The Haunted Hoard: Year Walk (PC)
Video games are a wonderful medium for learning about myth, religion, and folklore, because while you can read up on those things easily enough, a video game can require a player to interact with them repeatedly and understand their nature to overcome whatever gameplay challenge involves that bit of culture. Year Walk is an excellent example of this, the game drawing on some rather unknown elements of Swedish mythology for almost the entirety of the experience. Even if you aren’t going in with a cultural interest, Year Walk should at least cement the titular ritual in your mind, and while learning about cultural fictions could have been interesting enough on its own, Year Walk integrates its inspirations as part of a surreal horror narrative for the player to interact with.
A year walk is an old ritual used on the last day of the year to try and take a look into the future to find answers about possible wealth, love, and happiness. To perpetrate it, a person must first lock themselves in the dark with no food or drink for a whole day, stumbling out into the forest on New Year’s Eve to interact with the spirits who held such knowledge. Our particular year walker is a young man whose love interest may soon be lost to another man, so he stumbles out into the snow in the hopes that the year walk may bring him an answer on what the new year will bring for his unfortunate situation. Year Walk has a haunting storybook style to its visuals, with objects and characters having clear cut shapes but the depth and coloration helping it avoid feeling too friendly. The people and creatures in the game are especially striking, their simple but distinct designs making them memorable even if they might only play a minor role. However, much of the game is presented in a thin widescreen strip that doesn’t really benefit the visuals, and the environments, unfortunately, are a bit indistinct. “Leafless trees standing in the snowy darkness” could describe much of the game’s visuals, and since you’ll be trotting back and forth quite a bit, the forest’s subdued visuals are disorienting. On the one hand, a year walk certainly would be disorienting due to the food and light deprivation needed to inspire the visions, but certainly some of the navigation issues come more from the odd way you travel. In Year Walk, you are always viewing things from your character’s eyes as if it was a first-person adventure title, but your movement is limited to the X axis. When you’re in an area, you crabwalk left and right until you find a path that will allow you to move to a different area. This odd movement style never really justifies itself with anything that clearly required such rigidity, but it also doesn’t hold the game back from much, the game even breaking away from that style when it wants to do interesting movement puzzles.
Once you do settle into the way you walk though, Year Walk does begin to give you an expanding sequence of interesting things to do. You are given an encyclopedia right off the bat to read about the folkloric creatures you will encounter, some of the entries helping to explain the odd sights you are about to come across that would be almost inexplicable otherwise. There is still an air of mystery as you interact with the spirits though, each of them having certain wants or challenges associated with them that ultimately connect to this adventure game’s puzzles. Pattern recognition, an observant eye, and an experimental mindset are the traits most useful for Year Walk’s interesting set of obstacles, with many solutions being cleverly spread across the forest so that you’re gradually building up an understanding of something that coalesces into useful knowledge for the puzzles you eventually find. There are not a whole lot of unique locations or objects in the forest, so when you are left stumped on a puzzle, you can eventually whittle down the relevant information for the most part, or even just consult the game’s hint system if something’s just not clicking.
Despite a mostly clever set of puzzles, Year Walk can be almost too clever at times. Most games establish some boundaries for how the player is expected to interact with the game world such as the controls or what level of knowledge is required for the game, with an implicit set developing if no instruction is given. Year Walk cheekily breaks away from those implicit rules at times, making for a sly puzzle or two that can be appreciated after the fact, but beforehand can lead to frustration as its outside the box the game world seemingly created before then. The game definitely wants you to experiment with solutions, and if you can reach those solutions naturally, it’s definitely satisfying to see your work rewarded.
The definite highlight of the puzzles would be the interactions with the strange spirits of the forest, the air of mystery around them fueled by their odd silent requests. Year Walk mostly goes for an unsettling, atmospheric horror that comes from this interaction with the supernatural, but at one point, it just throws an out of place, over the top scary face jump scare at you that undermines the more subtle horror found elsewhere. It’s not the only jump scare, but the others feel more rooted and earned than something that suggests a lack of confidence in the otherwise more reserved horror tools it implements. Unsettling noises, strange characters and locations, the air of mystery, moody ambience… Year Walk didn’t need to resort to such a tactic thanks to an already effective atmosphere, especially when it gets pretty creative with its visuals as the story begins to reach its end. Or at least, what seems like its end.
Year Walk tantalizes the player early with things that won’t be understood until a second playthrough of the game, and since it’s pretty short, it doesn’t hurt to immediately go back in after the initial completion. To truly beat the game, you must take a second Year Walk that, while having the same set up as your first one, goes down a different path, one that takes what is otherwise was a basic story with strong visual and tonal support and injects it with a surprising new angle and layer of depth. It essentially flips from a game more about location and feel to one heavy on a narrative to its benefit. The year walk begins as a trek to find what strange new creature will interact with your vision quest next and shifts into a mysterious story that makes you want to know what the next plot development will be. The conveyance of that new plot is a bit direct and not very interactive, but it’s well written enough to excuse its less subtle approach. It helps Year Walk avoid an odd narrative trap of either being too straightforward or too oblique, as the wiggle room for interpretation before your second walk is limited. Being able to add both more meat and more mystery to the tale is an excellent way to give two different types of player something to attach themselves too, avoiding potential feelings of hollowness for people who chose to see the story through to its true end.
THE VERDICT: Year Walk takes elements of Swedish folklore and uses them to construct an unsettling atmosphere of the supernatural. Much like the year-walking hero, you are disoriented as you explore, but while the odd movement takes a bit to get used to and the snowy forest blends together, it doesn’t reduce the overall tone of the haunting night journey into the surreal. Puzzles cleverly unfold throughout the course of the game, solutions often being a culmination of details picked up along the way. Not every puzzle is so well integrated, but Year Walk does manage to avoid being just a short atmospheric walk with stylish visuals. Smartly designed and thoughtful puzzles with a solid narrative that can be found on a return visit to the game fleshes Year Walk out into something unearthly but accessible.
And so, I give Year Walk for PC…
A GOOD rating. The mythology of Year Walk is intriguing and the game has many intelligent ways of of constructing a puzzle, it just lets down the excellent parts of its design a tad when it forces in an out of place pop scare and the puzzles that aren’t about the game world but figuring out something outside its context. If not for these, Year Walk would likely cut a better pace and keep a more consistent tone, and it’s very likely that some players can overlook these and the odd movement to appreciate it fully for its artistic visuals and surreal situation.
Year Walk is a good game with some clear points for refinement, but what’s most important is its successes in making its atmospheric adventure effective and meaningful. Year Walk helps the figures from Swedish folklore stick in your mind through effective integration, striking designs, and the unease they and your adventure inspire while still entertaining through well designed mind puzzles and a surprisingly good story once you’ve reached the true end of your walk.