SEASON review: "A promising ride with a stick in the spokes"

I spent most of my time playing SEASON: A Letter to the Future - Scavengers Studio's sophomore title - thinking why on earth there aren't more games with bicycles in them. There's an abundance of car games, and we've even got a whole genre for games where you just walk, so why no love for bikes? Well, in comes SEASON with an attempt to rectify that, sending you on a journey to chronicle the present before it becomes the past, one photograph and pedal at a time.

Understanding the pain of forgetting

The main driving (or should I say, riding) force of SEASON is a vision of an incoming 'SEASON' that washes away the world. This causes our main character Estelle to venture out from her secluded mountain village into the world on a mission to capture it before it disappears.

Throughout your journey you will encounter a few souls who refuse to be displaced just yet, giving you the opportunity to learn more about their lives and the world that they inhabit. There are also narratives to be found within the earth itself, as the past has a tendency of leaving its mark on the world.

From a structural point of view, the narrative is generally up to you to piece together through your travels. While there are a handful of mandatory sections that give you smaller pieces of the puzzle, it is largely through your own actions and discoveries that the past and present are unravelled.

Parsing the world through the lens, microphone, page, and wheel inevitably gives you a picture of the world that any person would be unable to accurately recreate, and thus the importance of your scrapbook is shown.

It is not just the practice of remembering that you are capturing but the practice of memory itself, as the impending SEASON washes away not just the earth but your memories of it too. I found this to be a particularly engaging activity that actively altered how and what I chose to capture, as there is only a limited amount of space on each area's respective page to memorialise.

This is also echoed within the actions of the people that you meet, who are also struggling to leave the past behind. One of the high points of SEASON for me was a conversation with a woman unwilling to part with her late husband's belongings on the eve of a move. The challenge of forsaking treasured objectives that double as memories is significant, and I am glad that this carries over into your own narrative decision-making.

The story falls short

However, I was not as entranced by how the cutscenes and dialogue sections in the game actually played out. Far too often they felt stilted, empty, and disconnected from the tone of what was being discussed. While they don't fill out the bulk of the game, I did find myself largely uninterested in them purely due to their presentation.

In connection to this, you are presented with a handful of dialogue choices throughout the game but it is unclear how much of an effect they actually take on your narrative path. One particular decision in the late game seemed quite significant in what it could change, but due to the lack of save states, there was no easy means of going back to see the potential alternative. SEASON is a short game, so it is not a huge effort to play through again, but it would have been nice to have the option regardless.

Furthermore, the game arrived at a rather abrupt ending shortly after this, leaving me a bit surprised that it wrapped up that quickly, as I was expecting more to the narrative. It does diegetically make sense in the grand scheme of things, but it did leave me feeling short-changed.

The pleasure of riding

Aside from the narrative, the main draw for many to SEASON is the cycling. As mentioned, there are very few games that engage with bicycles - especially those that aim to capture how relaxing it can be - so I was immediately interested in how SEASON could emulate the sensation. The reality of it however is very much a mixed bag, with plenty to enjoy but parts that do unfortunately hold the experience back.

While it does take you a good half an hour to actually hop on the saddle and start riding, I was immediately struck by how glacial the experience felt. As someone who very much enjoys the sensation of cycling - the feeling of the breeze against your face and you float through a glade - I was immediately reminded of this when playing SEASON.

Scavengers Studio has done an excellent job of having the camera float in the middle distance behind you, giving you the intimacy needed to feel connected to Estelle as a rider but also the space that surrounds her too. It became abundantly clear to me that my favourite moments in the game were when you're free to just ride, exploring where you want at your own designated pace.

Paired perfectly with this is the top-class haptic feedback experience on the PlayStation 5. Actually riding the bike requires the sequential squeezing of the triggers, which become tighter when starting out or heading up a hill - replicating the force you would need to expunge when riding a real bike. While it would have been nice for the entire experience to have been manual - as you relinquish the need to pull the triggers once Estelle gets going - it still created an enjoyable experience.

Falling off the bike

On the flip side, however, are a lot of finicky moments that made the action of riding often frustrating. Something I noticed very quickly is how eager the game is to force you off your bike if you pause for even a moment. While getting on your bike is just a simple button press - having to repeatedly do so across the course of the game interrupts the flow of riding that I was enjoying so much.

Moreover, adjusting the camera when cycling just did not seem to work. There are many times throughout the game that perfectly suit the classic slow pan to reveal the landscape move, but for some reason making any sort of camera movement sent my vision straight into the floor. As you can imagine, this made it quite challenging to stay on the given path, often sending me into the ditches where I was required to stop and reassert myself.

The performance was also questionable when riding the bike, as I experienced fairly consistent framerate drops, especially in the mid to late game. While not enough to bring the game to a slideshow or severely inhibit my ability to play, it did remove the weightlessness from cycling, making it feel rather sluggish instead.

Art in the age of mechanical reproduction

I did find plenty to enjoy in the photography aspect of the game. Personally, I love square format photography, as it naturally limits what you can include and therefore leads the photographer to be more purposeful, which fits extremely well with SEASON's core theme of conscious preservation. 

Sadly, this does not translate to the actual restrictive aspect ratio of the game. Instead of widescreen 16:9, the game is presented in what is likely 2.39:1 - presumably in an attempt to make it seem more 'cinematic'. However, this often just felt obstructive in the wrong ways, and instead just felt like a simple crop instead of an intentional aesthetic choice.

Continuing this notion of restriction the choice of which photos to include within the scrapbook, but I appreciated this in the same way as the square format photography. While you are free to capture as much as you want, your space on each page is limited, so you must be responsive to which images represent each of the areas best.

The same is very much true with the field recordings, as they can take up a fairly significant amount of space on the page as default. You must be always thinking of how you want to show each location, and that often makes for some rather appealing scrapbook pages too.

My two biggest gripes with the scrapbook system come from the actual customisation and layout of the pages though. Firstly, it would have been very helpful to have had even just a few more placement options available - for example, the ability to raise or lower the hierarchy of certain items on the page. Additionally, the additional items you receive after 'completing' a page are rather repetitive and often uninspired, leaving me to never really touch them.

Every system in SEASON seems to just be encapsulated by highs and lows. There will be something I'm really enjoying like the act of cycling, but then simultaneously an annoyance or disruption will creep in and spoil it. That is not to say there is nothing to enjoy within SEASON - quite the contrary, with the form of a great game clearly here. Aspects like the haptic feedback and active preservation excel within the game, but there is far too much clasping on the brakes to get the rhythm going, even in such a short game.

3/5

Reviewed on PS5. Code provided by the publisher.