Year Walk
Game Creator(s): Simogo
Platforms: iOS, macOS, Windows (PC)
Target Audience: Fans of atmospheric adventure and puzzle games, psychological horror enthusiasts, and players interested in dark folklore and interactive storytelling.
My Playtime: Approximately 2 hours to complete
Year Walk constructs its narrative architecture in two ways: Embedded narratives and Evocative spaces. Walking is the core mechanism through which the player interacts with this narrative architecture. From my personal experience, walking forced me to slow down and invest more time and attention into the surrounding environment, which brought about both positive and negative gameplay experiences.
Embedded narratives: why walking
Year Walk contains puzzles are merely about “bringing information from one place to another.” As shown in the image, to complete a puzzle, the player needs to visit three locations marked with red circles and record the information on the runestones. “Puzzle-solving” does not constitute the core experience; rather, it is a hook used by the designers to induce the player to engage in walking within the game space and to deepen their familiarity with the environment.
Figure: Game map, with red circles indicating three puzzle information points. The red circles are not built into the game.
This game has no map teleportation feature; players must personally walk through the Swedish winter forest. During my playthrough, I was somewhat frustrated at first: I often got lost, repeatedly passed the same spots, and had to check the map with every step. But soon, certain elements began to catch my attention, such as mysterious symbols on trees, runestones, and eerie wooden boxes. This is the designer’s application of embedded narratives: distributing the Nordic cultural symbols contained in the game throughout the environment. There is no need to predetermine the sequence in which players see these symbols; the designers only need to ensure that “players will encounter them on the critical path to solving the puzzles.” This joy of “discovery” enriches the user’s walking process. Conversely, if users could teleport, the scenery along the way would often be ignored, and the effectiveness of the embedded narrative would diminish.
Figure: Mysterious symbols on trees
Furthermore, the designers established connections between scenes through environmental details, granting the game space a sense of coherence. For example, I saw a mill in the distance in one scene, walked forward, and sure enough, arrived at the foot of the mill. During the continuous process of walking, these isolated scenes formed a complete “mental model” in my brain. As I became more familiar with the environment, the frequency of getting lost and checking the map decreased—this gave me a sense of euphoria, namely that “joy is learning.”
Figure: A mill in the distance
Sound design is also highly crucial. There is a puzzle about “finding the source of a song,” and the closer the player gets to the target, the louder the audio becomes. This simulation of physical spatial characteristics promotes the brain’s cognitive integration of the scenes, making players more convinced that they are inhabiting a real, immersive space.
Evocative spaces: why not walking
Year Walk draws heavily upon Swedish folklore, including elements like The Huldra and The Brook Horse. Introductions to these folk beliefs are entirely contained within the game’s Encyclopedia interface. At the beginning of the game, I didn’t notice this interface until the plot involving the Brook Horse reminded me to open the Encyclopedia—I read through all the folklore entries in one sitting, and my gaming experience shifted drastically.
Figure: Encyclopedia interface
This is the charm of evocative spaces: before I understood this folklore, I could only use the word “mysterious” to describe everything I saw. But equipped with this prior knowledge, the game transformed into a “folklore practice.” I read in the Encyclopedia that “the Brook Horse is a monster associated with the spirits of dead children,” and the Brook Horse in the game actively tasked me with collecting children’s souls. The introduction of this knowledge greatly increased the depth of my gaming experience—it was no longer just sensory stimulation, but also the profound weight of experiencing a foreign culture.
Figure: The brook horse
Year Walk did not utilize these folklore backgrounds as embedded narratives: for example, the player does not collect background information during the walking process, nor do they unlock a monster’s lore entry immediately after completing a puzzle. If designed that way, players might feel annoyed and skip the text entirely. Because Year Walk primarily narrates through audiovisual information rather than text, embedding the folklore background directly into the gameplay loop would force players to constantly switch between “reading text” and “sensory experience,” thereby increasing cognitive load. Currently, the Encyclopedia system acts more like a “transmedia narrative,” remaining independent from the core game media. Users can freely choose when to read it, whether to consume it all at once or gradually. In my view, this is a superior design choice.
Suggestions for Improvement
Walking also introduces design risks: when players are sufficiently familiar with the environment yet still have to engage in repetitive walking, or when they resort to an “exhaustive search” because they cannot find puzzle clues, the user experience severely deteriorates.
The solution I propose is: introduce more uncertainty to the walking process. For instance, as the game progresses, alter the art assets and features of certain scenes (the game actually does this to a degree, such as adding bloody footprints); integrate jumpscares into the walking process itself, rather than exclusively triggering them after a puzzle is solved. This way, upon entering a new scene, the user will constantly wonder “Will there be a jumpscare here?”, adding a layer of psychological thrill to an otherwise repetitive traversal process.
Additionally, the game’s hint system still has room for polish. During my playthrough, I conducted an exhaustive search to find a raven (which was very small and easily overlooked). Designers could make the hint system more conspicuous, such as highlighting objectives on the map (or embedding folklore entities acting as guides, similar to a fairy). If there is concern that this might ruin the “sense of exploration,” they could simply add unexpected events on the critical path leading to the highlighted location.
Ethical Issues
The core narrative of this game involves violence. Over 100 years ago, a young man on a year walk foresaw that he would eventually murder his female lover with his own hands. And indeed, he did: the game contains visual depictions (including blood) and textual descriptions (e.g., being stabbed 21 times) of the lover’s death. Today, more than 100 years later, the protagonist attempts to save the victim through a year walk, and the method is leaving a knife for the murderer of the past through a “rift in time and space,” prompting him to commit suicide.
There are two ethical challenges here: First, the murderer commits the crime out of “romantic jealousy,” while the victim’s character is relatively flat, serving merely as a backdrop to “add tragic elements to the story”—this risks exacerbating gender stereotypes. Second, the resolution to the problem relies on fighting violence with violence, or alternatively, attributing the justification for violence to the supernatural and to madness.
What is somewhat comforting is that the designers refrained from using the image of the deceased victim when designing the jumpscares. Through the game’s narrative, what they ultimately wanted to convey is “how to cross time and space to avert a past tragedy.” The narrative’s focal point is not visual sensationalism, but rather redemption.
Figure: Ending interface
