SEASON: A Letter to the Future
This game is all about vibes, exploration and keeping a journal
Played on: Steam Deck
Playtime: 9.4 hours
I follow a lot of content about “cozy games”, “wholesome games”, “feel-good games”. I keep tabs on this part of the gaming sphere. Weirdly, I’ve never seen much about SEASON: A Letter to the Future, and we should amend that right now. It has been a while since I finished playing it, but it has been on my mind enough to make me want to write about it.
SEASON is a game where you play as a young woman, exploring a world beyond her village (via a bike that you can choose the color for!). Before an unnamed catastrophe takes place, you get to traverse a giant valley, take pictures and audio recordings and decorate your journal however you want. This sounds really boring when I put it like that, but this was an experience that I will not be forgetting anytime soon.
I could describe it as Vibes: The Game and it would be perfectly accurate. The game doesn’t try to explain everything to you. The terms they use are vague, the technology they use is not really defined and there is definitely some mysticism going on that they almost never elaborate on. They do explain some things, but most of the world is unexplained, and it’s up to you to piece everything together.
The game sometimes overdoes it with trying to be deep, and it just comes across as verbose. I appreciate the sincerity, but when it becomes borderline unrelatable, I think that’s a problem. Still, I found that a lot of the monologue from our main character adds to the vibes of the game, and fits perfectly within the obscure world that the developers created. You might end up hating the way it is handled if this is not your thing.
I have a deep appreciation for media with great art, and an even deeper appreciation for comic-book style media where you can just pause it to take a screenshot, and it can become your wallpaper. The Spider-verse movies come to mind. There is a lot of people who talked about how great the art in those movies are, so I won’t get into it, but I will say that they specifically made every scene so that when you pause the movie, it will look like a moment from a comic book. SEASON made me feel the same way. Even the conversations between the characters involve speech bubbles.
Recording & Journaling
This game is all about recording your journey. You get a camera and a device for audio recordings, that’s the whole mechanic. Oh, and you can also ride a bike (which was great, honestly. But the camera angles could have been better). You gather everything you can from the places you visit. You can take photos of the trees, the goats, the view or the propaganda posters from the “organization” that weirdly resembles a military. You take the photos and you put them in your journal and - wait, what is that noise? A cricket? You immediately take out your microphone and record the sound. How does a sound go into the journal? Well, there is a small drawing accompanying the sound so you can put it on your journal and when you hover over it, you can hear it again.
It was honestly so refreshing to just stroll around, looking for things to capture. It helped that a lot of the things I wanted to capture were actually what the game wanted me to notice, so I had no issues with my progression.
If you don’t like journaling, you might end up hating this mechanic. Lucky for me, journaling is my passion. If I were a more organized person, I would journal every damn day. It was extremely satisfying for me to organize my journal with photos, recordings, stickers and drawings. As you put more things on your journal, you unlock more stickers and drawings.
Even though it’s such a relaxed game, it also needs a plot, right? I won’t go too deep into the details here as I think it is best to check it out for yourself, but to summarize: You are recording the history of the current season before it ends, and when it ends and the new season starts, no one will remember what happened. So having physical evidence of what transpired in the previous season is important, and you are given this arduous task of documenting what you witness. You are also trying to uncover the mystery of this “organization” and what they are trying to do. Are they good or bad? Or are they in a morally grey area? There are some mysteries here and there, and they do drive you forward, but they are not the appeal of the game. So, a forewarning: do not go into this game with an expectation of a mindblowing plot. The game is all about moments that you can stop for a second and take the world around you in.
There was a particular moment during the game that will stick with me forever. The conversation that our main character has with Kochi, the kid who shows you around the valley with his bicycle, was the part where it hit me the most. The conversation struck a chord with me and I found myself shedding a few tears, not out of empathy for the characters, but because I related a bit too much with what was being said on the screen.
SEASON evidently gets inspiration from a lot of different real-life cultures, but I’m not educated enough to comment on how they nailed the portrayal. I will say, however, that I really enjoyed going around and talking with people, learning about their lives, their cultures, the things they enjoyed... Sometimes things they were saying were a bit too vague for my taste, but it didn’t bother me too much. I rather enjoyed paying attention to little details like the trinkets, tapestries, plates, statues and so on. They made the environments feel alive, while remaining simple and not overwhelming.
The game does have its flaws, the major ones being how some of the dialogue comes across as “verbose” (as I mentioned before) and the roundabout way the story is told. Nothing is ever explicitly told to you, despite the protagonist making comments on every occasion she gets. You don’t know what a “season” is, for example. And the whole story is based on seasons, so you have to figure out what it might actually be, if you want to make sense of the story. This is very much intentional, as the game does not want to feed you the story directly. Which is fine, but the writing of the characters and the dialogue could have been more solid if they wanted the vague story to hit better. But I consider this as not a big issue, as the game intends to be a somewhat abstract art piece disguised as a walking simulator.
I think the word “underrated” is used so much that it has started to lose its meaning, in my opinion. But, flaws and all, I truly consider this game to be an underrated gem, and I don’t know why it’s not mentioned more in the indie game spehere, especially by people who love chill games with great art. Maybe because this is a one-and-done game, without much of a gameplay loop. Still, it is a great way to wind down in your couch or bed after a long day and take in this artful world around you to relax. This is definitely a title that cozy indie game lovers will enjoy.
Whoa, another one for my wishlist!
Sounds interesting, I'll have to take a look