Back in 2020, Montreal-based indie dev Scavengers Studio revealed Season, a visually-striking adventure in which players record various details of their semi-grounded fantasy world (think Studio Ghibli rather than Tolkien) before it’s all destroyed in a mysterious apocalypse. The game showed a lot of promise, but interest was overshadowed by the emergence of accusations of toxic management and sexual harassment, mostly perpetrated by the company’s co-founder and creative director Simon Darveau. This led to a suspension for Darveau, but he’s since returned to the studio in a reduced role.

　　Understandably, some may still feel uncomfortable about the situation at Scavengers, but nonetheless, their game has re-emerged with a new subtitle – Season: A Letter to the Future – and a fresh gameplay trailer. The game’s previous trailer showed some brief snippets of in-game footage, but this one provides a much clearer picture of how the game will play. Check it out for yourself, below.

　　Scavengers has provided a bit more detail about Season in a new blog post…

　　High in the mountains, there is a village safe from the turmoil of changing seasons. No one has left in a generation, no one until Estelle. In her world, a season is a period of history, an era. This season is about to end. Riding off into the unknown, she leaves her home to try to capture this moment for the future. Estelle navigates through a strange yet familiar world, witnessing life on the brink of an impending but mysterious change.

　　The gameplay of Season: A Letter to the Future focuses on exploring, recording, meeting people, and unravelling the strange world around you. At any point, you can hop off your bike and equip a tool from your bag. Each captures a different layer; sounds and music, art and architecture, voices of old people, vanishing religious practices, the traces of seasons long past. Your tools help you peel back these layers until you’re able to grasp the culture, history, and ecology underneath everything.

　　Your camera can capture anything you see. Your microphone can capture and playback anything you hear, through directional sound recording. This action also prompts moments of reflection and inquiry as you understand your surroundings, sparking thoughts and investigation from Estelle. Use these recordings of the present to unlock answers for the future.

　　Your time spent with other people is crucial. You help them through moments of quiet crisis. In their lives, the change coming to the world is not abstract, it is immediate. They are trying to navigate, to survive, to find a way to live. You help them. You remember them. The choices you make reverberate and the importance of what you’re doing becomes increasingly tangible. Showing your recordings to these characters you meet can also yield useful pieces of information or a moment of connection.

　　It all comes together in your journal, a letter to the future, where you assemble the fragments of the season into a whole. Through snapshots and recordings, you build an evolving expression of your own perspective on what you’ve seen and done on your trip. Via the act of recording, your exploration and investigation are rewarded throughout the story in surprising ways.

　　With the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, you will feel the terrain under your tires, thanks to the controller’s haptics. When you’re cycling, you feel resistance in the controller’s adaptive triggers when pedalling up steep hills, and then enjoy a relaxing coast downhill. You won’t have to stick to the main road: cycling off the beaten path will lead you to hidden places and new discoveries.

　　Season: A Letter to the Future launches on PC, PS4, and PS5 this fall.