For all the liberty and wonder it gives, touring could be an uncomfortable expertise. Whenever I’m alone abroad, I turn into hyper-aware of the truth that I’m an outsider. My skill to obviously talk or course of data is diluted, leaving me to soak up my environment and study on the fly. It’s an anxiety-inducing feeling, although one which at all times rewards me once I permit myself to just accept that I’m not an knowledgeable and be comfy with listening.
That expertise is on the coronary heart of Season: A Letter to the Future, the just lately launched indie journey sport from Scavengers Studio. The story follows a girl who’s tasked with leaving her remoted village to warn the encompassing world of a coming “season” change. Players are by no means instructed what that entails, however it’s a foreboding prophecy that feels vaguely cataclysmic. Armed with a pocket book and an audio recorder, the protagonist is distributed on a countryside street journey to document as a lot as she will be able to in regards to the world and go away future generations a historic doc to study from ought to an apocalypse come. She finds herself caught between being a cultural preservationist and a vacationer with no understanding of the world she’s documenting.
Season‘s narrative director, Kevin Sullivan, embraces that tension. It’s not a sport that claims to grasp every thing in regards to the international locations and cultures that encourage its fictional world. Instead, it asks its gamers to just accept that they aren’t at all times going to be an authority wherever they go, however a affected person observer who’s keen to study. In an interview with Digital Trends, Sullivan digs into the philosophy that guides Season, a sport constructed round cultural connections born from shared anxieties in a altering world.
Finding your perspective
Season: A Letter to the Future got here from a easy premise: The crew at Scavengers wished to create a sport about touring. Its story would combine private experiences of its builders together with cultural and historic inspirations. Rather than feeding gamers a grand thesis in regards to the act of journey like a know-it-all school pupil who spent a semester overseas, the purpose was extra to speak the sense of uncertainty plaguing a sparsely populated world on the point of history-defining change.
“The experiences that we ended up drawing from were traveling,” Sullivan tells Digital Trends. “That became the first pillar, that is going to be some kind of a trip. So we drew on experiences we had traveling. The themes came from that — what it was about was ambient energy that we were feeding off of in our lives. We didn’t really set out for it to have a message or something specific, but it started to give expression to a sense of fragility and a sense that the world is moving into a new era.”
Creating a sport about journey, one which pulls inspiration from varied actual cultures, would have an inherent problem. If not dealt with sensitively, the story might come off as hole tourism. Some of the sport’s fiercest critics have already lobbied that grievance towards it. In a searing overview, Kotaku’s John Walker challenged the sport’s “astonishingly colonial mindset,” criticizing the core story of a girl with no world expertise taking over the self-important function of cultural preservationist.
Sullivan’s personal learn of the sport, although, is rather more about how its gamers see that process moderately than its most important character or the builders behind it. Season is about notion and the way we select to interpret the world because it’s specified by entrance of us. Players are free to take pictures or document audio of no matter they need throughout their journey and doc it of their scrapbook; they’re additionally free to naively misread what they’ve seen, utterly lacking the cultural significance of one thing that’s fairly on its floor. The design is left purposefully ambiguous to let gamers actually seize their perspective, even when it’s a shallow one.
“The thing that we found in the design is that the more you specify what the game wants you to do, the more it feels like a job,” Sullivan says. “Once you start to say ‘boy, it’d be really great if you take a picture of a cow,” it’s like, who’s saying this? The sport desires this stuff for no purpose! That meant leaving it open so you possibly can full an entry with out doing a great job, however that’s as much as you. You get a certain quantity of what you set into it. You see in individuals’s studies of their expertise, they find yourself telling you greater than they know they’re telling you about what they did or how they understand issues.”
There’s not a lot authority on the planet, and the sport doesn’t attempt to act like an authority both.
That philosophy might clarify why essential reception for the sport ranges so wildly for the time being. Much of what you get out of it’s straight tied to your expertise with it. One particular person might impatiently rush via all of it, filling their scrapbook with inconsiderate photographs simply to hurry up development (“can we go home yet?”). Someone else might spend additional hours combing each inch of its midgame open world for particulars, strolling away with a wealthy understanding of its world. Season doesn’t choose gamers both method; it merely provides them a digital house to discover how they view unfamiliar locations.
“It is an extrapolation of the experience of traveling into an unfamiliar place where you’re inundated with information,” Sullivan says. “Unless you have a guide, you don’t understand a lot of the things you’re seeing and you can’t master it in a day. The big thing you’re doing in the game is happening in your head … it’s a lot about what you figure out. We tried to stay to things that felt true to the experience. The fact that you can blast through this game and not understand anything, and it doesn’t really stop you from progressing, is kind of true to life. You can do that when you travel.”
