Year Walk

I keep thinking about the sound of snow underfoot. That crunch, looping softly while you stand frozen in a winter forest rendered in cut-paper silhouettes of dark indigo and bare branches. Year Walk earns that memory. It is a first-person puzzle adventure built around the ancient Swedish ritual of Årsgång, a real historical practice in which someone fasts, isolates themselves in darkness, then walks out at midnight on New Year's Eve to receive visions of the future. Simogo took that premise and made something that feels less like a game and more like a controlled haunting. The movement is lateral, almost diorama-like. You shift left and right across layered planes of forest, occasionally pushing forward into new zones. It takes maybe fifteen minutes to stop fighting the structure and start reading it as intentional. The forest reveals creatures from genuine Norse folklore: the Huldra, a forest spirit who seduces; the Mylings, the restless ghosts of unbaptized children; the Brook Horse rising from a turquoise stream; the Night Raven; and finally the goat-headed Church Grim. Each encounter anchors a cluster of puzzles. No slide puzzles, no inventory juggling. Some require you to follow a distant melody to its source. One demands you decode a hidden language, and keeping a pen and paper nearby is genuine good advice. The built-in encyclopedia, compiled with actual folkloric research, fills in the mythology around these creatures, and crucially, it participates in the puzzles. Reading an entry about a Myling will at some point change what you see in the forest. That loop between reading and playing is where Year Walk is most quietly brilliant. The PC adaptation is thoughtful. Touch puzzles from the original iOS version were redesigned around mouse and keyboard, mostly without friction. A hint system exists if you want it, and a map keeps you from spinning in circles. The two criticisms that keep surfacing across reviews are fair: some backtracking gets repetitive in the final stretch, and one puzzle breaks the fourth wall in a way that briefly snaps the spell. Neither is a dealbreaker in a game that runs around two hours, maybe three if you sit with the story. The sound design by Daniel Olsen is something I want to mention separately, not as a footnote. Church bells, vocal harmonies, distant drones, and the aforementioned snow crunch work together to build dread that no jump scare could manufacture. There are a handful of jump scares. They land because the silence around them has been earned. The true ending is locked behind the encyclopedia's journal section, accessible only after you finish the base game and follow specific clues back into the world. It reframes the entire experience and connects the 19th-century story to a present-day researcher whose obsession with year walking has not gone well for him. It is the kind of structural decision that small studios take because they care more about the experience than the play time. For players who like to sit with narrative games long after the credits roll, this is the reason Year Walk has stayed relevant a full decade after its PC release. Steam user sentiment sits at 92 percent positive, and that number reflects something specific: people who found it, finished it, and immediately wanted someone else to find it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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