Season makes a strong first impression on PS5 with a beautiful trailer

Season was one of the most pleasant surprises at The Game Awards, teasing a beautiful world you can explore on PS5 or PC before it is lost forever.

Scavengers, the studio behind social-focused battle royale game The Darwin Project, showcased Season with a trailer that follows its protagonist on a bicycle road trip through a world that blends the mundane and the fantastic. You wield a notebook, a Super-8 camera, and a cassette audio recorder to capture snippets of the world "before a mysterious cataclysm washes everything away", wandering through mysterious ruins as well as lively villages full of their own distinct (and doomed) cultures.

"The gameplay is centered around biking, exploring, recording photographs or audio, and encountering local people," creative director Kevin Sullivan wrote on the PlayStation Blog. "The player character is there in the critical moment, just as everything is about to change. 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."

It sounds heavy, but those beautifully stylized environments and characters are light and refreshing enough to pull you back in. Season doesn't have a release date yet, though it started full-on development in 2019 and PAX East attendees got the chance to try a playable demo earlier this year. It feels like PAX East was about a million years ago at this point in 2020, but I don't think it actually was.

Find even more great new games in our guide to upcoming PS5 games.