A beautiful game that falls flat in its mechanics

Video Game Review: Seasons after Fall

There+are+a+lot+of+good+things+about+this+game%2C+but+they+dont+quite+make+it+enough.

There are a lot of good things about this game, but they don’t quite make it enough.

The fall season can certainly be a beautiful time in which to be alive. With its warm, rich colors, it conveys a rich and cozy vibe to which no other season can compare. There should be a video game that fits the season, but Seasons after Fall falls flat in its mechanic, although its art style and atmosphere can certainly be a fantastic experience that fit well for autumn.

Seasons after Fall is Metroid Vania-style 2D puzzle platformer where you play as a seed that takes control of a fox. You use this fox to platform through the games different seasonal guardians for their powers. Once reaching them, you use your newly acquired powers to go to the next. These seeds change the season the game is set in; as you use them, the environment and the objects change, with plants either dying or coming back to life.

My experience

I quite enjoyed the first half of Seasons after Fall. The world in the game is beautiful with a nice narrator explaining the story of The Guardians and the season, all while guiding me if I found myself to be lost. The puzzle platforming was fun and fluent; running through these levels as a fox felt free, but the game take a nosedive in quality when the it forced me to go back to earlier sections two more times to get to the end goal (though it did allow me to see different section of these levels).

The games quickly started to pile on with its puzzle and it began to feel more like a chore to get through, which ruined the initial charm. This game gets frustrating. There are sections that aren’t bad, but it got infuriating to go back to sections I’d already been, even with the powers I’d already equipped.

Summary

Seasons after Fall started out great and had the potential to be an enjoyable experience, but the second half dragged the game so much and drained the initial charm I had experienced. The game could’ve greatly benefited from a completely new path for the second half instead of just retracing and recycling a lot of steps, like activating switches.

I’d say to pass on this game unless you want to focus on the beauty of the artistic design.