meExploration is a powerful motivator: no matter what kind of game we’re playing, we’re propelled by the stories, sights, or characters waiting around the next bend. Scavengers Studio makes use of that fascination with the unknown by making exploration the center point of Season. You control a nameless young woman, who decides to record as much of her world as she can and deliver her findings to a museum before the end of the current season, the term the game uses for its different historical eras. . As she travels on foot and by bicycle, her sketches, audio recordings, and photographs of her end up in her scrapbook; the narration comes from someone reading that scrapbook in the future.
Season makes great use of his game tools. Your camera comes with different filters and a focus tool, which makes taking pictures a pleasure. You have the freedom to photograph or record what you want; even when you’re supposed to capture specific things to make sense of a mystery, the game leaves it completely up to you whether or not you want to participate, and for how long. Biking feels great, and there’s a lot to see.
However, Season is considered much more than just a relaxing trip. You’re out to create your own anthropological record of a world heading toward calamity—”the true state of all things,” as the game says—and that’s where most of the game’s problems lie. Our protagonist remains nameless and blank enough for players to project anything onto her – there’s a scene where she talks about whether or not to record a story she’d rather keep private – but you as the player can force her to. tell it all at the same time. the push of a button regardless.
Season’s world, which is so crucial to its functioning, feels less like a real place and more like an amalgamation of cultural influences purged of their real-world meaning. Here, Japanese shimenawa ropes appear alongside Scandinavian architecture, while men in Stasi-like uniforms casually dictate rules of behavior via propaganda posters. Your character, for his part, is a spectator, a receptacle of stimuli and little else.
Memories are a major theme throughout, but Season offers them up for consumption in an extremely playful way: graffiti, undelivered letters, people telling their whole life story to a woman they’ve just met. There are flowers that play music and store audio, just so you don’t learn everything through text, and documents with the word “secret” stamped in huge letters, left in the dirt.
Season’s unwillingness to paint the world in broader strokes (“Internationalism was falling apart”) and penchant for flowery but nonsensical language may have been influenced by a troubled developmental story. Part of Season’s development cycle was marked by allegations of workplace harassment and disorganized leadership, which became public in 2021. The game is enamored with ideas of community and culture, but by appropriating real culture and taking it out out of context, he steals from himself. message.
