2026
By: Alexander Holmes
“SEASON: a letter to the future” is a story about heritage.
It is about the roots set down that help to raise us into the people we are today, and how the history of the world directly informs what it means to live in the present. And, by the end, it is a game about seeds. About who will take that history and what they'll do with the memories you've preserved.
The story starts us with a framing device. Some guy sits at a desk. He has tawny skin and hair almost the same color, and most notably he has Bandé Dessinee comic book eyes. The details of the lid and iris are drawn, Adventures of Tin Tin style, upon his skin rather than against the white of the Sclera. This is not our main character, but a person who is reading our journal. Which we wrote as a letter to whoever might be reading about our journey.
His research sets the stage for the story. We wake up as the Protagonist. A dark skinned girl with short, natural hair. This is Estelle. And Her most striking feature is her eyes. Large, bright sclera emphasized further by the magnification of her glasses. The gameplay begins by moving about her house, Shen Mu style, as she examines items that remind her of her childhood. Her friends. Her deceased father. And her mother. Who is singing and cooking breakfast in the other room. I'm not good with identifying fashion, but her jacket is giving Peru or some South American cultural dress. And she is preparing one last morning meal before our journey.
The character designs should continue to stand out through this sequence. Her friend Pâté is a chubby kid with literally no neck. The village elder is a kindly old woman with a 10x sized head straight out of a Ghibli movie. Our mother's hands are noticeably larger than normal, old and boney.
Taken together, it all gives the feeling of a fable. Like the imagination of the man reading the journal is exaggerating notable details as he reads.
The setting is equally fantastic. Learning about our family quickly grows to learning about the history of the town. To learning about the history of the world. Rapidly growing an appreciation for the duty we have been given in exchange for leaving the village of Caro.
Caro is, for presently unknown reasons, a very metropolitan and very isolated village. A village that's been around for hundreds of years, but the arrival of Dr. Fumio transformed it into a place for, as they describe it, healing mental illness. Their version of Therapy, however, is the ability to make the mind forget. The ritual we performed with our mother at the start preserved memories by trapping them in crystal, at the cost of the person who spoke them forgetting the memory entirely.
Something in this world was so horrible that forgetting seemed like the only way to get past the past. Attracting people from all walks of life to live here in Caro. People we never get to meet, as we leave the village alone.
The set up to the story reminds me of the book The Giver. One person chosen among the whole society to remember everything that's purposefully hidden. Only, instead of the senses being withheld in order to preserve a social harmony, it's memory and history that become the Protagonist's responsibility. Her abnormally large eyes indicating, as a matter of art, the responsibility of a journalist and a historian.
The beginning is a very slow burn. But an effective one at making the player care about this world, its characters, and its lore. It feels like a real place that has been mostly abandoned. The setting, music, and atmospheric sound design grips the player as they start to unravel a story layered with Pathos.
The gameplay is primarily about biking forward through the world. It takes a few manual peddles to get the bike going. Taking pictures with an old 4:3 Polaroid, which can mechanically flip between filters and adjust its focus range. Recording sounds with a cassette recorder, the artefacts of audio fuzz from the scrolling tape adds texture to every sound. Scribbling notes about the places you see. And using all of these pieces to arrange a collage which becomes the Journal from the opening cutscenes. The use of analogue technology to accomplish the task provides an intimacy to the play. Everywhere has more to record than you have room for on its dedicated page. And you don't get extra pages to record missing details. You have to choose what's worth remembering.
Thinking back to the man at the start helps the player to imagine that the activity is actually for someone, and wards away any doubts that the endeavor may be lonelier than it feels.
Tieng Valley is the first major area of the game, expansive and evacuated. A faction of people calling themselves Grey Hands are a somewhat anarchist, post-communist coded group of volunteer social workers. Their defining philosophy is, well, that they don't have one. They're trying to figure how not to make the mistakes of past politics that drove the world to forget its past. Memory Flowers grow on graves, speaking the voices of visitors passing by and long-dead locals. A sign nearby says too many flowers can be dangerous.
The valley has been protected by a massive and aging dam. This post-post apocalypse has no one capable of upkeep and repair. So rather than risk a sudden catastrophe, they're evacuating the locals and preemptively destroying the dam.
