Indie darling Season: A Letter to the Future sets out to stir your emotions.
Feeling the sun on your face, the wind blowing in your hair, and the gentle sound of the waves of the ocean. That is what Season: A Letter to the Future, a game developed and published by Scavengers Studio, banks on doing and wants you to do. To immerse your senses in the world around you, and if possible, to document it: the sounds, the people, the landscapes, and breathe in everything around you. Season: A Letter to the Future is an utterly unique kind of experience, one that can only be accomplished by the medium of video games.
You start in a town called Caro Village, tasked to record the world around you before the season ends, which will make everyone forget what happened in that era. Your mother asks you to choose objects of importance to you to make a pendant that will protect you during your journey.
The slow beginning is a perfect way to set the mood of Season: A Letter to the Future because this is not a game to be rushing through. On the contrary, before the game even starts, there is a message from the devs stating “Play at your own pace”, and it helps to calm down and relax once you’re let free.
The first thing you notice is the camera and voice recorder that you have with you, as these are your instruments of choice that will go a long way to recording the last of the season you’re living in. As soon as you leave your house and hug your mother goodbye, you notice a record player making sleeping sounds for the whole town to listen to, and the game nudges you to create your first recording of that.
Then, from tight corridors, you arrive at a balcony that reveals that Caro Village is actually just a small town on top of a mountain, and the breathtaking view from the top is just spectacular. There are many impactful moments of amazing landscapes around you in Season: A Letter to the Future that is perfect for you to photograph for posterity.
As you start descending from the mountain, you find three bicycles, and Season: A Letter to the Future asks you to choose a color. Massive doors open in front of you when you do so, signaling the start of a new chapter. That feeling of freedom when you’re first liberated in the wild on a slope on your bicycle is unparalleled, as you can almost feel the wind caressing your face.
While not all areas are as big as always to need your bike next to you, a nifty option on the menu to “retrieve bicycle” makes it all the much easier to leave it and explore on your own and have it spawn next to you whenever you need it.
One of the most important aspects of the game is the journal, as it divides into chapters each and every place you visit. Also, and this is the most important and fun part of it; you can customize it. Every picture you take, every recording, phrase, and a few stickers ask you to be as creative as you can be and fill every page of that journal that will survive the season with your originality.
Once you reach a certain amount of decorations in each chapter, the protagonist will reach a conclusion and reflect on the place that they visited and say a few memorable words, and you will be free to decorate your journal as you please once again.
A detail that Season: A Letter to the Future excels at is to make you reminisce about your own life, to care about the things you’ve lived, just as the main character records, remembers, and thinks about everything and everyone that came before her. You can’t help but feel the same way about your own life.
Season: A Letter to the Future is a very sensorial experience that asks the most important thing of you, which is your total attention. To hear the main character’s thoughts, to walk around the beautiful surroundings undistracted by the outside world, and to be moved by the narrative presented to you.
Season: A Letter to the Future is not afraid to show all the facets of life either. Amid all the reminiscing, there is an underlying disease that affects people, and it sets a sad tone to the tale because it’s an illness that makes people lose their sense of time, be it 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 5 years.
And just like life, it shows that not everything around you is beautiful as you encounter the ravages of war, soldiers praying to forget the trauma they have lived through, and see villagers mourning loved ones who died abruptly. The world is about to end as people know it in Season: A letter to the future, but you still look at it head-on, face it, and take your time to smell the roses.
Halfway through the game, you arrive in a land called Tieng Valley, the most open-world area of Season: A Letter to the Future and the richest, with content to find and record around you. Secrets abound in this area, and it has many interesting side characters that have their own issues and to fully immerse into the adventure, you must help them.
From a woman who just cannot decide what things to take as she’s leaving home to an old artist wondering if any of her work holds any value. Season: A letter to the future excels at these kinds of minute stories, as though you’re there for a brief moment. These people offer you a glimpse of what was and what should be saved for prosperity.
The whole experience is rather emotional and the voice acting, music and sound effects reflect that. The main actress performs excellently as a protagonist with the burden of carrying the world upon her shoulders and trying her best to look on the bright side of things. The varied cast of characters you’ll meet in your journey is not all sad or thoughtful, and the lighter ones, such as a kid who gives you a tour on his bike, are well-balanced with the rest of the story.
The music takes you on a solemn and pensive ride throughout all of Season: A Letter to the Future, as the musical arrangements and a “less is more” approach to the sounds around you help set the right atmosphere. The sound effects, which you are also tasked to document with your audio recorder, naturally come straight from real-life noises, from the chirping of birds to the waterfall falling on the rocks.
A particular feature that goes a long way is the vibration of sound and music on the PS5 Dualsense controllers when recording because it is so incredibly lifelike, and it is possible to ascertain the feeling of the controller’s trembling would be the same in nature.
At the end of the day, Season: A letter to the future is an incredible achievement as it is a risky endeavor to ask a gamer to slow down and breathe in the world they have painstakingly created, but once you let go of your preconceived notions, it will uplift you with its profound narrative.
