Year Walk
Developed by Simogo
Year Walk is a short adventure game based on Swedish folklore and phenomena that mixes reality and fiction into a horrifying and creepy experience. Originally developed for mobile platforms, Year Walk blends various puzzles with beautiful imagery to create a unique game. Clocking in at around 2 hours or less, this isn’t a long game, but a robust achievement list gives for a variety of ways to play the game and increase replayability. If you aren’t in to being scared, this probably won’t be a game for you, but everything it tries to do it pulls off extremely well.
The gameplay of Year Walk is mostly just walking around the map searching for clues as to where to go next. The story is based upon the Year Walk, an ancient visionary quest that sends you off on a first person journey to find out if the love in your life is reciprocated. Throughout the game, you use cues from the environment and a built in encyclopedia to help you figure out exactly where to go and what to do. A built in hint system helps push you in the right direction if you get completely stuck and a helpful map is also there if you need it. Most of the puzzles are straight forward, but it helped to have a notebook in front of me to write down things to remember.
Year Walk takes place in 19th century Sweden on a snowy landscape. While the game is first person, it has the feel of a 2D adventure game by using extensive layering on its graphics. Hints in the environment help to tell you when you can move up or down and a beautiful art style helps you to never feel lost. Eerie unexplained environments like abandoned shacks and various buildings create an uneasy setting. The audio design and soundtrack on this game are fantastic and a lot of the times I was feeling disturbed, the audio had a large portion in helping. Even some of the puzzles have solutions that are completely figured out aurally which is something I really respect in game design.
I’m not going to lie, this game made me feel scared more than anything I’ve played in years. While I absolutely loathe games that rely on jump scares to move the story on, I think they are used well here and help to create another layer of tension with each puzzle you solve. While there are way more than I would care for, I am going to give this game a pass on it just because the tension and horror doesn’t come solely from them. Where the game’s scares get increasingly effective is that they sometimes reach beyond just gameplay and go above and beyond to make it so even the game menus are not a safe haven. It’s hard to explain this without playing the game, but you will have to take my word for it.
The success of the horror also comes from an interesting mixture of reality and fiction. This game uses a ton of supernatural elements that take you out of reality, but everything seems to be based on real folklore which adds a sense of realism to the story. Year Walk has an encyclopedia that goes a bit more in depth on the creatures you will come across and the stories related to each of them do not help to make you feel any comfort. Early on I read all the entries in the encyclopedia which explained a lot more of what I was seeing in the environment but also gave me the foresight to always feel one step ahead of the game. I always new what was coming and that added to the tension I was feeling as I played the game. I’d love to explain some of the specifics, but I am going to keep this completely spoiler free not to ruin the experience. Just know that a lot of the folklore is pretty disturbing.
The biggest hindrance of this game is the fact that it falls into the category of being yet another mobile to Steam port. I can’t fault the game for coming out on another platform first and where this succeeds is it seems that the creators went above and beyond to add more features and support for a PC release. I do wish the game had some sort of controller support and using both the keyboard and mouse in a basic adventure game at times felt awkward and overly complex. There are no hotkeys for pulling up things like the map or your journal, everything is done via clicking on controls in the top right corner of the screen. I’m still grateful that this game did find it’s way on to Steam, without it I never would have had the opportunity to play and experience the game. While I can’t speak for the mobile version, I think this game is highly beneficial to be played on a monitor in the dark with headphones on – an experience that I doubt would translate as well to a mobile device.
The only thing I knew about Year Walk heading in was that it won a lot of awards and was a game that many people I know have spoke highly of. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was a horror game before I picked it up. I’m not a huge fan of the horror genre, but I really enjoy the story and lore in this game and have a feeling I will be seeing a lot of it in my dreams tonight. I’m not one to get scared too easily, but this game still managed to push my nerves a bit and had my heart racing as I played. I wholeheartedly recommend this and I will surely be finishing it before the week is over. I tried to do it all in one sitting, but the adrenaline forced me to compromise and just play half of it at a time. Don’t take that as a negative, if anything it should just show how effective the game is in what it tries to do. At the affordable price of $5.99, this is one game experience that any indie fan shouldn’t do without.
For the boring statistics part of this game, I played it for 1 hour and 1 minute and completed about half of the game.
braktheman 
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