At The Game Awards 2020, Darwin Project developer Scavengers Studio revealed a beautiful, compelling, and very different new title: Season. A young woman leaves her secluded community to explore the world for the first time, documenting her experiences on a cross-country bike ride, and slowly uncovering the mystery of a recurring cataclysm that has halted the world’s ability to progress.
Following the announcement, Season was lauded on social media following for its beauty, its premise, and its promise of a diverse and interesting cast of characters. But according to a number of current and former employees of Scavengers Studio, the game’s cozy pitch is dramatically at odds with the work environment of the studio behind it.
has spoken to nine current and former employees of the Montreal-based Scavengers Studio who worked with the company at some point over the past four years, all of whom spoke with us under the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. They described a company largely composed of talented people working on projects they deeply cared about across both Darwin Project and Season. However, they also said that the excitement and creativity surrounding both games was tainted by a toxic work environment fostered by the studio’s co-founders: creative director Simon Darveau (formerly founder of Spearhead Games and a designer at Ubisoft) and his romantic partner at the time of the studio’s founding, CEO Amélie Lamarche.
Almost every source we spoke to described Scavengers as an environment hostile to women — a “boys’ club” culture that was largely permitted by its co-owners or, in Darveau’s case, actively led by. Several said women were frequently degraded by male employees including Darveau, or infantilized and treated as if they did not know what they were talking about even when speaking from a position of expertise about their own work. This was said to have happened in casual conversations, public team meetings, and on the studio’s work Slack.