For this week’s Critical Play, I played Year Walk, an eerie adventure game developed by Swedish mobile studio Simogo. It was originally designed for iOS, but has since been ported to Steam for Windows and Mac. I bought the game on Steam and played it on my MacBook. The game is designed for solo players drawn to puzzles, eerie atmospheres, and folklore horror.
Year Walk is loosely based on Årsgång, a form of divination in Swedish folk tradition. A “year walker” must endure a series of rituals and supernatural encounters and if successful, they get to glimpse the year ahead. The game weaves narrative into the mystery by hiding its story inside its rules and its world, so that figuring out what to do and figuring out what’s happening are the same thing. The game’s mechanics of navigation, symbol interpretation, and environmental interaction produce dynamics of uncertainty, vigilance, and backtracking, which in turn create an aesthetic of dread and discovery. The game also relies heavily on embedded narrative, burying the story directly into the environment for players to excavate.
Year Walk also deploys Adams’ secondary architectural functions to deepen the experience. Its color palette is almost entirely white and grey: endless snow, bare trees, and a cold sky, which functions as atmosphere, making the world feel obliterating and endless. Adding to this is the game’s unique traversal mechanic: you can move in all four cardinal directions, but your view is always facing north, meaning you shuffle sideways or backwards through the forest without ever seeing where you’re going. It’s a small but deeply effective choice that makes navigation feel disorienting and ritualistic. The setting also works through allusion. The mill, the frozen river, the dead forest are not generic fantasy spaces but culturally specific Scandinavian ones. And the supernatural beings themselves introduce surrealism. These figures break natural logic just enough to signal that the rules of this world are not the rules of ours.
The color palette of the game.
The first tool the game gives you is a map, and it immediately establishes the architectural logic the entire game runs on. The map binds the player to pre-defined areas, with certain regions greyed out. The full shape of the world is visible, but parts of it are inaccessible. This is Adams’ constraint and concealment functions. The cemetery, which houses the Church Grim (the final creature at the heart of the ritual) stayed locked the longest. Seeing it on the map the entire game, knowing it mattered, and not being able to reach it created a tension the game never had to explicitly articulate.
Photos: the map and the locked church gate
The encyclopedia, a core mechanic of the game, works alongside the game’s architecture to form the game’s core embedded narrative. It describes the ritual and each of the supernatural beings a year walker may encounter. It’s an explicit signal about what you must accomplish but it doesn’t tell you where to go or in what order, which pushes you toward exploration. My first instinct was to visit every area on the map just to understand the world’s interaction logic: what’s here, what can I touch, what happens when I do? It was during this initial sweep that I encountered the Huldra, a female spirit of the woods who glided off screen, signaling I should follow. She led me to The Dead Tree, a large tree with a door in the middle and two owls on either side. Clicking the owls played different sounds, which told me something needed to happen there, but I didn’t know what yet.
I was super confused here
So I left and kept exploring. I found a shed with a creepy doll that resembled the Huldra’s symbol in the encyclopedia. Twisting its head made it dance and point to two owl symbols in a specific order. It took me a few minutes, but I realized I had to click the owls at the Dead Tree in that same sequence. Once I did and got inside, the puzzle continued. There was a set of lights that each emitted chords when I stood before them. I picked random lights to enter and after a few tries, I noticed a subtle positive beep signaling when I’d chosen the right light. I realized that the “right” light was the one that emitted a resonant, harmonious chord, while the wrong lights were discordant and unmusical. This was one of my favorite mechanics of the game. I was genuinely proud of figuring it out and awestruck at how well designed it was. The game was weaving the puzzle through every sensory channel: visual, space, AND auditory, which deepened the dynamic of vigilance.
I was given a key after reaching the center of the tree, but it dissolved into water before I could take it. The encyclopedia’s next entry was the Brook Horse, a spirit inhabiting rivers and water sources and I remembered a river from my initial exploration. This exemplifies exploration again as an architectural function: the player must hold a mental map of the space and revisit it with new knowledge. The world doesn’t change to guide you but your understanding of it does.
At the river I found the Brook Horse, and shortly after, the encyclopedia turned bloody. The Mylings page specifically was stained. The Mylings were murdered infants watched over by the Brook Horse, and helping them cross over earns a reward. When I went back out exploring, blood pools had appeared near locations that had been empty before. This is enacting narrative layered on top of the embedded one: the space staging new story events in response to my progress. The Mylings rewarded me with a blue eternal flame, which I didn’t know what to do with until I tried to enter a cave to the east and it was completely dark. The flame was what I needed to explore that cave. This is architecture’s obstacle function. The solution requires keeping track of and synthesizing narrative information . I actually had to take notes on my iPad to keep up.
My ipad notes
I could write about every single thing I did and every aha moment I had in this game, but I’m approaching the word limit. So: Year Walk is a small but confident game. Its mechanics and narrative architecture are so thoroughly layered yet unified that space and story become the same thing. The setting IS the narrative, doled out fragment by fragment through constraint, concealment, blood-stained encyclopedia pages, and a world that changes while your back is turned. Architecture controls the story because it controls what you know and when you know it; mechanics weave the narrative because they make you perform the ritual rather than observe it.
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Ethics
Year Walk raises some interesting ethical questions. The most visceral is its depiction of the Mylings (literal murdered infants) rendered as ghostly and bloody surreal beings floating in the snow. The game doesn’t shy away from the darkness of the source material, and I found myself pretty unsettled in a way that felt intentional rather than gratuitous. I actually think that sanitizing folklore horror does it a disservice, and that representing the Mylings honestly as tragic, disturbing figures actually honors the weight of the tradition. At the same time, the line between meaningful representation and shock value is a real one, and different players will land differently on whether the imagery crosses it.
The broader ethical question is what it means to build a game around a culture’s folklore at all. Games that borrow from cultural traditions risk flattening them into aesthetic backdrops. This is something my group is grappling with with our game (a point-and-click historical horror meant to explore the long term consequences of colonialism). I think Year Walk mostly avoids this because Simogo is a Swedish studio and they’re drawing from their own cultural heritage rather than appropriating someone else’s. That said, even within your own culture, there’s a question of how responsibly a tradition is handled when it becomes entertainment. Personally I think the game is genuinely engaging with Year Walking by taking it seriously but I’m not Swedish and I’m not the end-all-be-all opinion.
