SEASON: A Letter to the Future Game Review

SEASON: A Letter to the Future is a beautiful narrative adventure game developed by Scavenger Studio. Leave home for the first time to collect memories before a mysterious cataclysm washes everything away. Ride, record, meet people, and unravel the strange world around you. Immerse yourself in the world of Season, a third-person meditative exploration game.

Game Details

Adventure | Exploration | Narrative
Developer & Publisher: Scavengers Studio
Price: $24.99
Where to Play: Playstation | Steam | Epic Games

Story

High in the mountains, there is a village safe from the turmoil of changing seasons. No one has left in a generation, no one until Estelle. In her world, a season is a period of history, an era. This season is about to end. Riding off into the unknown, she leaves her home to try to capture this moment for the future. Estelle navigates through a strange yet familiar world, witnessing life on the brink of an impending but mysterious change.

In SEASON: A letter to the future, you play as a young woman from a secluded village exploring the world by bike for the first time, collecting memories before a cataclysm washes everything away. SEASON is a quest to discover a new world; one unknown yet familiar. Document, photograph, and record life as you find it, while you still can.
Official Synopsis

SEASON: A Letter to the Future Review

Where most games are concerned with completing checkpoints and objectives, Scavenger Studio’s SEASON: A Letter to the Future is a game that challenges players to really linger in each and every moment and experience. The gameplay of SEASON focuses on exploring, recording, meeting others, and unraveling the strange world around you as you explore a vast world alone on your bicycle. Breeze through gorgeous scenic mountain pathways, explore the ruins of a forgotten highway, linger in a beautiful abandoned valley full of a rich history.

Step into the shoes of Estelle, a young woman who chooses to leave her secluded mountaintop village on a quest to explore and document the sights, sounds, feelings, experiences, and people of her world for future generations. While your “main objective” is to collect snippets of the world around you and jot them down in your journal, what you choose to document is completely up to you. Whether that’s recording the sound of a torrential downpour, taking a photo of a seemingly insignificant abandoned bus stop, stopping to pet some goats, or just staring out at a beautiful sunset in the mountains. Your journey is completely your own.

At any point in the game, you can hop off your bike and truly give yourself over to this immersive world. Equip a multi-feature recording tool from your bag, which captures a different element; sounds and music, art and architecture, voices of old people, vanishing religious practices, the traces of seasons long past. Your tools help you examine the world more closely until you’re able to grasp the culture, history, and ecology underneath everything.

SEASON can take anywhere from 6 to 12 hours, depending on how fast you cycle through the various locations, though, you are highly encouraged to take your time. My first stream of the game took 4 1/2 hours and I’m barely halfway through the game and the bulk of that was spent snapping photos of pretty skylines and petting ALL THE ANIMALS.

I kinda thought the controls of SEASON would be a bit out of my comfort zone, but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to figure everything out. I went with the Playstation 5 version of the game (I figured using a controller would be easier than figuring out keyboard controls, or mapping my pro controller) and it’s super simple. And SEASON does have some pretty unique features that make the experience super immersive.

You use the L2 and R2 triggers to pedal your bicycle and thanks to the adaptive trigger feature the resistance will vary depending on your speed and the steepness of the road. Then there’s a feature that lets you feel the texture of the ground change as you cycle over different terrain with the DualSense wireless controller’s haptic feedback. The team really went all out to make it feel like you’re on this journey with Estelle. And as someone who can’t actually ride a bike, this is the closest I’m ever going to get to going an epic bike quest.

I’m mostly a visual novel gamer, so I need a really good story to keep me invested in a game. The premise of SEASON is simple enough on paper; travel around exploring and interacting with people you may encounter on your journey. But, SEASON is so much more than that. This is such an emotional ride, with each memory you collect you hold the weight of that experience. With each person you meet and each story you hear, you carry the weight of that person’s life, their joys and their sorrows, and in this game there is a great deal of loss. But, instead of being a depressing experience, SEASON has an overall message of hope. The game is a story of life, the beautiful, the ugly, and the kind of average everyday moments that give our existence meaning.

This is a beautifully written and executed story that stays with you. It challenges you to think about the mark we leave on this world and how future generations will look back on our time here. Will they look back fondly? Will they look back in anger? Fear? What is our legacy? It’s up to you to answer those questions.

Because you control the experience, SEASON becomes a wonderfully personal journey unique to each and every player. This is a game you want to savor, so take some time to give SEASON: A Letter to the Future a play, you won’t regret it!

A copy of this game was provided as part of a launch day content creator campaign.

Find out more about Scavenger Studio and SEASON: A Letter to the Future

Founded in 2015 in Montreal, Scavengers Studio is an independent video game studio bringing together a diverse team of passionate creators. In 2016, the studio’s first video game, Darwin Project, launched in early access. In 2019, Amélie Lamarche became President and CEO and then named SEASON: A letter to the future as the studio’s second major project.