Seasons After Fall offers colour and charm by the bucket load – as developer Swing Swing Submarine’s magical platforming fox adventure hits the right notes with a gorgeous hand drawn art style, and a concept to match its colourful aesthetic. But there are some core issues that hold it back.

We play as an unnamed sparkly thing (referred to as a seed) who is lured to the forest by a disembodied voice. The voice wants help with finding fragments around the forest and other areas, which are being held by four guardians (the seasons of winter, spring, summer and autumn), so she can be freed of whatever is supposedly keeping her in this place.

In order to do so however, you need a body. In trots a curious little fox, whom you promptly possess and use to bound among the trees and grass with abandon. The environments themselves, as already hit upon, are absolutely stunning, but what makes them all the more interesting is how they impact on the mechanics.

You see, our possessed fox acquires the unique ability of changing the seasons at will. Each season effects the environment differently, and as such rids obstacles, completes puzzles and so on. For example, winter freezes water, creating platforms for you to walk on; autumn opens up fungus platforms for you to reach higher areas; summer makes a certain type of large plant thirsty, meaning it will drain the immediate area of water; etc (there are many different effects each season can create). So what this produces is a constantly changing game world with different backgrounds, different feels, and new ways of progressing. It’s a very interesting dynamic, and it keeps you on your toes throughout. And as previously intimated, does wonders for the game’s already creative aesthetic.

Initially the game is a fairly linear affair. You follow the directions of the ‘seed voice’ to find the Guardians of the seasons and get their fragments, unlocking a new season for you to play with. However, after you’ve gathered them all, the game pretty much lets you get on with it as you please. It’s not a particularly open or expansive world, but you can go in multiple directions and tackle each area in whatever order you please.

On the one hand, the lack of hand holding is refreshing. It’s a nice world to explore, and there’s an added challenge to figuring out where to go next and how to solve the various puzzles. On the other hand it does make for some very frustrating and tedious circumstances. There is a bit of backtracking involved, especially given the game’s 2.5D nature, which means in order to get to some areas, of course you have to pass through others. So if you get confused or aren’t sure where you should go, it’s not very fun to find out you’ve made a mistake after you’ve spent a while running in one direction and now have to go all the way back. Just a little sense of direction would have made this a non-issue.

None of this is helped by the unfortunate fact that there just isn’t that much to the game in terms of actual gameplay. Yes, I think the mechanics are interesting and some of the puzzles have variation and challenge, but really most of your five hours with the game are spent running and jumping around, and actually a lot of the season changing/manipulating plants is quite formulaic – you reach an impasse, change the season, now you can progress, that’s basically the extent of it.

The controls can also be a bit unresponsive, making for some very frustrating moments. There’s no death state in the game, so it’s not like you’ll have to repeat sections if you fail, but falling off things and missing jumps due to a slight delay in input (I played with an Xbox 360 controller) is still very annoying.

As a result of these few issues, Seasons After Fall did become somewhat of a chore for me to play, however I was kept engaged by the brilliant aesthetic, story, voice acting, music and sound design. I don’t think it would be unfair to describe the game as a ‘narrated title’, and it’s definitely one of those transcendent experiences that sucks you in and wows you with pretty things and atmosphere. The story concept is interesting, and manages to be dramatic as well as pleasantly magical and peaceful – I suppose fittingly in a way that nature tends to be – and I became fond of our fox and his possessing sparkly ‘seed’.

I’d definitely recommend Seasons After Fall based on those latter merits, and its creative gameplay design. It’s just a shame it turned out a bit shallow and at times tedious.

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