“It’s about forming an idea of what the world is like. Which also means that the world itself has ambiguities and contradictions. There’s not so much authority in the world, and the game does not try to act like an authority either.”
The Era of Good Feelings
Though Season is extra centered on particular person journey than delivering a grander worldview, the crew’s personal notion of the actual world would form its digital one. Sullivan initially discovered inspiration within the Era of Good Feelings, a fancy interval of American historical past that spawned after the War of 1812. On a floor stage, it was seen as a time of prosperity for America because the nation moved towards isolationism and stood quickly united below a one-party system led by President James Monroe. In actuality, the “Good Feelings” banner is used a bit satirically. Behind-the-scenes energy struggles throughout the Democratic-Republican Party would create a simmering stress, finally boiling over right into a divisive get together break up that at present’s Americans are all too accustomed to. It wasn’t a lot an period of change because it was an uneasy prelude to at least one.
I began engaged on this in 2016, which was a 12 months that felt like the complete world modified.
That 1800s historical past would find yourself paralleling one other interval of American anxiousness as work started on Season. Sullivan started engaged on the undertaking simply earlier than the controversial Donald Trump presidency. While the sport itself doesn’t supply express commentary on the chaotic Trump years, it was knowledgeable by the worldwide feeling of uncertainty Sullivan discovered on the time, a sense that nearly transcended tradition or language limitations.
“I started working on this in 2016, which was a year that felt like the entire world changed,” Sullivan says. “That was also a year I was traveling and had the same feelings, and was even more sensitive to it. That was almost scary in a way, meeting people in places I’d never been who had a similar sense of dread. That feels very much to me like one of the origins of the project: being in an unfamiliar place, talking to someone where we barely feel the same language, finding ways to connect and communicate, and getting to the point where we’re both like ‘uh oh’”.
In making a fictional world, Scavengers was cautious to not get too near actual world occasions – Sullivan says content material was even lower from the sport after the COVID-19 pandemic started because it felt too unintentionally shut. However, some fashionable tensions did naturally make their method in as they match into a number of the historic context that guided worldbuilding.
“There’s a plotline in the game about this dam that’s being taken down that’s going to flood this valley,” Sullivan says. “It’s a post-industrial revolution type of event that felt very relevant and also very 20th century. We were looking at the Soviet Union doing that. The reason why that felt relevant was because of the sense of how much control human beings have over the world; things that seem unchangeable can actually be molded. Our possibly too strong ability to change the environment without a grasp of what we’re doing sometimes feels relevant for something that has some kind of latent anxiety about climate change built into it.”
Those real-world issues aren’t a random layer of commentary on prime of an unrelated street journey premise. Rather, Season leaves loads of clues as to the historical past and cultural anxieties of its individuals mendacity round. Players can utterly miss a few of these political threads or willfully ignore them in the event that they so select. More observant ones, although, can take the time to soak up as a lot data as they’ll. Though they could by no means absolutely know the place they’re passing via, they’ll at the very least attempt to discover widespread connections that may deliver them nearer to understanding.
No authority
While Sullivan spends a lot of the dialog discussing how the studio recreated the expertise of touring, I notice that the sport is simply as a lot about cultural preservation. Players aren’t simply casually wandering via the countryside and taking snapshots for enjoyable; they’re writing what is going to turn into a historical past ebook about a spot and other people they’ll’t start to know. That’s a tall process for a sport that largely takes place in in the future, however Sullivan embraces the flaw inherent in that process.
“It’s a complex issue that I quickly realized was not how I wanted to think about what I was doing,” Sullivan says. “If you go deep enough into it, you can find some interesting complexities to it. If you ask some characters about culture and things like that, their answers are kind of surprising. There’s a character who talks about how culture is not a thing you put in a box. And it’s not antithetical to change; it is the way people react to change and survive it.”
Like the sport itself, elements of its hero’s ultimate historic document are going to be left hazy and obscure. Those data gaps are what outline Season, although. It by no means goals to ship gamers residence with a full image of its story. It solely asks them to seize the world precisely as they see it. With sufficient individuals decoding these pages, maybe somebody can piece collectively what all of it means.
“I don’t think the character thinks of themselves as an authority, but rather as a witness giving testimony. And that’s put into the future too. It’s like, I don’t know the full import of everything I’ve collected. I don’t have time, but maybe someone in the future can make better sense of this stuff than I can.”
Season: A Letter to the Future is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and PS5.
Today’s tech information, curated and condensed to your inbox
Check your inbox!
Please present a sound electronic mail tackle to proceed.
This electronic mail tackle is presently on file. If you aren’t receiving newsletters, please test your spam folder.
Sorry, an error occurred throughout subscription. Please strive once more later.
Editors’ Recommendations