We have one evening to document as much of the culture of this valley as we can, before it's all washed away.
As we explore and record whatever we find important, we start to see the story of this world unfolding. The whole world seems bent toward forgetting the past to forge their new future. Not just our village, but the Grey Hands, and Tieng Valley. What our village did through New Age Spirituality and medicine, what the Grey Hands seek to do through politics, Tieng Valley did through Religion and Agriculture. The memories of the past literally forming into minerals in the soil, and feeding memory flowers. We choose to spend a lot of time trying to record what has been happening in the valley. Fitting in far more than one evening’s worth of writing memoirs and photography.
On occasion, the game breaks the fourth wall to ask the player to engage in the act of remembering. From nostalgia to propaganda, and even introspection. From FMVs of old video footage from the real world, occasionally edited to be more vague and disturbing. To a guided meditation where we imagine a friend describing a dream, and we’re supposed to imagine the dream alongside, sitting with the controller in our hands and our own eyes closed.
There is more to the culture than even the people remaining know. We must uncover the names of three gods. Tide, sleep, the ebb and flow of water over time, the movement of a crib. Void, the absence of things. And Din, a loud and unpleasant sound; the act of making someone remember something through brute repetition.
Each symbol representing the gods’ names in stone carvings and rippling water reminded me of Chinese auspicious symbols, or the Veve of Haitian Lwa.
For the ritual of Din, I was granted someone else's memory. For the ritual of Tide, I was rocked to sleep, and the dream connected me to my mother. For Void, I chose not to do the ritual, because nothing felt worth forgetting.
The squeaking hinge of my PS5 controller's triggers placing me on the old bike I used to cross the country, and record the changing of the season.
—
It is at this point that we should ask, in a game as multicultural and diverse as this, in what way can African or African diaspora culture inform our reading of the game? In what way does having a black protagonist inform the story, elevate the narrative, or elevate the experience for a black audience.
I want to start here, with a point that I hope to make with more and more frequency. Because of the differences in the political history of this world from ours, and our character's personal history coming from a remote, self-governed village, the protagonist of this game is both black and uninformed by blackness.
In many contexts, that statement would be a point of critique rather than a point of celebration. But here it is a strength. By having a black protagonist, whose voice is our voice and perspective becomes ours, Season presents a black protagonist as normal. The mundanity of a black character freely roaming through the world creates an image that blackness suits any and all contexts. Rather than being relegated to socially approved black-archetypes in media or restricted to black cultural spaces, Season celebrates personhood by treating blackness as default. In the way so many games assume fair skin to be default.
That is one possible reading. Another possible reading is to see the setting of the world as a story informed by the fallout of colonialism. Of the generational trauma that results from the loss of one's memory, history, and roots. Our job as a player-character is to create an encyclopedia of sorts. But we come from a village where forgetting is treated as medicine. Losing defining moments of life, and leaving their children to wonder at how much discarded history brought them to their current lives.
We are meant to be recording history, in a world that has forgotten. Every culture, not just African Diaspora, is concerned with their roots. But 200 years of the transatlantic slave trade put up hard walls for those of us who want to remember. Families and groups who shared a common language were purposefully separated when sold to the plantations.
My own maternal family history ends at English slavery in the Americas. My paternal family history ends at French slavery in Saint Domingue. Haitian cultural artifacts, religious heritage, can trace general ties back to Angola and other regions of West Africa, but nothing specific. Whereas some people in this world can draw their histories back over hundreds, or even thousands, of years, I know mine ultimately ends with a receipt and an inventory ledger. Sometimes I do feel like forgetting would be a mercy.
For this reason, the work Estelle is writing could never take the form of an Encyclopedia or a history text. It could only be a memoir, an essay, a journal. Digging up one's roots is inherently personal, emotional, and wrought with ambiguity and ennui in equal measure.
To do otherwise would be dishonest to the present. And would curse our descendants with the same absence that started us on this journey in the first place.
Working to make the now as good as it can be, without forgetting the joys and hardships of the past. Surely there must be a way to do both.
Thank you for reading,
Take care of each other,
And stay true.