Sometimes, a flawed game can be a perfect encapsulation of a single concept.

Season: A Letter to the Future is laser focused on the tragedy of memory.

The gameplay loop is simple. Go through a place, take pictures, record audio, assemble a couple scrapbook pages, write some notes, move on.

Aside from a few pages that must be filled out to progress the story, nothing is mandatory. You can leave entire pages blank. You can take the worst pictures in existence. The only person to judge how much you failed to care is you.

I can see why this game failed so hard the studio had to downsize months after the game's release. It is slow. It is dependent on non-tangible, non-trackable player investment. And if you do invest in what it has to teach, you will likely feel sad.

The first page you make is a tribute and farewell to your mother. I had no idea how important scrapbooking was to what this game was trying to do, so I stuck her picture in a corner, slapped the gaudiest clip-art over the remaining space and called it good so I could move on. It looked like crap.

The second page you make encapsulates your entire home town. This seemed much more manageable. There were so many other places and things to take pictures of! Sounds to record, trinkets to tape in! It was a fun, healthy-feeling variety of stuff.

I started to grasp what the game was doing once I left town and got my bicycle. I had a whole page for... the mountain I biked down. There wasn't anything there! I whizzed by it all in a couple minutes! What was I supposed to fill all that space with? This, with its goats and abandoned construction cranes, got as much space in my journal as my whole hometown?

In my search to fill space, I found postcards and stamps. I took wide landscape shots to fill space. And I realized that in my job as chronicler, I had to choose what was more important to me - artifacts and context of the culture that used to be here, or the experience I had moving through what existed in the here and now. Did I write observations factually and accurately, or was it important to show some of the color of my character's emotions as she moved through this space?

When I first saw that there were note options that contained no factual information, but only the protagonist's musings, I thought, "what a waste, why is that here?" But as I assembled artifacts and observations without her in it, the enterprise felt wrong. I wasn't capturing what it felt like to be in those spaces. Her experiences didn't line up perfectly with mine, but it also felt like I was missing something important by being so clinical in my approach.

These myriad decisions are where the primary form of engagement comes from Season: A Letter to the Future. How actively memory is created, and how easily the means of communicating memory completely warps the goal that fueled it in the first place.

I have some background in graphic design, so I loved adding some clip art at jaunty angles, or leaving some blank space so that photos I took could really pop. But whenever I looked at those pages later, I couldn't help but think, "why didn't I take more pictures?" From a pure utilitarian perspective, I should have been plastering every page like a checkerboard. And it still wouldn't have been enough.

For some spaces, I thought, "this place is interesting, but I'll be here again later." Then when I returned later, the sun had moved, the lighting was completely different, and my photos looked like crap. I wasted so much good sunlight not taking pictures!

Normally when games have dialog trees that progress regardless of your choice, I often feel myself ask, "why did you need to give me the illusion of interaction at all?" But in Season, I could clearly see that each decision was a fork in the conversation. Did you try to ask people about what historically happened, or what it felt like to live through those events? And true to the flow of conversation in real life, you never get to go back to those moments again when someone might have been vulnerable enough to open up to you. And sometimes, you feel instant regret with the non-answers you get.

Watching other characters actively creating memory, watching yourself make recordings of their creations. I'm floundering to make sense of my experience of this game here, now. I want to find a reason to talk about a music box I made a recording for where I was so lazy I didn't make a second recording when the first didn't start at the beginning. Later when I listened to it, besides being mad at my past self, I noticed the microphone had picked up the rain in the background, something I had completely forgotten was happening when the recording was made. A recording I made!

I want to edit this review a million times. I want to not touch it at all. Which is the more accurate way of doing things? A memory carefully conserved with thought and deliberation, or flying by your whims and coughing out whatever flows naturally?

I saw a promotional video for photo manipulation AI recently that showed how someone added clouds and a cabin to a picture he took of himself in the woods. How the speaker was putting forth the idea that photos will soon be beyond reality. That the idea of a memory will no longer be to convey things as they happened, but how it felt like they happened. Cameras now already do this, with their tricks to edit out the people and noise around you, leaving a sterilized world with a face seen more perfectly than any human can. But we still have a tether on reality, a shared understanding for what kind of concept a photo is trying to gesture towards. What happens when the cultural exchange of memory is merely the ideas of feelings of places and activities?

Most of the locations in Season: A Letter to the Future, while pretty, didn't feel like much while I was wandering through them. But when I saw my incomplete journal entries for those spaces, I was offended on my own behalf. How could I capture the nature of the winding path from the new cemetery, when any one photo could not capture more than a single bend obscured by trees? How could I have forgotten to take a picture of the other side of the bell tower where the bell would have actually been visible??? I never took a picture of her house! Or his van! I never took a picture of a single road, even though my whole life was spent on my bike 5x more than it was at any destination!

At the end of the game, you are given a final opportunity to look through your journal, to reflect and rearrange. There was a somber sinking devastation as I was forced to realize the disconnect of how my brain was justifying every bad choice I'd made. That anyone I showed this to, I could explain why there aren't any pictures of fruit from the fruit farm. Or how this shrine looked so much better in the early afternoon light, not this murky twilight. Because the point was that anyone seeing this wouldn't have my insight, my excuses, my regrets. The only clues they would have about that world, or the evidence about my life, would be exactly what I gave them. The stilted, terribly cut audio. Historical photos half-obscured with dumb-ass stickers. Patterns and rituals photographed but never explained. People captured in a moment with no context given to who they were, why they mattered to me.

When I saw my first page, with my mom's face crammed into one corner, I cringed out of my skin. I deleted everything and gave her as much space as I could. That picture I took of her at the start of the game was the only proof of the home I had.