Scavengers Studio has been famed for its game, Season; for its vibe, gorgeous visual style, and its featuring of a Black protagonist. Season is available for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 since the 31st of January 2023.
Storyline
The game follows Estelle as she seeks to document information about her village before a cataclysmic event destroys it and every memory its people have of it. High in the mountains, there is a village safe from the turmoil of changing seasons. No one has left in a generation, no one until Estelle. In her world, a season is a period of history, an era. This season is about to end. Riding off into the unknown, she leaves her home to try to capture this moment for the future.
Leave home for the first time to collect memories before everything is washed away. Much of Season is spent just existing in its world, meeting its people, and taking various notes about what you see. This means taking photographs, drawing, and taking videos of the people you meet and the things you see. Immerse yourself in the world of Season, a third-person atmospheric adventure bicycle road trip game.
Gameplay
The gameplay focuses on exploring, recording, meeting people, and unravelling the strange world around you. Each recording tool captures a different layer; sounds and music, art and architecture, the stories of characters living through pivotal moments. Your tools peel back these layers until you grasp the culture, history, and ecology underneath everything. This quest leads you to figure out the mysteries around you.
Season has a new approach to gameplay and the story is fresh and largely disinterested in giving you boxes to check. You play as Estelle, a young woman who sets off to observe and record a part of her world on the precipice of a new season. In this unnamed world, which is like ours but also definitely not ours, a new season doesn’t mean just a change in temperature; it means a total rebirth of the state of things.
The game is deliberately unclear regarding exactly why, when, or how seasons emerge, and it seems at least sometimes they are influenced by people rather than natural things that happen to those people. Seasons seem to be more defined by the particular circumstances of a society–the breakout of war or widespread sleep, for example–more than they are snow days or fallen foliage.
For Estelle, it’s important to document the outgoing season as all will be lost when the new season begins, even as no one seems sure what that season will usher in itself. For the people of Tieng Valley, a lush farming village that’s largely been evacuated due to an imminent dam collapse, the beginning of the season may even be a matter of life and death. Equipped with a camera, audio recorder, scrapbook, and bicycle, Estelle treks into the valley to interview the last remaining locals, capture the state of the vista in its final days, and reflect on things like memory, community, and grief. These, and other themes, are delivered through thoughtful monologues and conversations that allow for players to insert themselves in the story.
Meeting each denizen of Tieng Valley allows Estelle to ponder her own place in the world.
Biking through the wide-open valley after a linear introduction, you can stop anywhere and take pictures of anything. You’ll find the world casually split into sections: a cemetery, a temple, a path to a farmhouse, and so on. In your scrapbook, each named location gets its own dedicated pages as you discover them, and what you put on those pages is up to you. You can capture photos of cows grazing after their human companions have moved out, focus on the juxtaposition of industry and nature on the eve of the dam collapse, or create a portrait of a grieving widow as she packs up her late husband’s best suit. It’s all equally valid and other than a few puzzle-like sections where you’ll need to find specific items, there are no wrong answers.
Simple camera tools like zoom, focus, and colour filters allow you to frame and present a moment just as you intend, and, if you like it enough, you can include it in your scrapbook. The same is true of capturing audio–you just point and shoot–and these audio clips become mementos you can include in your travel log. Capturing some images and audio brings out Estelle’s inner thoughts, which often become writings you can jot down, too. Capture enough of these “keepsakes” of any location, and you’ll unlock additional drawings, stamps, and other musings that can be reshaped and resized to further decorate your scrapbook. The idea is that, by the end of Estelle’s journey, the scrapbook will serve as a detailed moment frozen in time, left to pass onto future generations so they can understand their own would-be ambiguous history.
Her entire journey will take anywhere from 6-12 hours, with that variance largely owing to how much you let yourself soak in the various scenes. Season captures the invigorating sense of freedom riding a bike so often provides. Season is tranquil at all times, and given Estelle’s often wiser-than-her-years thoughts on her experience, the delicate but impactful music and incredible pastel comic book visual style it’s a game that is easily enjoyed.
It does have a definitive ending, and Estelle’s journey matters most once you see it and understand it all, allowing the game’s various themes to come to shore not like a monsoon, but like a delicate wave reaching up the beach. Season more often reminded me of a book of poetry than a video game.
Features
- A bicycle road trip
- Wind your way through stunning landscapes on your bicycle and take in each moment. Your journey will take 6 to 12 hours, depending on how much you linger.
- A compelling narrative
- Discover a new world; one unknown yet familiar. Contemplate and make difficult choices that could affect how the story ends. Select and capture the most important moments from the current season to preserve them for future generations.
- Document, photograph and record
- Collect memories, make recordings, and piece together the secrets of the world of SEASON in a highly customizable journal.
- Emotionally complex characters
- Meet a diverse cast of characters, each of whom has two precious things to share with you: the stories of their lives and a moment together at the end of the season.
- Immersive soundtrack, listen to the gorgeous score as you travel through the world; music is embedded in the landscapes, and evolves and drifts as you do.
Final Words
This is a truly beautiful game, not only when it comes to the graphics and artwork of the game visually but when it comes to the story and features that you will be able to do in the game. So, do you think you will purchase this game and help Estelle figure out what really happen to her village?
