Year Walk: Environmental vs. Narrative Mystery
Year Walk, the 2014 narrative exploration game created by Simogo, is an experience told through puzzles and Swedish folklore. Originally made for iOS and later released on Steam and Wii U, the game’s mechanics are designed for mobile—swiping through screens, limited interactables, and pulling and rotating items in a way that is harder to do on PC. Nevertheless, the puzzles and mystery of Year Walk are still strong enough to translate across platforms, drawing in audiences interested in an eerie, engaging experience of uncovering the secrets of the game.
Ultimately, Year Walk’s mechanics create a puzzle game first, and then a narrative one. While slight tidbits of the spatial mystery might be revealed over time through solving puzzles and unlocking new areas, the actual bulk of the narrative itself is not revealed until a post-game puzzle is unlocked. The mechanics of the puzzle and movement still lead to an enjoyable experience of unlocking new areas, but most of that information just sets the mood (rather than actually explaining what is happening). Through hiding most of its narrative in a post-game easter egg, Year Walk prioritizes the mystery of environmental discovery (puzzle solving) instead of the mystery of further narrative understanding.
The primary contributor to this is that the mechanics of Year Walk are quite limited. There is very little actual dialogue or text during the duration of the game itself, so the player is not able to learn a lot of actual information about what is happening. Instead, mechanics are about moving Mylings (the souls of abandoned children), copying patterns from one rock to another, and of course, walking through the space (Fig. 1). These mechanics lead to an incentive of spatial discovery and unlocking new areas, rather than actual motivation by any clear story (Fig. 2).
In terms of the space, Year Walk does create a really strong architectural experience for the player to exist in. In particular, all of Adams’s “Primary Functions” of the role of architecture in games are fulfilled. From the extremely constrained directions of movement (which initially was quite irritating to me, but that I eventually grew to be okay with as I gained familiarity with exploring the space), to the many puzzles that serves as obstacles for reaching the next phases of the game, to the concealment of certain hidden areas, Year Walk is ultimately a game that is only possible because of the precise nature of its architectural space. Thus, the main drive for most of the game is literally to unlock new spaces that are not yet available.
This design of architecture and puzzles-first, narrative second, led to an enjoyable yet slightly empty experience for the bulk of my play-through. While the encyclopedic information on the entities from Swedish folklore were engaging, it was overall less fulfilling than other games that more cohesively intertwine puzzles with narrative. For example, in another mystery-driven walking simulator, What Remains of Edith Finch, the story is gradually revealed to the player as they progress through different areas, rather than all at once at the end. Even in the similarly puzzle-driven Cube Escape games, narrative about the actual overarching mystery is revealed in each self-contained room for the player to slowly build up an actual understanding of what’s happening. In Year Walk, I would have had no idea about what actually happened if I hadn’t watched through the “end credits.” Reading through the final journal entries was the most fun part of the game for me, and Year Walk could have included more hints during the “first walk” about the fact that there’s a deeper narrative (Fig. 3). Perhaps more clues about who the player is embodying, a hidden puzzle that reveals information from the “modern world” that has “gone across time,” or even references to more about the time-based nature of “year walking” earlier, could have all engaged the player more narratively throughout.
Of course, since Year Walk is ultimately a game about puzzles, this leads to different puzzle mechanics that can have varying degrees of accessibility. In particular, Year Walk has an interesting puzzles that involves sound. At most points in the game, sound is atmospheric, but not actually required to play the game. However, in “The Huldra – Part IV,” you enter a room where the path forward is guided by what paths are in-tune with the sound of the room. There is no alternative indication of how to solve the puzzle that would make it more accessible (Fig. 4). In a puzzle-driven game such as Year Walk, having a sound-based puzzle did lead to a fun sense of epiphany for me since it was so novel. However, as a deaf person describes, these experiences of revealing to the player a new mechanic (such as an auditory one) instead make the moment less engaging for deaf individuals when they realize that the experience is designed for a person “with senses and environmental stimuli that [are taken] for granted.” In the case of this one puzzle, Year Walk could have added an alternative method that made it still possible for users who might be deaf or hard-of-hearing.
Overall, Year Walk is an engaging and beautiful game. In particular, it is strongly driven by the architectural design of the space, constraining player movement and guiding players to engage with obstacles that create fun through challenge and discovery. However, the emphasis on the mechanics of movement and puzzle-solving does leave narrative to be on the back-burner, with most of the actual narrative being revealed in post-walk journal entries that not every player will reach. Thus, while Year Walk does a great job of integrating environmental mystery into its mechanics, it could do more to incorporate narrative mystery into the actual gameplay loop itself.
