Season: A Letter to the Future (PS5)

This is another one of those games that I definitely wouldn't have ever tried if the PS-Plus membership hadn't offered it as a monthly special.

This game is more like a story that you take part in a little bit and these kinds of games are sort of like Life is Strange only less edgy and honestly, this one is really boring and you only carry on thinking that like a lot of books (The Life of Pi comes to mind) it gets better if you just have the patience to wait for that big moment where everything turns.

src

I'm not really a fan of these kinds of games but admit, every now and then they can be really good almost like a book that catches you by surprise because you don't really expect to be so entertained by reading. What Remains of Edith Finch did this for me but anyone who has played that game knows that it is very atypical as far as this very complicated and niche product is concerned. Gamers are a fickle bunch and games that play more like a story that you are only occasionally involved in actively aren't going to appeal to a great many people.

For me, this one took about 90 minutes of my time and after not being entertained after that amount, I put the game away for good. I suppose the great tragic and mysterious story is something I will wonder about but well, that's what we have YouTube for I guess. I am not going to keep plodding along for multiple hours just to get a glimpse at a potentially neat story.

src

So what do you actually do in this game? Well, not a whole hell of a lot actually, and that is part of the problem that most people are going to have with it. You wander around your house and look at stuff, flipping items over a la Resident Evil style, then do something with your mama to enable you to move to the next part. Then you do whatever it takes in that part to allow you to move forward and so on and so forth.

There are hints at the 1 hour mark that something really dark and tragic is coming and while i am excited about what that could be, there just isn't much variety as far as your tasks are concerned. You have to fill up a scrapbook with memories and this is accomplished by taking photos or recording sounds with your tape-recorder and then putting 6 "memories" on a page of your scrapbook or journal.

src

People or things you encounter tend to hint at war at times and the few remaining people in your village (if that even really is what it is) talk about it in the distant past-tense sense when talking about it. Yet, when you do leave your village, which your character says almost nobody ever does, almost everything you encounter is either destroyed or decaying. This becomes more widespread the further you go.

src

Other than that you just ride around on your bicycle looking for things to take photos or sound-recordings of so that you can fill up your scrapbook and carry on to whatever the next section is where you will presumably do the same thing again.

For some, nay, most people, this is going to become boring and tedious really quickly because the amount of time that you have to put into simply cycling from one place to the next where the camera angle CONSTANTLY resets to an angle where you can't actually see the road in front of you. Then, when you do finally arrive some clearly labeled things that you have to look at are highlighted so that it can trigger a cutscene that becomes increasingly dark, but still quite cryptic, as the game goes on.

I can't imagine who the intended audience for this could be outside of the massive amounts of shills on Reddit who will praise anything outside of the mainstream and talk about how almost anything that isn't an FPS game is the "greatest game they have ever played!"

This isn't a game folks. This is something you may wish to dabble in if you are having trouble getting to sleep. It is remarkably boring and the soundtrack is like a lullaby too.

src

The world or your part of it is coming to an end or already has or something boring and it is up to you to slowly plod from one field to the next documenting it with a Polaroid and a tape-recorder. That's basically the game. No thanks

Of course the game was met with widespread acclaim by basically everyone even though there is no chance that all of these glowing reviews are by people that actually played it. The fix was in but I think we are kind of beyond falling for propaganda all the time anymore and very few people actually bought this and this is likely why it is free now.

I won't complain because I paid nothing for it. This game sold only 60,000 units globally, which was a disastrous failure for Scavengers Studios and they faced massive layoffs after it. Less than 20 people remain employed by the company.

Scavengers Studio is an independent video game studio bringing together a diverse team of passionate creators.

So diverse in fact that their website barely functions and looks like something I would have made in Angelfire in the early 2000's.

Maybe make something that people will actually enjoy rather than trying to be all artsy-fartsy next time around yeah? IF there is a next time around for ya!