Scavengers Studio is best known for battle royale title Darwin Project. Announced at The Game Awards, their latest title, Season, goes in a completely different direction. Players will instead take a fairly peaceful road trip through a world waiting for its impending doom.
Players assume the role of a young woman traveling the world on a bicycle. The peaceful atmosphere of the surrounding countryside belies the fact that a mysterious cataclysm is about to wipe the world clean. Instead of panicking, all of the world’s residents seem to be accepting their fate. They’re enjoying their last season on the planet. Coming from a village far away from the danger zone, it’s the woman’s job to record as much of the world’s history as she can before it’s destroyed.
She’ll do this through taking photographs, interviewing local residents, recording the sounds of wildlife, drawing sketches and making annotations. There’s a mix of past and present civilizations to be found throughout. Unlike us, previous generations in this world have each lived for decades, if not hundreds of years, and that’s a lot of history to understand in such a short time.
Her main aim is to understand as much of the world as she can before it disappears. There’s nothing she can do to stop the impending catastrophe, she’s just there to record the changes as they happen. It’s up to players to decide what they record for future generations and what will be lost forever.
Despite the circumstances, the game is supposed to be atmospheric and relaxing. The art style reflects a “minimalist approach to realism” where objects aren’t overly detailed. The team’s artists have mainly drawn inspiration from early Japanese woodblock print artists, but there’s also influence from mid-20th century modest watercolor poster artists like Norman Wilkinson.
Season and its unique art style will be coming to PlayStation 5 some time in the future.
[Source: PlayStation Blog]
