Underneath the statue of the God of Oblivion in the Valley of Grace, prayer notes piled up, one of which reads in crooked handwriting, "I want to forget the pattern I saw in the water by moonlight." I don't know what this person saw in the water by moonlight, but I wanted to keep it as a memory of this season, keep it in a diary, and pass it on to the next season, or even every season after that.
In my eyes, SEASON: A letter to the future is one such game about life and memory. Similar to many small-scale games with the theme of immersive simulation experience, this work does not show players "why it is fun" from the gameplay, but uses the type of game to illustrate the understanding of reality.
In the worldview of "Sending Dreams to the Far Away", the river of time is divided by "seasons". The so-called seasons are the great changes in the world as a turning point, there are seasons of rapid development of industrial civilization, there are seasons of world wars and people's lives, and there are seasons of cultural prosperity, the change of seasons, or natural disasters, or it may be intentional.
The season in which the protagonist is located is after the world war, when social civilization retreats to the era when human beings live in isolation and are scattered around the world in the form of settlements, does it sound a bit like "Death Stranding"? From the presentation of the overall environment, "Sending Dreams to the Distance" does have a bit of the meaning of "Death Stranding", you can hardly see the traces of modern civilization still maintaining and developing, you can only see how it once existed. Broken overpasses, dams in disrepair, rusty cars buried in the green, you won't see a single person on the road unless you come to the settlement.
Our protagonist is a young man living in a settlement who has never seen the world of this season as it really looks until her friend's dream causes the elder to prophesy that "this season is coming to an end", and she has the idea of going outside to see it, and she will probably not return.
Why go to the outside world? Because she wants to witness the change of seasons with her own eyes, she wants to record everything, and use sound, photography, and painting to gather this season into a book, and when the change of seasons washes the world again, future generations can recall the world as it used to be.
The world is full of people, and the elder can often recall the seasons before the war season, she remembers her mother, the giant ship called the "Water Republic" in the heyday of culture, and the war season that made the world fall apart; The artist who lived in seclusion in the Valley of Tian'en, in his later years, recalled that he sneered at his early works, and entrusted the task of cultural inheritance to the protagonist; A single mom living on a farm, packing her bags before moving away, gets caught up in memories while keeping her husband's belongings.
What moved me the most was the protagonist's mother, when the protagonist decided to explore the world away from home, the mother did not stop it, but made a soul-protecting pendant for her daughter - it takes five props, with five memories corresponding to the five senses, integrated into the pendant, and the mother will lose these five memories. When I chose a dried flower as a prop for my sense of smell, my mother recalled the precious memories of her deceased husband picking this flower from a cliff and said sadly, "I can't lose it."
This was the only one of all the available props that would make my mother hesitate, and I could choose the ruthless option of "making a pendant with it, I would be safer", but in the end I changed to another prop.
But even if I changed to other props, I would be a little hesitant at this time to make my mother lose her memory in exchange for my choice to leave home. If people lose their memory, does life also lose part of its meaning?
This discussion of memory runs throughout the game, when you ride your bike through the world, photograph every unusual facility and scenery, record the radio station or the sounds of nature, it is to add memories to the season, even if the person has passed away, but the memory can be preserved, which is the purpose of the protagonist's trip. In fact, people in this world are more or less trapped by memory, some like the single mother, do not know to choose to take away the relic full of memories and worry, recall the good times in the past when choosing the relic, and there are also people who want to abandon the bloated memories of the past and start again. The organization "Gray Hand", which appears in the middle of the game, also has different intentions for the ambiguous element of "memory".
Under such a world view based on real society, the game also adds a bit of fantasy setting - a patient trapped in the concept of time, unable to discern the passage of time; Grow the flower of memory wantonly, recording the sound memories that once appeared here; There are also ores that gather strong emotional memories from the soil, containing incalculable energy. But these are just episodes, ways to help the protagonist and player understand how the world works, and our ultimate goal is to record as a spectator.
It may sound cold, but the process is actually full of warmth. Cycle along the seashore and watch the sun shine through the clouds and the town standing on the cliffs in the distance. Once a busy road with few people, and the natural sounds are so intimate, all this will become a testament to the past for people who look back on the past next season, and feel that all this is full of meaning. As a letter to those in the future, this memory of the seasons is precious.
From this point of view, "Sending Dreams to the Distance" and "Memories of Eddie Finch" have the same core wonder, both through exploration, recording and memory to write a letter to the future, which contains thoughts of the deceased, feelings of reality and longing for the future. It's hard for me to evaluate an indie game that focuses on atmosphere with the same overly objective eye that most games do. Perhaps the movements of the characters in it are slightly stiff, the feel of the bicycle is not ideal, and occasionally there will be an embarrassing situation of card perspective, but this is only a few hours of flow, but it brings unparalleled emotion, and the form of telling the story is obviously more important than "play".