But the rest make wonderful use of the ominous atmosphere and otherworldly beings to both tax your brain and unsettle your nerves. A few of them can stray into frustrating territory, particularly one that requires you to pick out specific notes from a chorus of voices. The puzzles are simple, for the most part, challenging you to find hidden spirits or recall patterns or piece together the meaning of runes. You’ll find some kind of clue or object to fiddle with in nearly every area though, so it’ll certainly pay to get and maintain your bearings as you walk. It’s a little disorienting at first but the map is very smartly laid out the exact same way, and there’s only 20 or so areas to explore to begin with. Each area is a panorama of snowy fields and barren woods that you can scroll horizontally across, and then move forward or backward into adjacent areas. There is walking to do in Year Walk, and you’ll do that from a first-person point-and-click interface. You won’t spend the whole game reading up on ravens and huldra, of course. For other titles such a reference might be a nice detail, but here it is indicative of the care and consideration put into the overall design. It also features prominently in one of those very puzzles, in a way that does a lot to immerse the player in the game. It’s a useful tool both for clarifying the historical background of Year Walk and for puzzling out some of the interactions you’ll have with the unearthly beings you’ll meet. The year walker you play here has a particular reason for their walk, and by overcoming the hardships along their path, will get an answer to a question they might not have truly wanted answered.Īll of this information is culled from the game’s built-in encyclopedia, a small collection of pages that give scholarly descriptions of the concepts found in the game. A year walk could be dangerous to both body and mind, but by following certain rules and customs, the walker could arrive at their destination and receive visions of their fate. Starting on a particularly auspicious day like New Year’s, after fasting and remaining in solitude, the walker could depart their house into the spirit realm, to face the hidden beings of the world. The concept of year walking is a sort of vision quest that allowed the walker to glimpse the future. It’s not the longest or most complex horror title around, but that factual grounding and excellent aesthetic make it an experience you won’t soon forget. Year Walk is built around an actual historical belief in Sweden, something that people have attested to experiencing. Telling a story that’s been told before, and told by people who took it far more seriously, grounds your horror in reality and gives it that unsettling edge of being just the tiniest bit more plausible.
But there’s something special about horror rooted in folklore. You can make perfectly effective horror games out of aliens, made-up demons, or haunted dishwashers if you know what you’re doing.