Don’t you just love this time of year? The beautiful, colourful leaves swirling in the cool breeze, the bright sunshine warming the world at the crest of morning, and the snow tickling the ground as it tumbles down? Wait, what time of year is it, again?
It’s puzzle-platformer time, of course!
Welcome to Seasons After Fall, where you must master the very seasons themselves in order to restore balance to a mysterious forest. The player takes control of a strange, enigmatic spirit with the ability to possess animals in order to explore the world around it. Surprisingly creepy, but cool nonetheless. The animal ‘victim’ in question happens to be an agile and clever little fox, who really is a pleasure to control. From timid strutting to bounding leaps, the game’s protagonist moves through the world beautifully, and is quite possibly the best platforming fox since Miles ‘Tails’ Prower. There, I said it.
The game sports a pencil-effect graphical style peeled straight from the pages of a children’s pop-up book. The foliage and terrain is layered in a similar fashion to fellow vegetation-oriented indie title Ori and the Blind Forest, populating the foreground with shadows that cast depth into the setting. IN fact, Seasons After Fall is a good-looking game overall. An imaginative and engrossing world is soon revealed as the player unlocks the power to change seasons at will, as well as the environment around them. The golden glow of Autumn (that’s what we call it in my neighbourhood, bitch) brings with it gusts of leafy wind. Summer brings lush green vegetation, spring has gloomy, fresh rainfall and winter summons layers of snow and ice, as you’d expect. Yet somehow, the art style manages to turn the familiar seasons into something strangely dimensional and unfamiliar, as if the fox is prancing not through different points in time, but entirely different, parallel universes of the same world and environment.
The game’s plot is fairly simple, which is both a blessing and a curse for Seasons After Fall in its fluctuating ability to motivate the player. There are some great moments of narrative and voice-oriented storytelling, but also some moments of ‘why should I care, dude?’ The absence of combat, or of any real peril at all; is clearly an artistic choice that channels the player’s attention towards the puzzles and challenges that define the game, as well as the beautiful season mechanics. Which is of course; a good thing. However, danger and foreboding is often suggested or teased at by in-game characters, only to result in an encounter with what is otherwise a benign and immobile beast that cares as much about your presence as it does about complex cloud formations. It’s easy to feel the sense of anti-climax at this point, and the player can quickly lose momentum and forget not only what is at stake, but whether there is anything at stake at all. The lack of an imposing antagonistic force could make the player wonder why exactly the fox’s quest so important in the first place.
The seasons, once unlocked at first; are by far the most enjoyable feature of Seasons After Fall and it’s primary game mechanic. Can’t reach that high platform? Invoke winter and allow sub-zero temperatures to freeze the water, so you can jump from it. Those plants look like they could support your weight? No? Summon the summer sun, and they will grow strong enough to form a bridge for you. Every dilemma requires the right combination of seasonal effects to unravel it, and it’s a pretty unique approach to puzzle-solving. As well as getting nature to do what you want it to do without controversial genetic modification. It’s also quite easy on the eyes, and I found myself lingering on a particular season simply because it fits the scene so well, damn it.
Along with the hard-as-nails flora that seems utterly unfazed by the constant switch from sub-zero temperatures to hot sunshine, there are some unsettling spidery forest life forms there to help Fox out, but few other animals to speak of. The odd squirrel would have made the forest a little less lonely, but the absence of critters is (sort of) touched upon in the narrative.
A downside to being the fox however, is the eventual transition into a ghostly-green spectre of a fox, which although a decent manifestation of the mysterious entity you control, happens a little too early in the game. I feel I’d have enjoyed my time as a little fluffy beastie for a little longer, at one with nature, before the supernatural vibe twinkled onto my screen and reminded me that I’m basically a meal ticket for veterinary exorcists. Nevertheless, I might now look a little differently at the fox that craps on my garden path every Sunday night. For a while, at least.
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