Seasons after Fall arrived in 2016 from developer Swing Swing Submarine and publisher Focus Home Interactive, a puzzle-platformer for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux. You play a red fox in a mysterious forest, hunting the lost spirits of the four seasons. The hook is that you can switch seasons at will, and the world rearranges itself around that choice.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
A Fox and Four Missing Spirits
The setup is spare. The spirits of the four seasons are gone, and something is happening in the forest that has never happened before. The fox travels in search of the Four Guardians of Seasons, aiming to bring them back to their steles and take command of the powers they protect. That is the whole frame: a small animal, a big wood, four absent gods.
Freeze the Waterfall, Feed the Plant
The seasons are not decoration. They are the puzzle vocabulary. Summon winter and a waterfall freezes solid so you can cross it. Call for spring and a plant grows that guides you into a zone you could not reach before. Switch to fall and strong winds lift certain platforms into the air. The environment is the lock, and the calendar is the key.
Movement stays gentle. Flying jellyfish carry the fox from place to place. Certain plants boost its jump. There are no enemies and no way to die — the obstacles are entirely questions of where to go and what to do next. Swing Swing Submarine built the game without a steep difficulty curve, and the result is generous rather than punishing.
A Forest With No Death and No Enemies
That generosity is the design’s clearest bet, and it is the part most worth arguing about. A game with no fail state has to hold attention with curiosity alone, and Seasons after Fall does that by making every screen a small mechanism. The fox’s power to change the environment is also, in the game’s own framing, a power to alter its relationship with the world and the characters in it. That is a real idea, and the game mostly trusts it.
Changing the seasons will modify organic platforming elements that will move or expand based on which season you switch too, altering your relationship with the game and its characters.
A String Quartet in the Caves
The presentation is where Seasons after Fall spends its confidence. The two-dimensional art is gorgeous and the soundtrack was recorded by a live string quartet — a genuine expense for an indie project, and audible in the result. Forests, rivers and caves all get the same treatment: an ecosystem that is as disturbing as it is marvelous, in the game’s phrasing, and asked to carry the player across hours of quiet navigation.
Where the Seasons Stall
Here is the honest cost. Without danger, without a difficulty curve, and with puzzles built from a single repeated grammar — freeze this, grow that, blow this over — the middle of the game can go slack. The fox is charming and the wood is beautiful, but neither generates much pressure. Seasons after Fall is a game you wander rather than one you fight, and wandering has a ceiling.
It remains a smart, kind, well-made thing. Swing Swing Submarine took one mechanic and built an entire world’s logic on top of it, then refused to punish anyone for playing. That restraint is rare and it is worth respecting. It is also the reason the game never quite grips you the way its best images suggest it might.
Seasons after Fall scores 7.5 of 10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
