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