Late October in the Hudson Valley the leaves had peaked and all turned to brown. You could take the train out of the city and bike the rest of the way, up into the highlands from the river. In the mountains there was an old trail, and after a few miles of gravel it bent with the earth and the New Croton Dam came into view. Over 2,000 feet of sun-bleached stone blocks stretching nearly 300 feet high at their tallest point.The crest was full of visitors as I coasted across, then down the other side to enter the park at the dams base. Families picnicked, kids climbed, friends took pictures. The water and stone were enormous in a way the word no longer felt adequate. As I lingered I remembered another ride, years prior, in Scavengers Studios 2023 game Season: A Letter to the Future.Estelle was born in a hamlet tucked away in the mountains. Her father was a poet who never left home; her mother raised her when he died. At the games start, her epoch does not have a name like the ones that came before: the Season of Modernity that ended a century ago, when people built great infrastructure like Works Progress Administration posters come to life; the Gold Season, a brief period of cultural exchange when travel and communication were common; and then The War, when the infrastructure was destroyed, the knowledge to build and maintain it lost, letters forgotten on rail carts and gondolas. The world became smaller, and then all the soldiers fell asleep. The seasons turned.This week on Polygon, were looking at games that feel like vacations for your brain in a package were calling Retreat Week.Estelles work is to understand this season that is haunted by the ruins and dreams of The War. It is ending soon, she learns, so she sets out with a scrapbook to deliver to an archive on the other side of the world. In between she records the season in drawings and Polaroids and audio tapes. As the player, we choose what will be remembered and what will be forgotten.After walking down the mountain, further away from home than ever before, Estelle finds the bike her friend fixed up for her, a baby-blue Dutch cruiser with drop bars and a leather saddle. The color-matched rack and fenders look heavy, and the white tires belong down by a beach, but its all she has. Estelle grabs the bars at her side, walks it to the road, steps over the top bar. Then, she pushes down on the pedals and I feel the resistance. Each press of the trigger matches a stroke of her legs, and the triggers of the DualSense demand force from each finger. I push left, then right, and find that rhythm as if learning to ride, and as she begins to roll the resistance lets up. Its like a memory of taking the training wheels off for the first time.Estelle cycles through the ruins, dwarfed by wind turbines, cargo ships, and aqueducts that make her and me feel so tiny, the distances we travel so far. She has to put all her weight into it to get over the hills as the strokes become harder, standing up on the pedals to get over gravity and reach the crest. Eventually we coast over a dam, descending into the Tieng Valley what an old tourism billboard advertises as the home of the reliable gods. A man stops her, says the dam will be destroyed soon, but he lets us in to document the few remaining evacuees.Most of Season is spent biking around Tieng Valley on its final day, meeting its inhabitants and recording their pasts. And each time Estelle wants to go somewhere else she has to walk back to her bike, put her leg over the frame, and push through the friction to get rolling again. As she records the sights and sounds, the game attunes players to touch through vibrations and force, haptic feedback coloring in Estelles sensorium to connect players to her world, to her season. But to say Season feels like riding a bike prompts a troubling question: What does riding a bike feel like?Haptics alone evoke cycling as much as a La Croix suggests the image of a fruit somewhere nearby. The DualSense resists, but not like gravity. Season cannot make you feel like youre on a steel bike geared for the city struggling up the banks of a fjord to the old aqueduct trail. How could a game translate the too-narrow road tires skidding against large gravel stones hidden beneath the new autumn litter?This is also a central problem of Season: how to remember the only world Estelle has known. She sketches vistas, takes photos, records bird songs and waterfalls and rustling wind. She writes observations, a poet of the end times for some unknown historians to discover in an archive. Or you can keep the memory of a father between yourself and his son. You can close your eyes and put down your tape to embrace the moment of a final song, all that was Tieng Valley. You can choose to feel the power of a god and forget your own name too.How to capture all the world in a single account? The question of player choice in Season is the same question of Italo Calvinos city of Zaira, which exists in relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. Or the question of Jorge Luis Borges On Exactitude in Science, in which cartographers attain such perfection that their unconscionable maps are made at 1:1 scales. Riding a bicycle is not about pedaling, but overcoming inertia. Cycling is a story of resistance as hard to start as movement is to stop. So, I dont want you to know the teeth of the gears turning the wheels, but the feeling when the wind is at your back that moment the world tips in your favor atop the crest of a hill.I have never visited the Tieng Valley, but I have rolled down the Hudson River Valley in summer and seen past ridges and peaks farther than I knew. And when Estelle descends a ruined highway away from her home and the distance comes into view, I feel the breeze. Ive coasted across a dam and felt unbalanced between the lake and air, the enormity of everything built beneath me. So when I stood at the base of the New Croton Dam, I did not feel all 297 feet of its masonry, the tallest dam in the world when it was completed in 1906. Nor did I count the volume of all the water in its reservoir.I thought about how Estelle never had a name for her season. How that work was left to the historians who never knew, not the poets who remembered. That my season was changing, too. I wondered what the history books would name this time when it is prologue. We cant see whats over the edge from the climb, but I know gravity will overtake us soon and we will descend somewhere new, fast.