Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let yourself be carried away by the Journey of Season, a third person bike road trip game. The premise of Season is that you play as a traveler recording the last moments of different cultures before they are swept away. Through the eyes of a young woman from a distant village, you explore the world for the first time.
The gameplay centers around biking, exploring, recording photographs or audio, and meeting local people. The player character is there at the critical moment, just like everything is about to change. You are not there to stop the change but to witness it, to make recordings and try to understand what is lost before it disappears.
The mission is similar to creating a time capsule, deciding what would capture the spirit of the time and carry it forward. It is a strong action to be taken in the face of an uncertain future. The feeling that the good times are over is even more prevalent today than it was when we first started working on Season many years ago.
Season’s world is a unique blend of past and present, where the mundane mingles with the surreal, creating something that feels otherworldly yet relatable, strange yet familiar.
Season’s artistic direction is inspired by illustrators, painters and directors of natural light. It has been specially developed from A to Z to adapt to the feel of the world we are building. It is inspired by early Japanese woodcut artists, as well as mid-20th century poster artists such as Norman Wilkinson. It’s a minimalist approach to realism. This mindset of simplifying, getting rid of rather than adding detail, set the guidelines that we kept in mind when developing the overall look of the game.
In season, the atmosphere is warm and melancholy. It’s a world at the end of a Golden Age, where you take one last bittersweet look before it becomes a distant, faded memory.