A Letter To The Future Review — A Memorable Meditation On Memory

The game’s frame, a stranger sitting down to read through Estelle’s journal, establishes right away that the end of the season has already come to pass. We are playing through these final days to discover the secrets of the season and to write the titular letter to the future. This isn’t a game about preventing the apocalypse. This isn’t a game about dramatic action sequences. This is a game about savoring life, quiet exploration, and examining the beauty in the world around us — whether that’s the sound of the wind rushing through a lavender field or a heartfelt memory preserved in the earth itself.

Season: A Letter To The Future follows Estelle as she leaves her home village for the first time and sets out into the world to record the changing of the season. Throughout this journey, she learns about previous seasons and why this season is ending by visiting old ruins and the last remnants of an ancient community. She records her travels by taking pictures, capturing audio recordings, jotting down notes, and making observations along the way.

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The narrative is poignant and contemplative, lacking any dramatic urgency beyond the initial reveal of the season ending. The narrative absolutely delivers on this promise, providing a pace that benefits greatly from a more relaxed playthrough. This isn’t a game to rush. The very act of wanting to rush spoils the experience, as the narrative encourages slowing down, taking in every sight and sound, and exploring every corner of the world. This is a game about mindfulness.

Early on, there’s a touching moment before Estelle leaves her village during which her mother crafts her a pendant for her journey. This pendant is meant to ward against ‘mind sickness,’ protecting against several psychological afflictions present in the world. These afflictions can range from losing the ability to track the progress of time, to becoming so overwhelmed with piled-on memories that they become physically debilitating. To craft the protective pendant, Estelle’s mother must infuse the pendant with several shared cherished memories, each linked with one of the five senses. In doing so, Estelle’s mother forgets each infused memory, essentially sacrificing her memory for her daughter’s. You move about your childhood home, turning over different items and knickknacks, choosing which items to use in the pendant. With each item, Estelle’s mother revisits a cherished memory, and then it leaves her forever. She’s forgetting pieces of their lives together in order to protect her daughter on her journey beyond the safety of the village. There’s a strange gravity to everything in this game, always pulling back into the impending finality of it all.

Estelle, as a protagonist, is fairly quiet in her interactions with others. Instead, she leads a rich internal life. The game is filled with her narration, reflecting on her experiences, observing the world around her, and thinking about the people she encounters. The writing is genuinely thought-provoking, and while it could push you away if you’re not in the right headspace for this type of experience, it’s deeply rewarding if you’re in the right mood.

Her voice acting is also excellent, carrying an intonation that fully embodies the quiet contemplation the game instills. Her brief notes of wisdom and regular monologue are never unwelcome, feeling completely at home in the somber journey the game takes you on.

The same can’t be said about all of the other voice actors. Some were great, obviously. Estelle’s mother and father, for example, felt like the right fit and tone. Others, like her village elder, were jarring enough to pull me out of the game. Something about the delivery came across as unnatural, like someone reading unrehearsed lines off a page. The quality of writing elevates these exchanges quite a bit, and some performances, if a bit stilted, are earnest, but the uneven performances stand out.

Fortunately, Estelle makes up the vast majority of the game’s voice acting, providing quality narration throughout. She does such a phenomenal job at conveying quiet and profound emotion.

The concept of a ‘season’ is intriguing. Speaking with characters will uncover details about the previous season, the transition into the current one, and speculation about the next. The simple yet complicated question of ‘what exactly is a season in this world?’ is explored and answered, though it’s never quite so concrete that I could definitively explain it to a friend. But, conceptually and thematically, it’s explored to a satisfying degree.

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The previous season involved a huge war, one which still heavily impacts the current and soon-to-be-ending season. There’s a melancholy to Estelle’s journey, a yearning for something better, a deep desire to forget the ravages of the previous season — but there’s also a need to examine the effects of this war and its lasting impacts on the people you encounter, the landscape, and the emotional state of the world itself.

The setting isn’t quite fantasy, but it is certainly fantastical. It includes some unusual diseases, like “time misperception disorder,” which causes the afflicted to be unable to track time passing, or “dream sickness,” which causes the afflicted to slip into a deep, unending sleep. The game’s decidedly mystical vibe seeps into nearly every corner of the world, including gods and shrines with very real and tangible powers, but contrasts tastefully with its elements of modernity. Recognizable elements from ‘civilization’ — like cars, cranes, and travel posters — are hiding around every corner, though they’re strikingly rusted, overgrown, or otherwise making their disuse apparent.

