HomeReviewsSeason
Season: A Letter To The Future review: a melancholy travelogue of a gorgeous post-war worldA new cycle begins
A new cycle begins
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Scavengers Studio
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Scavengers Studio
It’s a fantastic - if sad - start to Season, and gets straight to the heart of the adventure ahead of you. This is a world where prayers, rituals, and prophecies hold great weight, and where you’ll be exploring the fragility and fickleness of memory. Underpinning everything is a deeply profound sense of melancholy - and here I was expecting some relaxing two-wheeling through lovely-looking landscapes. Well, turns out Season is a lot more than a pretty travelogue.
SEASON: A letter to the future - CG Story Trailer | PC, PS5 & PS4Watch on YouTube
SEASON: A letter to the future - CG Story Trailer | PC, PS5 & PS4
You play as Estelle, a young woman who sets off to record the last moments of the titular ‘season’. In this world, a season is best understood as a period in history, and right now the current season is ending. Setting off on her bicycle - not exactly sure where she’s going or what to expect - she arrives at Tieng Valley, a giant gorge that will soon be the casualty of a flood of biblical proportions. She decides to explore the valley on its last day, recording as much of this curious place as she can to preserve its memory for future generations.
Hopping on your bike and cycling around is an absolute treat, and simple controls make peddling easy work. There’s no order or itinerary to what you do, giving you free rein to follow your nose, cycling around the valley until you find something that piques your curiosity and stop for a look-see. You’ll be stopping a lot because Season is, in two words, bloody gorgeous. During my first free-wheeling descent into the valley, my eyes had a major workout. A majestic, stone temple to the east, twinkling lights from deep within a forest to the west, a giant stone head of a god resting on an upcoming hillside, a humble farm with cows and goats resting on an embankment, and so, so much more. Landmarks jutting out from the horizon are just begging to be explored.
As most people have been evacuated out of the valley, only a handful remain. Talking to them lets you discover more about what it was like living in Tieng Valley and what it meant to them and the wider community. |Image credit:Scavengers Studio
After visiting a few areas, chatting with the valley’s remaining folks and filling out your scrapbook with found treasures, a bigger picture starts to present itself. Why is this season ending, and more importantly, what’s causing it to end? In this way, Season is as much a mystery game as it is a gentle bike sim. Within the first 30 minutes, you learn that the previous season was one of a great war that shook the world, so there’s a lot of pain and trauma in the stories you collect. Eventually, the reason behind the end of this season becomes clear, a tale that’s artfully told through the people you meet, and the memories you collect.
Indeed, you can feel the desperation of people wanting to move on from the letters, notes, diaries, and charms you find, but they also reveal that the valley’s residents aren’t quite sure how to do that. People want to be free from the past and look toward a brighter future, and there’s a poignancy in only being able to record these memories rather than take concrete actions to address them. After all, your concern isn’t really about why the war started or what happened, but more about how its ripples can be felt right now in the present. Recording the landscape and the collective memory of its people is how you’re preserving this valley.
This post-war story was the last thing I expected from a pretty bicycle game. The way its story unfolds feels highly engrossing, like watching a photograph slowly develop until you have a complete picture of this curious, beautiful place. It’s all told very poetically and at a deliberately relaxed pace, too, which might not be for everyone. This isn’t a game where you can pop a rad wheelie or yeet yourself off a ramp-shaped cliff, Evel Knievel-style.
My screenshot folder has been well and truly fed but I could do without these black bars 💀
I don’t think people would expect those kinds of GTA pranks from Season in the first place, but there is something about it that’s still quite hard and difficult to pin down. I’m treading lightly here as I don’t want to spoil much. There’s lots of talk of gods, rituals, and dreams. There are flowers that capture the sounds of people’s past lives and documents that warn of a dream sickness. It’s a strange intersection of beauty and weirdness, and personally I’m utterly in love with it. Some of my favourite moments were snapping a pic of a smashed vending machine that had been turned into a shrine for a dead loved one, or meeting a monk who, instead of traditional robes, wore polka dot socks and a bright pink trench coat around his shoulders. Giant metal cranes covered in brown rust and ivy are treated with the same grandeur and brilliance as the holiest of shrines. A scene that will always stick with me is coming across an empty, derelict car park filled with soldiers stuck in an eternal slumber, each one laid to rest in their own parking space. It’s beautiful, dream-like, and completely grim all at the same time.
Estelle has a fabulous voice actor and, interstingly, she’s the only character who doesn’t speak during cutscenes. When we hear her talk it’s always as a soothing monologue in her head as she reflects on the world around her.
It may be thematically dense, but crucially, Season never overwhelms you with too much information at once. Instead, it drip-feeds the history of Tieng Valley in manageable chunks, and gives you plenty of room to ponder, absorb and come to your own conclusions about how its people are gradually untangling themselves from their past. Sometimes, forgetting is as easy as snuffing out a candle’s flame, other times it’s not just about mentally moving on, but physically moving on at the same time. And there are moments when you simply don’t have a choice in the matter, unable to release the memories you hold tightly within a fist. Grief is weird in that way.
