A Highland Song

I went into A Highland Song expecting a text-heavy inkle experience wrapped in a light platforming shell. What I got was something stranger and more physical: a 2D side-scrolling climb across rain-soaked peaks, with stamina management, survival-lite shelter mechanics, and a day-night cycle counting down to Beltane. The studio responsible for 80 Days and Heaven's Vault has built their most embodied game to date, and it takes about half a run to realise what that actually means. The core loop is deceptively simple. You run, jump, climb, and slide Moira McKinnon across layered mountain terrain, hunting for the path that shaves a day off your journey to Uncle Hamish's lighthouse by the sea. Grip depletes on steep faces. Rain hammers the health bar. Sleep spots scattered across abandoned bothies and cave mouths let you recover, but every hour resting costs daylight. What keeps this from feeling punishing is the map system: roughly 100 collectible map fragments reveal new shortcuts, and every peak you summit contributes a Gaelic name and a fragment of Scottish mythology to Hamish's narrated letters. The first run is almost designed to fail - many players will arrive a day late to a bittersweet ending - but the game banks your progress, maps and discovered items carrying forward so each subsequent attempt builds on the last. That structure is pure inkle DNA, the same persistence loop that made 80 Days endlessly replayable. The highlight, consistently praised and impossible to oversell, is the rhythm sequences. A wild deer appears on certain traversal stretches, and the landscape physically reshapes itself around the beat of live Scottish folk music from TALISK and Fourth Moon. Tapping in time with the fiddles and pipes sends Moira sprinting further and faster, the hills becoming a percussion instrument. It is the moment where the game stops feeling like a genre hybrid and starts feeling like its own thing. The rest of the soundtrack operates similarly, understated and atmospheric when you are lost in fog, alive and urgent when a peak finally opens up. The rough edges are real and worth naming. The 2D layered foreground-background design occasionally makes it genuinely unclear which plane Moira can move to, and the seven-day time limit carries friction on a first playthrough that actively discourages the unhurried exploration the game also wants you to do. Some reviewers found the survival mechanics undercooked and the world geometry occasionally obtuse. These are fair criticisms. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and excellence in audio and narrative at the 2024 Independent Games Festival, which tells you where its genuine strengths lie - it is not a platforming showcase, it is a mood and a place and a coming-of-age story about a specific geography that rarely gets this kind of loving attention. If you want waypoints, objective markers, or a tidy six-hour finish with no loose ends, look elsewhere. If you want to get rained on in the Scottish Highlands, learn what a cairn means, hear a cave whisper something you cannot quite explain, and then start the whole journey over again knowing more than you did - this is the game for that. The patience it demands in the first run pays back quietly and steadily over three or four. Inkle keeps making games for people who read the tooltips, linger in the margins, and trust that slow openings earn their endings. A Highland Song is that bargain, kept. Kai, Scout Team