While your early moments of the game follow a fairly linear path, the majority of your time is spent in Tieng Valley, a beautiful and somewhat haunting locale built beneath an old dam. The dam is scheduled to be destroyed soon, and so you enter into the valley to record its existence — the people, the sights and sounds, the monuments, and of course, the memories. While Estelle’s journey exists and continues beyond the confines of this game, it is in Tieng Valley that she truly comes to terms with her purpose in observing and recording the end of a season and the beginning of the next.

The actual gameplay of Season: A Letter To The Future involves traveling from location to location on your bicycle, using your tape recorder to record conversations or the sounds of nature, using your camera to take pictures, and using your journal to collect and arrange artifacts, pictures, sketches, and to write down your thoughts.

Composing the journal is a central mechanic. While this might sound trivial and potentially dull, it’s anything but. Each two-page spread is dedicated to an area or a topic, and you decorate each section with photographs, artifacts you find, audio clips in the form of sketches, and jotted-down thoughts and observations that you can select from categorized menus. This process feels incredibly organic, and the satisfaction I felt from getting each page just right genuinely surprised me. You only need to fill each page with 5 items before the page is ‘complete,’ prompting Estelle to provide a kind of sum-up thought of the page’s subject, but I often found myself continuing to tweak and add and adjust these pages, sometimes even returning to them again later to do just a little more, to get things just right. The whole process of collecting these artifacts out in the world, then pausing to arrange them in the journal and reflect on what I’d discovered, is incredibly meditative. Toward the end of the game, Estelle revisits each page of her journey, offering a final chance to tweak, or simply admire, your hard work.

After leaving the village, the game initially feels full of forward momentum. You’re following fairly linear paths, pausing along the way to take pictures, sketch a vista, or record the unique sounds of the environment. You’ll pick up unreceived letters or abandoned tools, muse as to their purpose or their contents, and you’ll move on. This flow holds steady for a little while, but you’ll eventually reach the aforementioned Tieng Valley, the location where you’ll spend the majority of your time.

This location fundamentally changed the pacing of the game, and it took a moment to adjust. Rather than following a linear path, I then had this large valley to explore non-linearly, with plenty of sights and sounds to experience in every corner of the region, but this shift didn’t change the flow of gameplay. I would still ride to a new spot, roam around taking pictures, interact with animals (sometimes people), record sounds, and contemplate existence — the importance of memory, and events of the past. When I felt I’d completed an area, whether by ‘finishing’ my journal entry on the area or after having exhausted every interactable I could find, I’d ride my bicycle down the road, or down a new side path that I’d discovered to see where it took me.

I had a pretty fun time with the bicycle itself. When you hop on the bike, you need to squeeze the L2 and R2 triggers back and forth a few times, simulating those early pedals before you get up to speed. After that, you’re cruising until you decide to slow down or you hit an incline, requiring you to start pedaling again to keep up speed. There were a few locations where I was going uphill, and I had to pedal quite a bit — the DualSense’s adaptive triggers offered a bit of a finger exercise — but this never felt too difficult or time-consuming. There is an option to change the bicycle controls in the settings, but I never felt the need to change things up, enjoying the novelty of the default system.

If you end up wandering a bit too far from your bike (you can run, but not terribly quickly), you can simply pause the game and select ‘Retrieve Bicycle,’ which will summon it to you. A bit immersion-breaking? Maybe. But the alternative of running back to the bike would have made for dreadfully dull moments that would have punished exploration more than it encouraged it.

Time spent on the bicycle was always lovely. You’ll often encounter massive downslopes through beautiful countryside, offering a serene, relaxing experience. Each of these downslope opportunities treated me to a breathtaking view. A few times, I stopped to take pictures to record the moment, but eventually, I realized the moment was the movement — not a single snapshot in time but an experience. Even though I was out in the world to record it, this realization helped me bask in the beauty of the transitory, the fleeting. This played into the very nature of Estelle’s journey. Each sight and sound you encounter is likely the last time it is experienced by anyone. It adds a weightiness to these experiences, and ones I’ll cherish fondly.

It’s difficult to put into words my experience with this game. It offered a strange peace that was, all at once, a somber experience — one full of joy, sorrow, laughter, and regret. It explores the weight and comfort of memories, the impact they have on the world, and the importance of existence. It can be meandering at times, and some of the side characters’ voice acting pulled me out of the experience. If you aren’t in the mood for this kind of game — a walking simulator vibe with an emphasis on scrapbooking, bicycling, and photography — hold off on playing it and wait until the right mood strikes. When you go in with the right mindset, this game can get under your skin in the best way. Season: A Letter To The Future isn’t a perfect game, but it is a significant one, and one that I will carry with me for a long time.

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