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Review: Season: A Letter to the Future

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Season: A Letter to the Future

review | Season: A Letter to the Future

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No fighting, no explosions—you can’t even jump—but this quest game provides a unique experience for everyone who plays it

by Dennis Burger
March 31, 2023

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the concept of the brilliant new PS4/PS5/PC game Season: A Letter to the Future is to deconstruct its title. The “season” to which it refers isn’t a meteorological subdivision of the year but something more akin to the ages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium—larger swaths of time into which history is grouped in retrospect. There was, in the past of this game’s world, a season of industrialization, a season of cultural exchange, a season of war, and the season into which your character was born, whose defining characteristics are a bit nebulous.

The “letter to the future” is your mission in the game. The end of your season has been prophesied. You’ve been chosen to leave your insular little hometown to document the world as it exists for the benefit of future generations. Your tools for the journey consist of merely a camera, an audio recorder, a bicycle, and the blank scrapbook you’ll fill along the way—with photos and drawings and quotations from the people you meet in your travels—not for your own benefit, but for the benefit of those who’ll read it long after you’re gone.

Let me underline that point in case it doesn’t resonate. Season: A Letter to the Future is a quest game, to be sure; it is an open-world exploration game. But you have no weapons. You can’t even jump, you can’t punch, you can neither build nor destroy things. Your job is to explore and learn and document—to see the world as it exists and to listen to the stories of the who populate it—and the scrapbook you end up filling by the end of your journey will be uniquely yours. It’s legitimately inconceivable that any other player will construct a letter to the future exactly like yours.

None of it would work if the world weren’t so compelling, but the tiny little indie dev-team Scavengers Studio has created a virtual reality that’s nearly infinitely compelling, not merely in its composition but also its aesthetics. The world of the game certainly seems to be ours in the far future, as its artifacts will look all too familiar to modern eyes—machines of commerce and construction; crumbled superhighways that exist in the landscape but are not part of it. Let’s just call it what it is: A post-apocalyptic earth by all indications. But not since Adventure Time have we seen a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful.

The game’s distinctive rendering style certainly doesn’t hurt in that respect. Regular gamers will recognize the graphics as belonging to a tradition known as cel-shading, perhaps employed most popularly in a handful of modern Zelda games but also used in films ranging from A Scanner Darkly to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

As lovely as the graphics are, though, it’s the surround soundtrack that sells the constructed reality of the game. More often than not, it’ll be your ears that point you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries, be it an old windmill creaking in the midst of a storm, creating energy for no one, or a manmade instrument that converts the sounds of the wind into music.

Perhaps the neatest thing about Season: A Letter to the Future is that I think it will be non-gamers who somehow stumble upon it who appreciate it the most. The game begins with the gentlest of invitations: “We invite you to explore and enjoy this experience at your own pace.” Many of us who are accustomed to exploring virtual open worlds will, I fear, rush from one discovery to the next, chasing the trophies and achievements we’ve been trained to view as the point of it all, secure in the knowledge that as soon as we’ve hit the ending credits we can start a new game and discover all the things we missed the first time around.

Season is not that sort of game. Having made it to the end and meditated on its themes—ecological, environmental, societal, historical, and personal alike—I doubt I’ll ever play it again. To do so would be to miss the point. As with life, it’s the ephemerality of this letter to the future that makes it so precious. To attempt a do-over would be to sully the memory of this one-of-a-kind experience.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Not since Adventure Time has there been a post-apocalypse this quirky and beautiful, done in a cel-shading style reminiscent of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

SOUND | The surround soundtrack sells the constructed reality of the game, guiding you in the direction of the most interesting discoveries

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Video Game Review: Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel's Spider-Man

video game review | Marvel’s Spider-Man

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This video game manifestation of Spidey not only makes for an intensely cinematic experience but packs an emotional wallop that tops the various movies 

by Dennis Burger
November 7, 2019

It may seem odd to shine a spotlight on a game that was released more than a year ago, but while Marvel’s Spider-Man was released for PlayStation 4 back in September 2018, I found myself in the middle of a long hiatus from console gaming to focus on some more strategic PC games that had been piling up in my Steam library. What drew me back was an unused PlayStation Network gift card my dad had given me for my birthday, as well as the relatively new release of the Spider-Man: Game of the Year Edition, which hit store shelves this autumn.

