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Indie games tend to explore spaces deemed too risky for publishers or too niche for some players. Season is nothing if not niche, but it’s a good thing it exists. You play as a young woman named Estelle who sets out from her home to document her world on the eve of tremendous change. In her world, “seasons” don’t just bring new weather patterns; they are wholly world-altering and usher in essentially new societies, making them more like a (potentially) gentle apocalypse.
In gameplay terms, this translates to Estelle biking the countryside with her sketchbook, audio recorder, camera, and freedom to explore the world as you see fit. You’ll photograph people as they move to safety and places long or recently abandoned and, through it all, tell your own story by documenting the sights and sounds of a place soon lost to time. As you decide what to immortalize in your sketchbook, you’ll create your own narrative, choosing which images, phrases, drawings, and more you feel are crucial to telling the story of the land. It’s poetic, soft-spoken, and meditative like nothing else I can recall having experienced.
As Estelle cruises down the cliffside on her bike, the wind feels welcoming. As she pauses to rest in a firefly forest, it feels like you, too, are given a chance to just breathe and exist. And then seeing the entire scrapbook in the game’s conclusion feels like a trip down memory lane even as you only just arrived there yourself some hours beforehand. Season is as close to a mindfulness practice as one might dream up as a video game, making it a uniquely calming experience.
“As Estelle pieces together her scrapbook made by my hand, I often found myself asking why I took a particular image, what I liked about a specific sound,” critic Mark Delaney wrote in our Season: A Letter to the Future review. “What memories or feelings was I conjuring, even subconsciously, that led me to present Estelle’s world in the ways I did, and what did that say about how I see my own world? Season asks a lot of introspective questions, provides few definitive answers, and hopes players are willing to breathe it in, consider it carefully, then exhale slowly as they reflect on both the game and themselves. It’s unconventional even in a sea of indies that are constantly trying new weird things, but it works.” — Mark Delaney
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