Seasons After Fall is a magical indie game from French developer Swing Swing Submarine, appropriate for all ages. Its enchanting artwork feels like an award-winning picture book brought to breathing life. Its soundtrack, done entirely by a string quartet, is stirringly lovely. The voice acting is top-tier, from a young girl’s wheedling coax and petulant fear to a gentle old bear’s confusion and urgency. And its gameplay is simple, just platforms and puzzles. Seasons After Fall doesn’t need to be a complicated game when playing it is such a peaceful, beautiful experience.
The story of Seasons After Fall begins when you, a ball of light, are swept along a dark river and brought into a primeval forest. A young girl teases and encourages you to find the four Guardians of the Forest, calling you “little seed” and offering you guidance if you get lost along the way. After finding each Guardian, you gain the power of their Season, which you can call upon at a moment’s notice.
The seasons mechanic is the chief puzzle driver; you have to figure out how to manipulate the seasons in order to progress in the four levels, which include a cave, the top of a mountain, a windy field and an autumnal forest. So each level is actually four levels: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Each season is not only visually distinct, but mechanically distinct as well. Leaves unfurl in summer, trees grow in autumn, water levels rise in spring and fall in summer, and water freezes over in winter.
Each Guardian is as lovely in its own way as the terrain you traverse in order to reach them. But of course, Puella Magi Madoka Magica style, all is not as it seems. You possess a fox against its will to take fragments of the Seasons from the Guardians, after which the fox collapses and you form a ghost of its shape instead. Your young friend turns on you as one of the Guardian wakes, softly confused, begging for your help to restore the forest. You realize your young friend with the playful voice is trapped in a nightmare realm, hoarding mysterious treasures close; you realize something’s very wrong.
So you run, skip and jump through the levels again, but because you have the power of all four Seasons now, you can reach parts of these levels you’ve never reached before. This makes every level feel new, from plummeting through a deep well of water, to exploring underground, to teleporting with the help of ethereal wind wisps. The puzzles also get harder as the game goes on, but no puzzle is too impossible to solve with some dedicated thought. The soundtrack and the Season After Fall's aesthetic are both so strong, and the game proceeds through its plot at a brisk enough trot, that I never felt exhausted by any particular puzzle or level.
It’s important to point out that gameplay is not Seasons After Fall s raison d’etre. The puzzles are simple enough for a child to complete unassisted, and the Seasons gimmick, while charming and well-executed, is not especially deep. Seasons After Fall is a 2D platformer, though cunning tricks of the art make the world seem three-dimensional, so your little fox may miss their jump sometimes.
But there is no health bar, no enemies, no combat: you can’t take damage and there’s no fail state. This encourages leaping wildly from place to place and inculcates a certain feeling of comfort and safety in the player - the only “fail state” is whether or not you can solve any given puzzle. If you’re more interested in wickedly hard puzzles or ironclad gameplay than unbeatable atmosphere, you may fare better with Jotun: Valhalla Edition ( check out our review), which doubles down on the difficulty of its boss fights while keeping a similarly appealing and lush hand-drawn aesthetic.
Overall, I felt every part of Seasons After Fall was well-integrated and the developer’s vision was incredibly well-executed. I would recommend it without reservation to anyone looking for a beautiful indie title to lose a few hours in.
So what do you think? Will you be giving Seasons After Fall a spin? Seasons After Fall is available on Steam for $14.99.
