![]() ![]() You see in people’s reports of their experience, they end up telling you more than they know they’re telling you about what they did or how they perceive things.” You get a certain amount of what you put into it. “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 game wants these things for no reason! That meant leaving it open so you can complete an entry without doing a good job, but that’s up to you. “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. ![]() The design is left purposefully ambiguous to let players honestly capture their perspective, even if it’s a shallow one. Players are free to take photos or record audio of whatever they want during their adventure and document it in their scrapbook they’re also free to naively misinterpret what they’ve seen, completely missing the cultural significance of something that’s pretty on its surface. Season is about perception and how we choose to interpret the world as it’s laid out in front of us. Sullivan’s own read of the game, though, is much more about how its players see that task rather than its main character or the developers behind it. In a searing review, Kotaku’s John Walker challenged the game’s “astonishingly colonial mindset,” criticizing the core story of a woman with no world experience taking on the self-important role of cultural preservationist. Some of the game’s fiercest critics have already lobbied that complaint against it. If not handled sensitively, the story could come off as hollow tourism. 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.”Ĭreating a game about travel, one that pulls inspiration from various real cultures, would have an inherent challenge. The themes came from that - what it was about was ambient energy that we were feeding off of in our lives. So we drew on experiences we had traveling. “That became the first pillar, that is going to be some kind of a trip. “The experiences that we ended up drawing from were traveling,” Sullivan tells Digital Trends. ![]() Rather than feeding players a grand thesis about the act of travel like a know-it-all college student who spent a semester abroad, the goal was more to communicate the sense of uncertainty plaguing a sparsely populated world on the brink of history-defining change. Its story would mix personal experiences of its developers along with cultural and historic inspirations. Season: A Letter to the Future came from a simple premise: The team at Scavengers wanted to create a game about traveling. In an interview with Digital Trends, Sullivan digs into the philosophy that guides Season, a game built around cultural connections born from shared anxieties in a changing world. Instead, it asks its players to accept that they aren’t always going to be an authority wherever they go, but a patient observer who is willing to learn. It’s not a game that claims to understand everything about the countries and cultures that inspire its fictional world. Season‘s narrative director, Kevin Sullivan, embraces that tension. ![]()
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