Season
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
There’s an overgrown path, tucked away among ruins, in Season: Letter to the Future. Follow that path to the end and you find a half-submerged shrine, a stone sculpture bearing the rough outline of a face. Pray at this shrine – pray to the God of the Void – and Estelle, your player-character, forgets her name. It’s not as if she misplaces it. No, her name vanishes from her mind, replaced by a void, which comes to be filled in by a sense of peace.
Shouldn’t losing your name be terrifying? Shouldn’t it induce existential vertigo? But no, the player-character formerly known as Estelle moves on. She gets back on her bike. She rides away from the shrine. And it works. Within the context of Season, it works, because the game’s not only about the value of memory but also about the ambivalence of forgetting. The season – in the game, this term means something like an historical epoch – is passing, so your task is to record the lives, the landscapes, the objects that make up the present.
As the game’s subtitle suggests, you’re preparing a transmission to the future. You have a camera, a tape recorder, and a notebook. This last item gives the game one of its most distinct mechanics, a kind of scrapbooking mini-game in which you arrange photographs, sketches, and (strangely) audio recordings. Different places in the game have their own pages, and when you place enough items on those pages, you unlock spoken reflections from Estelle. The scrapbook doesn’t preserve the world’s story in an official history, instead it collects the past and the present in fragments, fragments that compose constellations—personal arrangements of historical material, vibrating with the significance of a moment that can never be retrieved.
But even as Season fights against forgetting, it also acknowledges the necessity of oblivion. There can be no future without burying the past. The beginning of the game sees you leaving the village in which you’ve grown up for the first time. This section of the game, a kind of prelude, doubles as tutorial, so you’re introduced to the scrapbooking, recording, and cycling mechanics. In the process, you learn about time sickness, a pathological form of memory overload, and about the doctor that invented a treatment for it: a technique of selective forgetting that the game presents in a ritualistic manner that blurs the line between science and fantasy. You also learn that the previous season ended with war, that the village folk are refugees (or the descendants of refugees), that historical trauma threatens to overwhelm the present with memories of loss.
This initial section of the game ends with Estelle pedalling away from her village on her newly-acquired bicycle. There’s a rhythmic quality to this movement, in part because the player pumps the pedals of the bike by pressing the left and right triggers of the controller in alternating sequence. But this rhythm also comes from how the future depends on a departure: you leave behind your home, loosening your relationship to your past and entering into the space between seasons. It’s not as if past and present vanish. It’s more like they tip over into the future.
The mood in Season: Letter to the Future has the same texture as climate grief: the dark anticipation of losing the Earth to climate change. Like climate grief, Season is a melancholy affair, written in the future anterior. It imagines a moment in the future in which we will have lost what we hold dear. It’s a game in which the player learns to let go of the environment. At the same time, the landscapes are beautiful and the game rewards exploring them. There are no experience points or skill trees, but there are hidden vistas, quirky characters, bird songs, and a subplot of minor intrigue. You don’t accumulate power, instead you collect memories, set against a background of forgetting that instills them with significance. I met a boy who recently lost his father; he took me on a bicycle tour of his village, which had emptied out because of an impending flood. I photographed him with his father’s grave and with an enormous tree. He was leaving the village later that same day. He left a pig toy on his father’s grave—a sacrifice to the gods of memory, a prayer that the future might turn out well, or at least okay.
Season’s unique combination of melancholy reflection, speculative imagination, and peaceful cruising allows me to forgive the game its faults. The voice acting isn’t great and the dialogue is sometimes simplistic. Riding the bicycle can be finicky – the collision detection could use some tweaking – though once you get the hang of it, it offers a peaceful kind of enjoyment. A better map would have been nice in the central portion of the game, though getting lost did lead to some interesting discoveries. And yes, sometimes the game can be a touch saccharine. To be honest, though, these were minor faults in one of the most ambitious and thoughtful indie games released this year. What I’ll remember from the game is an owl hooting among sparkling treetops; pink-purple flowers whispering with voices borrowed from the dead; broken bridges and dead windmills, relics of our own bygone season—which, I hope, manages to transmit some rough beauty to the future.
We were provided with a review code by Evolve PR.
