Revision 4

Grave Seasons is built around a fixed calendar. Each playthrough covers one in-game year and ends with a defined conclusion, which works hand in hand with the randomized killer to make repeat playthroughs feel different. The title's reference to seasons reflects how central the calendar is to both farming and the murders.

One Year, Four Seasons

A playthrough lasts a single year divided into four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. Each season runs as its own month within that year. The season determines which crops can be grown, so the player's farming plans change as the months turn. See Farming for how growing is tied to the seasons.

The calendar also works as a time management layer. Time is a resource: a day spent on one task is a day not spent on another, so the player is constantly trading farm work, investigation, and building relationships against each other. The team has compared this day to day structure to Persona, which it cites as an influence on that feel.

A Day in Ashenridge

Within each season, the game runs on a full 24-hour day. There is no forced bedtime that stops the action: rather than a hard cutoff at night, the day flows from early morning into midday, then early evening and late night, and the player is free to keep exploring Ashenridge after dark. Live time keeps ticking no matter what the player is doing, so staying out late spends the same hours that could have gone to farming or sleep.

The town stays active at night. Residents keep their own routines around the clock, so NPCs can be found wandering after sunset, drinking late, or lingering by the docks as the light fades. Those nuanced schedules make nighttime a useful window for snooping: the cover of darkness is a natural time to poke around a neighbor's belongings while investigating. See Investigation and Clues.

Night also carries the game's darker tone. Some of the most ominous moments happen once the sun goes down, and the dread builds as each month edges toward its next killing. Rest is still part of the routine, since sleep is tied to the full farming loop, but the lack of a hard nightly stop means the player decides when, and whether, to head back to the farm.

Seasonal Murders

The calendar also paces the killings. As each season passes, the supernatural serial killer targets at least one victim, so the murders are spread across the year rather than happening all at once. With four seasons in a year, that works out to at least four potential victims across a single playthrough. The killer's choice of target depends on which character was drawn as the killer at the start of the run, and which residents the player has befriended along the way.

Each season gives the player a recurring window to investigate, gather clues, and try to protect the next person before time runs out. See The Murder Mystery and Investigation and Clues.

A Defined Ending

Because the year has a fixed length and a defined ending, each playthrough is a complete story. How that story resolves depends on the player's choices, including who lived, who died, and whether the killer was identified or influenced along the way. Once the year is over, the current save concludes; starting a new game draws a fresh killer from the subset of named residents, so the next run unfolds differently.