For my critical play, I chose Year Walk, a 2013 mobile game by Simogo published for iOS. This game’s target audience is those who like mystery/somewhat horror games. As the game contains some graphic/shocking content, such as a hanging doll, the game is probably not intended for players under ~16 or so.
Notable Formal Elements:
Players: The game is mostly based on you exploring the environment around you — there are no other players.
Objectives: The objective of the game is a bit murky, but generally the game’s mechanics incentivize you exploring the world and interacting with your fiancé (I think?)/a woman.
Outcomes: Not sure about the final ending of the game, but the game’s periods of exploration are broken up by cutscenes when you reach certain checkpoints.
Rules/Mechanics: Players scroll side to side, and can move up/down whenever an arrow appears on screen allowing them to do so. After reaching a certain destination/landmark, cutscenes will play, providing you with more information on the story.
Boundaries: The game’s boundaries are strictly defined — the game’s world is in the forest/buildings in the forest, and its eerie, dark nature lends itself to a sense of mystery. There is no cross-over between the game and the real world.
Year Walk predominantly uses Embedded Narratives — as you progress through the game, the game’s designers slowly give you more and more information, allowing you to learn more and more about the world around you. For example, while you’re initially thrown into the game with only a short preamble on what a Year Walk exactly means, once you meet Stina at the windmill, you learn more about who you are and the dangers of a Year Walk. You also walk by a puzzle box that (I assume) you will learn about how to break open/solve later — this structure allows the developers to create a sense of progression, creating a set of mini-arcs that are resolved as you progress through the story, all in service of the overarching story arc.
The main types of fun in Year Walk are exploration, narrative, and sensation. The game is predominantly based on exploring the mysterious world around you, so the game includes cryptic writings, unexplained rooms/puzzles (e.g. the hanging doll, the puzzle box), and generally doesn’t guide you to where you should go. One thing I noticed was that the game would often let you scroll far to the sides, even though there were no up/down rooms there and thus you found nothing. Another way the game encourages exploration is through having multiple interconnected paths to visit everything. This is similar to a maze in the sense that it gives players multiple ways to explore and understand the connections between each landmark.
The game’s exploration is motivated by its narrative — while I’m not too sure on the specifics based on how far I got, it seemed based on an old tradition of exploring in the wilderness in the night, and had something to do with your fiancé. There was also an element of danger, as she warned you of something happening to her cousin when she went on a Year Walk as well. Overall, the story seemed interesting and mysterious, matching the general theme of the game.
Another way the game reinforces mystery is through sensation — one element that specifically stood out to me was sound design. The game’s sound is mostly quiet, ambient sound. However, when you stumble upon certain important scenes, the sounds become louder and stand out. For example, when you reach the windmill, its loud creaks stand out against the windy gusts, letting you know that you’ve reached something important.
Finally, something that annoyed me with the game (and thus something I think could be improved upon) was that the game sometimes gives a little bit too little information on where you should go next. While I understand this is antithetical to the nature of a mystery game, I often found myself just exploring in circles for 10-15 minutes, which killed a lot of time and more importantly made me less interested in the game, as I was no longer learning anything new. It might be helpful to have a “replay last cutscene” button, or maybe just add more hints to lead players in the right direction.
