy, I took the discovery mechanics seriously, which surprised me.
With a bigger budget, the loading screens might have been the only problem that could have been solved. Even though this is used in many games, I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had taken advantage of more powerful hardware, removed this part and connected the world so I never had to leave it.
Season: A Letter to the Future makes me feel many different things. You will experience a wide range of emotions from joy to loneliness to fear. It takes advantage of the player’s natural curiosity and rewards those who take the time to look around.
If you don’t have that time I’m afraid the experience won’t be as good as it could be. It’s a game that makes ordinary things interesting by focusing on memories and how quickly we can lose everything.
