Seasons After Fall Review – PlayStation 4

Seasons After Fall is a stunning new game from the French developers Swing Swing Submarine and Focus Home Interactive. In it, the gamer takes control of a young nameless fox who must venture through a gorgeous oil-painted landscape, in search of the answers that will bring balance back to the forest.

At first, the gameplay seems to have taken second priority to the spectacular visual presentation – which, as mentioned earlier is rendered as exquisitely detailed hand-painted landscapes and creatures. However, the gameplay takes a sudden and amazing turn once the seasonal gameplay mechanic is introduced. What begins as a run of the mill side-scrolling platforming quickly transforms into a unique puzzle-based mindbender reminiscent another French release, the epic Rayman series.

How it all works is that our fox is little more than an unknowing vessel suddenly inhabited by a metaphysical spirit on a quest to find the four forest guardians representing winter, spring, summer and fall. Each of these guardians imbues our spirit animal (if you will) with the ability to cycle through the seasons thereby manipulating the landscape around it; going from fall to winter causes spewing geysers to freeze or switching from winter to spring will cause dormant mushrooms to grow, all in an effort to get the fox to previously unreachable goals.

It is not always clear which season – or pattern of seasons – will best result in the desired outcome, which is where the puzzles really take form. In some cases, gamers will have to quickly cycle between seasons. For instance, cycling to spring will result in rain which will cause the aforementioned geysers to shoot even higher than normal, cycling immediately to winter will freeze the geyser at their higher height. Like any good puzzler, there is a good deal of trial-and-error, thankfully our heroic fox is virtually invincible so there’s not much to lose.

I cannot say enough about Seasons After Fall’s presentation – I’ve already mentioned the amazing visuals more than once, and again I must say this is one of the most unique visual packages seen in years. I keep harkening to the hand-painted artwork, but that doesn’t account for the fantastically fluid character modelling, that when combined is reminiscent of classic Disney. My wife was content with simply sitting on the couch next to me, with no other purpose but to watch the fox hop around the forest and listen to the excellent orchestral soundtrack. She said it was “peaceful” and “relaxing”.

I allude to Rayman because of the obvious French lineage, unique side-scrolling gameplay, and beautiful artwork, but Seasons After Fall shares a lot in common with many artfully unique games of recent history; Pixeljunk Eden, Flower, LocoRoco, and Limbo immediately come to mind. Gorgeous presentation, unique gameplay, and sadly…a bit of boredom after a while.

Indeed, about halfway through the five-hour odyssey, Seasons After Fall has pretty much delivered all that its revolutionary gameplay can offer, and the remaining half of the adventure becomes a bit of a “been there done that” repetitive slog that casts a cloud over the experience. And by “been there done that,” I mean that Seasons After Fall relies on a lot of backtracking and replaying levels over multiple times with newly acquired abilities.

With an MSRP of $20, Seasons After Fall certainly won’t break the bank, but its visual splendor and 2 ½ hours of great gameplay, followed by an equal amount of retracing doesn’t really seem like an equal trade-off. I would say if you can pick this up on a PlayStation Store sale, by all means it is worth checking out, but at full price you might just want to check out a demo.

Screenshot Gallery


Author: Arend Hart
Veteran gamer and review writer, Arend has been playing and reviewing games for Game Chronicles since the beginning with more than 400 reviews over the past 20 years, mostly focusing on PlayStation.

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