For those who aren’t deeply embedded in video-gaming culture, “Game of the Year Edition” is common vernacular for a soft relaunch of a popular game that generally includes all the little add-ons that have been released since, bundled with the original title, for one lower price. In the case of Spider-Man, that includes three mini sequels, collectively dubbed Spider-Man: The City that Never Sleeps, which sold for $9.99 a pop in the months following the main release. Spider-Man: Game of the Year Edition collects the original game and its followups on one disc (or in one download) for $35.

You may also be wondering why we’re covering a video game on a site that typically focuses on luxury home cinema. There’s a good reason for that, which has nothing to do with my long delay in finally picking it up and playing it. Marvel’s Spider-Man is one of the most cinematic games I’ve played in ages, both in its gameplay and its AV presentation. But not in the most intuitive of ways.

At its heart, Spider-Man is what’s known as an open-world game, the world in this case being a slightly scaled-down and very Marvel-specific version of Manhattan circa 2014 (when development of the game began). This playground in and of itself is a technological wonder, not only in its relatively faithful recreation of Times Square, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, etc., but also in the way it captures the feeling of moving through the city from district to district, squinting at the sunlight gleaming off buildings in the daytime and the stunning array of neon, halogen, and LED lights piercing what little darkness exists in the shadows at night. The way the game uses its deep shadows and intense highlights to convey the Manhattanhenge effect is among the best applications of HDR I’ve seen to date. 

All of this could be written off as mere eye candy, but it’s more than that. The game’s developers, Insomniac Games, spent so much time working on the web-swinging mechanic—making sure webs would only attach to buildings or flagpoles or what have you rather than clinging to empty air as in past Spidey games and also making sure the parabolic physics of such swinging felt genuine—that if there weren’t some verisimilitude to the look of the city itself, the illusion of Tarzaning through its vertical landscapes would be broken.  

It isn’t just graphics and physics that drive the experience, though. The sound also elevates the AV presentation of the game, with a rich real-time uncompressed 7.1 soundscape and cinematic score that whips and whirs around you as you swing through the city or walk its streets, or even poke around in the science lab where Peter Parker works when the red-and-blue pajamas come off. (By the way, not that this really affects the gameplay, but you’re far from limited to the default two-toned onesie, as one of the game’s most compelling Easter-egg hunts is an ongoing search for the badges and components that allow you to craft or unlock all manner of other Spidey-suits.)

Of course, whooshing around from skyscraper to skyscraper or tinkering with circuit boards in the lab isn’t all there is to do here. There’s an overarching story—based not on any of the previous versions of the Spider-Man mythos but rather a new amalgamation that draws elements from the best that movies and cartoons and comics have to offer—and you’re drawn to new story beats by way of police-scanner alerts or cellphone calls from allies and loved ones. 

It’s a more emotionally engaging story than that of any Spider-Man film to date, in part due to its complex ethical and moral themes but also due to its length. If you don’t stop to thwart muggers or terrorists or take perfectly framed photos of Manhattan’s numerous landmarks, you could probably burn through the main storyline in 20 or 25 hours. 

That’s certainly enough time to become attached to characters and invested in relationships but it would also be completely contrary to the point of the game. The beauty of Marvel’s Spider-Man is the freedom it gives you to explore this world and its original storyline at your own pace. 

As I approached the end of the main quest, my wife and I sat on our sofa—me an active participant in this interactive storytelling-and-exploration experience; her a very willing passive viewer—and openly wept at the poignant and impactful emotional resolution of it all. It’s that engaging. 

Of course, having the Game of the Year Edition meant I still had three more intertwining stories to explore, more petty crimes to deal with between the Church of the Intercession and Battery Park, and more time to rummage around in its sewers and abandoned subways. And while feeling a little tacked on at first, this trilogy of mini sequels eventually evolves into yet another web of intrigue that picks up on threads only hinted at in the main storyline. It may lack some of the personal emotional resonance of the main game but it does amp the moral complexity up to new levels. 

Whether you merely play through the primary questline of Marvel’s Spider-Man or pick every achievement and side quest clean, as I’ve done, you owe it to yourself to play it on the best AV system in the house. And yes, that even includes an Atmos system. 

I know I’ve grumped in the past about not being the biggest fan of object-based surround sound with movies but the 7.1 soundtrack of Spider-Man upmixed into Atmos opens the landscape of Manhattan up in tangible ways. Hearing the roll of thunder and crack of lightning over and around you simply brings this sprawling environment to life. 

If you do play the game through a reference-quality sound system, make sure to dip into the audio settings and make one essential tweak. Change the default sound mode from Home Theater, which is really intended more for soundbars and smaller sound systems, to Maximum, which is mixed for “premium home theater systems or studio playback.” 

