Seasons After Fall is a visually beautiful platform adventure game, out on Steam. Developed by France-based indie studio Swing Swing Submarine and published by Focus Home Interactive.
Seasons after Fall is based on the seasons and the influence they have on the nature around them. The gorgeous hand-painted puzzle game, where you play a Fox as it explores its surroundings. Your Fox has been possessed by an elemental seed. You and the seed are on a quest to find all the seasons and absorb their power in order to protect and restore order to the forest.
A young girl’s voice tells you, a seed, to possess a fox and explore a forest to find the guardians of the seasons. Finding them will grant players the power to swap between seasons. That is the basic premise of Seasons after Fall‘s story, which as you can imagine makes little sense, as the reasoning behind everything is never fully explained—at least as far as character motivations are concerned. At least there’s a clear conclusion.
The story isn’t why you’ll want to play the game, the wonderful art style, animations, and calming gameplay is.
Each of the seasons has a drastic change on the game’s environment. It’s up to you to change the world and discover new secrets. To progress through the levels, players will have to use a combination of the surroundings and the seasonal effects to activate platforms and manipulate other wildlife.
Seasons after Fall is hands down the prettiest game of 2016. All the graphics are hand-painted, making nearly every moment screenshot-worthy. Every time you unlock a new season and the entire screen shifted to summer, winter, autumn or spring colours. You’ll come across a few different animals that stand out from each other due to the unique art, not to mention the fox is adorable as well.
This is one of those calm puzzle platformers with no enemies and no fail state; just you and some enjoyable platforming and simple puzzles. The puzzles mainly involve swapping between the seasons after you unlock them, which can help you progress through the environment around you. For example, mushrooms only sprout in the fall, water freezes over in the winter, and some plants sprout in the summer. While the puzzles are easy, they aren’t spoon fed to you and you’re left to figure them out on your own—though I couldn’t imagine anyone having trouble solving them.
The visuals of the game are nothing short of beautiful. There is a really raw quality about them. On the close-up scenes, you can see big bold brushstrokes. But during the normal gameplay, the artwork is fine and detailed, but it still maintains a “painted” look about it. The art style doesn’t use dark outlines, but that doesn’t mean that things disappear into the background, the main character still pops out on the screen.
All in all, Seasons after Fall is a delightful game to play with unique game mechanics, and an art style to rival any painting hanging in a gallery. If you’re looking for a relaxing and therapeutic game to play, or just a work of art, you’ve found your game.