I dream of bicycles.
Years ago, disability took cycling from me, and ever since I’ve waited for a game that might capture my rouged memories of it. At last, Season has done it.
Scavengers Studio’s Season: A Letter to the Future casts you as documenter of a fading world. A world in which a sleeping sickness slowly degrades, and eventually devours, memories is making the idea of history… well, history. Protected by a memory pendant, our nameless avatar ventures into this wide world with a camera, a sound recorder, a scrapbook, and a bicycle.
In decades of playing video games, none have captured so perfectly and precisely the sensation of simply riding a bike.
In other games, vehicles are simply a way to move from point A to point B faster than feet can carry us. But Season understands that movement isn’t just a tool; it’s an experience. It captures the cooling rush of air as you ride an open road, the serenity of coasting and taking in the scenery, the rush of careering down a hill with no effort at all.
There’s heft – visceral weight – to Season’s cycling that makes it less a simulation of riding a bike than a simulacra. It’s tapping not into the realities of cycling – anyone who has cycled in Cambridge knows it’s not all as pleasant as described above – but rather folds into the representation created in my own wistful memories.