Year Walk

released on Feb 21, 2013
by Simogo

In the old days man tried to catch a glimpse of the future in the strangest of ways. Experience the ancient Swedish phenomena of year walking through a different kind of first person adventure that blurs the line between two and three dimensions, as well as reality and the supernatural.


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i love small puzzle games so pair that with swedish folklore and youve got a video game staple for me

Evocative, creepy, somber game with a great sense of presentation and format (essential qualities if you want to make more than just a "good" 2D game) Cute postgame segment as well.

A different, short adventure game with some depth dug into an obscure, Swedish mythology. You set out on your first Year Walk, which the purpose is to gain a vision into the future. You interact mostly with mythological creatures and have to solve certain puzzles to reach your goal. Although you are provided with an encyclopedia to get an insight into Year Walk, as well as the creatures involved to help you along, the adventure is riddled with some harrowing experiences due to the unpredictable natures for the players getting into this for the first time.

Having played through this, I admit having this game haunting in my subconscious while I slept and although I'm no big fan of horror games, this game has a fascinating lore in its fragile state of existence, based on the research data compiled by a Swedish teacher (and his journal which becomes increasingly unsettling upon reading it). Recommended for thinking players but also for fans of mystery/mythology who might need a bit of walkthrough on this.

This review contains spoilers

It's got a lot of interesting folklore and it looks very nice with the use of parallax scrolling and that limited color pallete, but the game doesn't have faith in its own puzzles and has a hint system that doesn't cost anything because of how obtuse some of the solutions are (there's an arbitrary fourth wall break regarding something physical that shows up in the in-game encyclopedia for example. I don't understand how that thematically ties into the fact that what appears there was victim of infanticide). There's not any depht in it, the folkloric aspect ends up feeling like a touristic presentation, and the horror sometimes uses jumpscares at random...

Or that is what the game wants to you think. Oddly, once you finish its very ethereal plot-twist ending where your girlfriend appears dead apparently by you, it gives you clues for an alternate option which involves finding a way to log into a computer and you find out that instead of someone searching for the folklore you were actually playing as someone in the past that is warned by someone in our present to commit suicide so as to not have a psychotic breakdown later, and all the details of the protagonist's story are revealed to the player. I don't know how the protagonist being from the 1800s knew how to use the computer but ok.

It's a bit weird to rate. On the one hand, it averts the time travelling cliché of the protagonist getting what he wants with no consequence since it involves his own sacrifice, which is a bit hard to come by in these types of story

However, on the other hand it locks the interesting details of the main character's psyche and his current situation after you complete the story, which means you are normally just playing a regular point and click adventure only focused on gameplay and atmosphere (which can be quite botched as I mentioned above) and then dumps everything on you from the point of view of someone you never meet and with elements you didn't investigate by yourself. It would be like if in the PS2 horror game "Siren" you could only access the archives that explains the story after you reach the fake ending and if it wasn't you in organic contact with the environment that allowed you to gather the clues but some random hundreds of notes that show up from nowhere.

There is a game for DOS called "Bioforge" that did something similar to this, where you find an "encyclopedia" in a computer to understand the environment and who lets you know all the details of who you are at the end since you have amnesia. But in there you have to do moral choices which are interestingly what you end up comparing to your real backstory and makes you actually feel like you became a changed man, so it ties into the themes of fighting against the remnants of a religious organization. Here in Year Walk you are interacting with spirits and all of a sudden it turns out you will be a murderer.

It's a very strange and unnatural structural decision which would have made me drop the title by lack of interest if it wasn't because I was playing it by the recommendation of a friend. Thanks Felipe by the way, it was an interesting experience even if I am not too convinced by the whole work

Não gostei, mas não é ruim.

O jogo é curto, pouco mais de uma hora. Segundo algumas coisas que li tem fator replay, pois a história continua na segunda jogatina, mas eu não tive vontade de jogar tudo de novo. O game traz um visual muito original, uma arte linda! E é totalmente focado em puzzles. Não são coisas absurdamente difíceis e nem muito fáceis — foi o que me fez continuar querendo jogar, pois era divertido quebrar a cabeça. A história é um pouco vaga, mas tem muito sobre a cultura local do país que o jogo foi feito. O jogo é baseado em uma antiga tradição sueca chamada "Årsgång", tem até um glossário cheio de textos sobre os mitos, monstros, cultura, lendas sobre essa tradição. Parece bacana, mas não me interessei o suficiente para ler.

É um jogo de aventura/terror. Tenta te dar uns jumpscares, mas não rolou comigo. A ambientação é bonita, tem certa imersão e vale a pena dar uma conferida se gosta de jogos indies com uma pegada de horror trazendo narrativas misteriosas/confusas. Eu falei sobre a arte, né? Pois, é. Fiquei encantando.

As conquistas parecem estar quebradas, ao menos eu não consegui desbloquear nenhuma.