These conversations are as brief and as naturalistic as they are literary. In addition to the photos she takes and the sounds she records, Estelle has a handful of opportunities to talk to the other inhabitants of her dying world. The particular texture of light in the Tieng Valley changes seven times. To walk from the entrance of the valley, to Assembly Point, where the valley really begins, takes fifteen minutes and forty-seven seconds, during which you will take around one thousand nine hundred and forty four steps over four thousand four hundred and eighty three feet. To ride your bike to each of the major landmarks in the Tieng Valley takes thirteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds. That would make things easier, and SEASON has no interest in making things easy. SEASON has no interest in abstracting the valley, either. This stellar area design makes the act of photographing the dying valley a melancholy joy. A forest filled with dim, electric light hums in the northeast, sunlight punching through the trees and accentuating the half-light of the bulbs. Bits of rubble form stunning, accidental arches above a refugee camp. The skeletal remains of an impossibly large highway loom over a small cow farm. The game has a masterful command of architecture and space. The valley, like every other part of SEASON is as dense and beautiful as it is fleeting. (It is also a game, we should point out, where current and former employees described the developer as a toxic workplace and “an environment hostile to women.”) Along the way is also a bittersweet, unexpectedly funny meditation on memory versus history, and the reconciling the end of the world with the knowledge that life will, somehow, go on. SEASON: A letter to the future is a game about fixing memory in place, and choosing what is lost. She must record the end of the season, a pseudo-apocalypse which describes the end of a historical era, using just a camera, a tape recorder, a journal, and most importantly, her (and your) judgment. This is not just an act of motherly love, but a reflection of Estelle’s role in her dying world: Estelle is an archivist, the first person to leave her small village of Caro in decades. This process destroys the memory, and Estelle’s mother makes the sacrifice in her daughter’s place. To make a pendant, one must burn their memories: turning them into a form that is touchable and raw.
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