“Find a sacred square of earth. Lay down, so you have the dirt at your back. Close your eyes. Close everything. Your ancestors are in that dirt. All the living and all the dead are holding you up. Now Stand. They’re still there, aren’t they? It’s time to move. To entangle yourself everywhere with everyone. So that next time you lay down in the dirt, you will have so much more to tell them.”
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.
As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.
Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.
I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.
Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.
Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.
I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.