Ride a bicycle and memorialize fading cultures in this gorgeous, melancholy third-person adventure

Season is one of the more interesting things shown at The Game Awards tonight. It's a third-person game about a young woman who's exploring the world on her bicycle, taking photos, recording audio, encountering local citizens, and bearing witness to the critical, final moments of a disappearing culture.

The PlayStation Blog describes Season as "similar to making a time capsule," in that you're assembling the elements that you think will best capture the spirit of the moment and carry it forward for the future. The world around you blends both the past and the present, the mundane and the surreal, and as sad as it sometimes is to let these things go, "you are not there to stop the change but to bear witness to it, to make recordings and attempt to understand what is being lost before it’s gone."

A closer look at what it's all about can be had on Steam: "Document, photograph, draw, and record life. Through a solitary bicycle journey, form your own memories, your own vision of the world around you. Your goal? Protect these treasures from being forgotten. Your quest will lead you to discover a new world; unknown, yet familiar. You will be immersed in different societies that will make you discover the mysteries of the world of Season; a surreal version of the mid-twentieth century, where thousands of years have passed without any progress. Find out what caused the last collapse and what might cause the next one."

There's no release date yet beyond "coming soon," but there's a website up now at play-season.com.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.