This upcoming game lets players explore a new world by bike

Season, an upcoming videogame from Montreal-based studio Scavengers, is described as an “atmospheric adventure bicycle road trip game.” Many aspects of the game are still under wraps, but it seems like it will be the perfect game for those who love exploring on two wheels.

Players experience the exploration-based game in the third person, travelling the world as a young woman collecting artifacts and memories before a mysterious cataclysm washes everything away. “Our grandparents lived for a thousand years, and our parents had a century to themselves,” she says in the trailer. “But us, we have one season.”

In the game, a bicycle is part of the tools the player is equipped with—other items include a notebook, a camera and a tape recorder. Players use the tools to explore the world and document it, before it all disappears.

An artifact of the future

Kevin Sullivan, Season’s creative director, says that there are a variety of different types of cyclists on the project’s team. “Personally, I did a lot of urban exploring on a bike this summer,” he says. “It helps to have a vague goal, so sometimes I’d bring a friend and a random article of sports equipment to eventually use on a to-be-discovered court.”

On his rides, he observes his environment much like how Season’s players will interact with the world. “An easy lens to throw on along the way is to wonder: how is the land being used? For what and by whom? I’m drawn to non-places, liminal spaces, heterotopias. The bicycle is the best way to find them.”

The bike is an important part of the game’s atmosphere. Sullivan points to a quote from J. B. Jackson, an American writer and the creator of Landscape Magazine: “The bicycle had, and still has, a humane, almost classical moderation in the kind of pleasure it offers. It is the kind of machine that a Hellenistic Greek might have invented and ridden. It does no violence to our normal reactions: It does not pretend to free us from our normal environment.”

“The bicycle is two hundred years old and feels completely modern, says Sullivan. “It still feels like an artifact of the future.”

Through this perspective, the bicycle is the way to travel through the landscape of Season’s surreal version of the mid-twentieth century, where thousands of years have passed without any progress.

Season doesn’t have a release date yet, but its beautiful imagery and peaceful energy are sure to be a great calming method post-Zwift workout.