Little touches like that prove at least some game developers realize the home cinema potential of their efforts, even if the AV industry continues to treat video games like mere children’s entertainment. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  One of the most cinematic games to date, with the intense HDR highlights helping to enhance the effect of web-slinging your way through Manhattan

SOUND | The rich real-time uncompressed 7.1 soundscape and cinematic score whips and whirs around you as you make your way through the city

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Video Game Review: The Last of Us

Last of Us (2020)

video game review | The Last of Us, Pt. II

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This game’s story is so compelling it can match any TV series or movie, making it a must-see for gamers and causal viewers alike

by Dennis Burger
July 26, 2020

I’m starting to feel like I’ll never finish playing The Last of Us Part II. And it’s all my wife’s fault. Mind you, this isn’t your stereotypical story about a man’s nerdy hobby and his other half’s nagging insistence that he put down the controller and help out around the house. We are not that kind of couple. No, the problem is that my wife has become as obsessed as I am with the game’s gripping story and incredible visuals, and since she has no desire to play it herself (“too many buttons”), she won’t let me play unless she’s around to watch.

It’s funny, all this fuss, especially given that I had no intention of playing this game to begin with. The original game, released in 2013 at the end of the PlayStation 3’s life cycle, was one of the most compelling single-player video games ever created. It was a simple tale, a sort of post-pandemic, American-horror-story riff on Kazuo Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, released years before The Mandalorian would bring that classic Shogun epic swinging back into the pop culture consciousness. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the original The Last of Us was such a perfectly told tale that creating a follow-up seemed as sacrilegious to me as making a sequel to Citizen Kane. 

But I got The Last of Us Part II for Father’s Day and figured “What the hell?” Even if it lived up to all my fears, it couldn’t spoil my appreciation for the original. It turns out, though—despite what you may have heard from the nerd-rage circles of the internet, where legitimate creative expression is met with ire and only repetitive and pre-chewed fan service is allowed—The Last of Us Part II is not only a brilliant sequel, it may well be the single most compelling and challenging work of art released this year in any medium.

And that’s the problem. My wife occasionally watched me play the first Last of Us, and she had a pretty good handle on the story despite experiencing it only in snippets. But she can’t take her eyes off of Part II, and now my play time is dictated by her viewing schedule. 

That’s why I’m only 35 hours or so into the story a month after the game’s release. From what I’ve seen so far, though, this new game is a revenge tale that’s ultimately about the futility of revenge—reminiscent of the very best samurai flicks. It’s a necessarily violent (at times) narrative about the personal cost of violence. It’s a non-linear storytelling experience that not only forces to see, but also to experience—to feel—the conflicting emotions and motivations of the various major players—each the antagonist of the other. It is, in a sense, a narrative extrapolation of the famous MLK quote: “The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everybody blind.” What’s more, it proves that in such a contest, no one agrees who took the first eye.

Add to that some of the most impressive HDR visuals you’ve ever seen on any screen and a dynamic surround sound mix so convincing that it has at times made us think there was a real storm brewing in the distance outside, and it’s understandable that my wife treats The Last of Us Part II more like a movie or TV show than a vicarious gaming experience. (Indeed, she almost seems to forget there’s an interactive element at all except during those times when I need to use the PS4 controller to strum a guitar in the occasional musical mini-game interlude.)

The point of all this is not that you shouldn’t play The Last of Us Part II if you’re not a gamer. The point is, if you have a gamer in your household and you’ve relegated them to the basement or bedroom, invite them into the home theater or media room. Let them play on the best AV system in the house. That’s the environment for which today’s cinematic single-player games are designed. 

Let’s face it: some of us are already starting to get a little starved for new content to watch, and that problem is only going to get worse as more film releases are delayed or taken off the release schedule altogether. With a new generation of video game consoles slated for release this Christmas, though—and with any number of new story-driven games waiting in the wings—you may just find that your spouse’s or kid’s next favorite game may become your new favorite home cinema viewing experience. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  Some of the most impressive HDR visuals you’ve ever seen on any screen, from a movie, series, or game 

SOUND | The dynamic surround mix is so convincing you’ll think there’s a real storm brewing in the distance outside

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Video Game Review: Stray

Stray (2022)

video game review | Stray

This home cinema-friendly game goes decidedly against the grain, using deep-bass purring instead of mayhem to give your subwoofers a workout

by Dennis Burger
August 12, 2022

From time to time, a video game comes along that reaffirms the validity of the medium and forces a conversation about whether interactive fiction should be seen as art. Off the top of my head, a non-comprehensive list of a few such landmark games would have to include Super Metroid; PaRappa the Rapper; Papers, Please; Minecraft; Disco Elysium; and The Last of Us and its sequel. 

