The next game from Scavengers Studio is something completely different. Scavengers is the Montreal-based indie team behind Darwin Project, the online survival game that was a low-key and short-lived cult hit in 2020. Darwin Project offered a twist on battle royale gameplay, dropping a small group of players onto a shrinking map, and arming them each with just an axe and a bow. It was all about crafting, looting and surviving the elements, while also hunting the other players and watching your own back. Darwin Project went live as a free early access game in 2018, it launched in January 2020, and it was essentially shut down by November that year.
Scavengers’ follow-up to Darwin Project is Season: A letter to the future, a single-player bicycle-riding adventure game about exploration and preservation at the end of the world. In Season, a young woman leaves her secluded village for the first time, just as a cataclysmic event is set to destroy everything around her.
She rides her bike across gorgeous landscapes, meeting new people, observing their rituals and documenting her journey. Players collect sound samples, take photographs and transcribe the habits of the wider world, collecting everything in one place before it all disappears.
Season looks like a slowly unraveling mystery set in a beautiful environment and built for just one player at a time. It’s the opposite of Darwin Project, and for that reason it feels like a delicious surprise from a studio that’s still hungry to prove itself.
Season: A letter to the future is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, the Epic Games Store and Steam on January 31st, 2023. It’ll cost $25 on PC and $30 on PlayStation platforms. On PS5, players will use the DualSense’s adaptive triggers to pedal their bicycle, with varying resistances as the roads rise and fall, and the controller’s haptic feedback will mirror the texture of the path forward.