If there’s one genre that has sadly struggled in part due to its namesake and reputation, it’s the Walking Sims. As the progeny of more traditional adventure games, games like Gone Home and Dear Esther, however novel they may have felt at the time, have grown into a cottage industry of indie titles that has been stagnating for a while. For every Stanley Parable or Off-Peak, there’s a dozen slow-as-paint-drying tone poems disguised as games.
The solution by some games, such as Nuts and Tacoma, is to expand the looking-around aspect with additional mechanics besides walking – whether that’s planting cameras, manipulating the flow of recorded events in time, or solving little mysteries. For others, like Firewatch, it’s all about sprinkling in bits of interactive narrative, even if they don’t drastically alter the experience, to give a bit more flavor. Yet none of these attempts to improve the genre do so without really getting at the central focus: exploration for its own sake.
Wanderlust is an often undervalued need in a world that’s so connected. “Why would you just want to go around, drifting aimlessly?” some ask, needing a goal. For those folks, Season: A Letter To The Future has an incredibly sensible answer – it’s the end of the world as we know it.
In Season’s world, every few decades, the next ‘season’ begins, and with it the world changes anew. The current season is dying, worn down to handfuls of scattered souls after a world war drove them all apart.
It’s not quite our world, with hints of magic realism sprinkled in and only fictional countries to explore, but it’s close enough to be understood at a glance. Except, Season wants you to dig deeper than a glance, so before you even start exploring, you have to learn the nameless protagonist’s origins through objects around the house.
Then, once you’ve discovered the most touching memories, you have to sacrifice some of them to protect the protagonist on her journey, using them to imbue an arcane crystal to safeguard her mind and body against disease. Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, her (very well voice acted) mother loses each of the memories tied to those sacrifices. She’s literally giving up a part of herself for the sake of her daughter – for your safety on this journey.
You’re immediately taught the sheer importance and scarcity of memories in this world. How life is so finite, yet equally infinite in how it outstretches our grasp. Season manages this without any complex mechanics beyond walking around and picking up objects.
Then it blossoms further, the moment you step out of your home. It’s your chosen quest to seek out what’s left of this world in its final days, free to record its sights and sounds with a camera and tape recorder. While certain objects have particular, scripted meaning, the rest are just there for you to find.
You decide what you put in your journal, and as you compile what these areas mean to you – from your hometown village to far off shores – you unlock additional journal customizations – from little design flourishes to full notes that the explorer thinks to herself. You choose what answers are found by a mysterious woman shown reading this journal in the future.
There are many secrets to be found along the way as well. It’s possible to sketch landscapes, capture music, and gain meaningful insights from characters. No conversation lets you explore every option, yet there is no wrong option either. It’s a question of priorities more than anything.
Do you understand an elderly woman’s journey through wartimes purely through what it meant to her, or do you try to understand her people, or perhaps the places they went? Are you interested in this world for its decaying ruins, its animals, or the culture soon to be swept away? Are you recording history to appreciate what’s around you, or so that you, yourself go unforgotten?
These are the questions Season makes you grapple with constantly. Despite sounding incredibly simple on the surface, it manages to present all manner of intricate ideas. Even in terms of mechanics, there’s a fair bit of nuance to getting the best photos and audio recordings. Sometimes you need to crouch, or change the color filter, or come at it from a new angle. It’s not all or nothing, just a matter of how much time you’ll spend to tell the story the way you want to.
This is the true potential of “walking sims”, if you ask me. Season isn’t just a well-told story that you walk through – you truly go on a journey. You become a part of this world and have to be enamored by it to get the most out of it. Season is a cohesive vision that understands how to harness the interactivity of games to better tell its story, and how to harness its story to inspire a fresh gameplay experience.
Should every exploration game adopt the exact same mechanics? Goodness, no. However, the philosophy behind it is worth emulating. Scavengers Studio’s first effort has the kind of focused vision most projects could only dream of.
At no point does it attempt to be anything more than what it sets out to be, concluding with a meaningful message without overstaying its welcome. There’s a reason some folks are insisting it’s already a 2023 GOTY contender, and I understand why. Season is so much more than just walking through someone else’s story, and it’s all the better for it.
