[PlayStation 5] SEASON: A Letter to the Future Review

SEASON: A Letter to the Future from Scavengers Studios is a third-person atmospheric adventure bicycle road trip game. Check our SEASON: A Letter to the Future review!

Leave home for the first time to collect memories before a mysterious cataclysm washes everything away. Explore, record, meet people, and unravel the strange world around you. Immerse yourself in the world of Season, a third-person atmospheric adventure bicycle road trip game.

SEASON: A Letter to the Future from Scavengers Studios begins with a prophetic dream about a new era that is about to arrive, called a season change in this world. Changing seasons is a big deal in this world, and everybody is preparing for it. As for you, your mother will help you keep some memories by forgetting them and transferring them into a pendant.

As someone protected by the pendant, your goal is to capture the current state of the world in your notebook by taking pictures with your polaroid-like camera and recording the sounds of the environment with your audio recorder. You’ll begin in your hometown and will soon go out of it and explore the neighboring valley.

In all honesty, I thought that the first hour was fairly confusing. I didn’t know exactly what to do and just followed the linear path and took pictures, and interacted with the objects on my way. It didn’t feel meaningful, and I wondered how it would affect the story in the end. The opening hour tells you how important it is to take memories of the different places you’re about to explore, but the game will progress as you help citizens in the valley. This wasn’t mentioned, which took me a little while of running around the valley to figure out.

A huge part of the game is exploring its vistas on a trusty bike you’ll get as soon as you get out of your hometown. The developer did an amazing job with the PlayStation 5 version since when you are on your bike, the DualSense features are perfectly used. You’ll feel the resistance on your pedals using the Adaptive Triggers when you’re climbing a slope, and you’ll feel all kinds of different vibrations on the controller depending on the type of terrain you’re on. For me, the use of DualSense was one of my highlights of this game. I liked how you could explore quickly between places, and if you lose your bike after walking, there’s a handy option to instantly bring your bike back to you.

I already mentioned how you take pictures of the (gorgeous) landscapes around us, and the gameplay slightly reminded me of Life is a Strange (without the supernatural elements), where the main character takes pictures of items around her and comments everything to herself, doing the narration. Sadly, even as the game concluded, I realized I didn’t get to care much for the main character or even its cataclysmic world – which is something I would have liked to see through the writing.

As for the presentation, this game is built on the Unreal Engine, and the environments are beautiful, lush, and sometimes mysterious. Each area is detailed and colorful, which was fun to discover. The valley, in particular, was amazing to explore and featured many different types of landscapes, which were also fun to ride our bike. There is also the inclusion of accessibility features like text size, which is something I always recognize when it is included.

It will maybe look like nitpicking, but I would have liked it if the third-person camera followed the player’s orientation as you raced through the different zones. I realized that you’d have to constantly adjust your field of view using the right analog stick every time you change direction, but this is not a dealbreaker.

As for the trophies, this game surprisingly does not feature a Platinum trophy, which is a rare sight for games released in 2023. The trophy list is also pretty short, with only 16 trophies – 11 Bronze trophies and 4 Silver ones. A few of them are unlocked as you progress through the story, and more than half are highly missable – as long as you achieve all of them in the valley before moving to the Shrine, which is a point of no return in this game, and since it saves by itself, there’s no going back. I would recommend you follow this SEASON: A Letter to the Future Trophy Guide.

As I was close to finishing the game, I was still not sure this game was a good fit for me. I did love the art style, and the different areas to explore, along with the lighting and environments, were very nice to explore. The inclusion of DualSense support and how it was used was also one of my personal highlights. On the other hand, the story is very thin, and this is one area I was looking for, which was disappointing, and even at the end, I didn’t care much for the main character. If this game is seen as a gorgeous sandbox bike riding game, however, you might enjoy this game more than I did. SEASON: A Letter to the Future is available as a Cross-Buy title with a $29.99 asking price, and your purchase will give you both the PS4 and the PS5 versions of the game at no extra cost.

Disclaimer
This SEASON: A Letter to the Future review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Scavengers Studios.