REVIEW: Cube Escape: Seasons (game)

In Cube Escape: Seasons, you explore your memories of four different time periods: Spring 1964, Summer 1971, Fall 1971, and Winter 1981. Spring 1964 is a good time. There are indications that things aren’t quite perfect (you’re on Prozac and have a note about something called Rusty Lake Mental Health & Fishing on your bulletin board), but life is decent. Things take a turn for the worse in Summer 1971, and everything is well and truly bad by Fall 1971. It appears that you may be a murderer. But wait! You may be able to go back in time and stop your terrible actions from happening!

I wasn’t fond of this game, at first. It seemed to be using mental illness as ham-handed shorthand for “disturbed future killer,” and I didn’t have much sympathy for the protagonist, who didn’t seem inclined to do much to prevent their actions until after they’d already done something terrible and (in a normal world) irrevocable.

I liked the game a lot more once the time travel aspect became a thing. I’m still a bit confused about what, exactly, happened, but I loved how the phrases from the weird person (?) over the phone became more than just random strange messages. “Everything you touch you change” indeed. Warning: my review includes spoilers from here on out.

Was the protagonist really the blonde woman all along, desperately trying to stop herself from killing herself? And was the blonde woman the same one from Cube Escape: The Mill and Cube Escape: Case 23? It seems like it, but if that’s the case, then I’m confused about the Cube Escape timeline. The blonde woman (or her killer, if they were truly separate people) saved herself in Cube Escape: Seasons, which should have meant that the events of The Mill and Case 23 never happened. The overall Rusty Lake story is compelling, but I’m not sure how everything adds up.