It’s a bit too early to say whether Stray will join that pantheon, but it might. Not because of its graphics or sound or even because of its gameplay. Those help, but what really makes Stray such a wonderful experience is that it uses all the hooks, tropes, and trappings of video games to say something fundamental about the nature of life that’s wholly antithetical to everything we think of as inherent to gaming. 

You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from the premise. You play as a cat—not a cartoon or anthropomorphic cat, but a bog-standard Felis catus whose only skills are meowing, jumping, and scratching things, who roams the surface of a post-apocalyptic world with his family. One day, though, he falls into the sewers and ends up in a dystopian subterranean cityscape highly reminiscent of the Kowloon Walled City by way of the Los Angeles seen in Blade Runner.  That plants Stray firmly within a tradition of fiction that employs architectural stratification as a metaphor for social stratification—everything from Metropolis to Star Wars: The Clone Wars to the theme song for The Jeffersons—with the major difference that in the world of this game, there’s no society left. At least not an obvious one. 

It’s obvious from the giddy-up, though, that the goal is to return to the surface to be with your feline family. The curious thing is that neither the game nor the world in which it’s set puts a ton of pressure on you to do so at any appreciable pace. In fact, aside from obvious action set pieces, it’s exactly the opposite. At odd intervals it encourages you to scratch out on a spot on a rug, curl up, and nap. And it doesn’t do so by saving your progress or refueling your energy or any of the normal sort of video game rewards. It’s a nap for the sake of a nap. The camera pulls back, the sound effects get a little more diffuse, and if your subwoofers can handle truly subsonic bass, you’ll feel as much as hear the purring of your little feline character as he drifts into a slumber. The whole audiovisual experience of it all is your reward, and there’s something refreshing about that. If anything, it feels sort of like those “lo-fi beats” screensavers that captivate people for hours on end on Twitch and YouTube. 

It’s just one of any number of ways the game encourages you to live in the moment, to be present, to experience the fleeting now of it all. Another way it accomplishes this is by surrounding you with a world that feels legitimately, chaotically real. Built, sure, but by a gaggle of architects who never met, not a solitary game-world designer. There are alleyways and rooms and ledges and awnings to be explored that serve no purpose other than to delight the explorer’s heart. Dead-ends that would feel like punishment for bad navigational choices in any other game feel instead like unexpected rewards: “If not for that wrong turn or that missed jump, I wouldn’t have ended up seeing this!” That’s a neat trick. It’s the exact opposite of the theme-park mentality that has driven even supposedly open-world games for years.

But, getting back to the graphics and sound: Both make this whole virtual reality a little less virtual and a lot more real. The lighting—a lot of which comes from screens and neon lights—not only serves as the occasional subtle beacon when it’s time to stop clawing at sofas and make your way to another part of the world, but also helps set the overall mood. 

The audio, meanwhile, isn’t mixed in Dolby Atmos but you’d never know that if I didn’t tell you. It upmixes gorgeously into the immersive format, mostly because the sound is already frighteningly immersive even in 5.1. Close your eyes and you can sense where you are in this dilapidated subterranean cityscape. You can hear the dripping of water from the storm sewers, the hum of electric lighting, the pitter-pat of your character’s claws as they skitter across surfaces ranging from steel to cement, reverberating off the walls around you to create the sort of believably subtle sonic textures we rarely experience in Hollywood movies, much less video games—much less super-low-budget indie video games. The air in your room takes on the quality of the environments you explore rather than merely slinging sound effects at your head. It’s the most convincing sound experience I’ve had in my media room since I can’t remember when.

Perhaps more than anything, what sets Stray apart is its rebellious hopefulness. It’s a defiantly uplifting story about stopping to smell the roses even when there are no roses to be smelled. It’s about the importance of fellowship, the power of cooperation, and the joy of swatting things off tables and shelves for no reason whatsoever. It’s a powerful exercise in empathy, an ode to individuality, a meditation on community, and simply one of the most heartwarming tales I’ve experienced in any medium in quite some time. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE |  Hyper-detailed environments and deliciously specular lighting effects help make the world of the game feel convincingly real

SOUND | The audio isn’t in Atmos but does up-mix gorgeously into the immersive format—mostly because the sound is already deeply immersive even in 5.1

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