In spite of its first-person perspective, you, the player, never see or hear anything of the “person” you’re controlling: there are no hands, no clothes, no visible signs of your existence in the forest aside from the fact that (few) other human characters will talk to you. You can take a look at this YouTube video to get the idea. The best way I can describe the visual effect of Year Walk’s engine is by comparing it to slowly opening the pages of one of those pop-up books for children. There are no loading times for the various “zones” of the forest: every time you swipe vertically to move forwards/backwards, elements of an area appear in real time, becoming bigger/smaller as you swipe to reach them or go back to the previous area. While leveraging both 3D and 2D elements, Year Walk’s first-person lets you move horizontally and vertically in the forest by swiping on your device’s screen. The first-person perspective of Year Walk isn’t rendered in the usual 3D you may see in first-person shooters or role-playing games. Year Walk can be comfortably finished in 3–4 hours without reading any tips or tutorials on the Internet more than “short”, however, I would call Year Walk’s experience as a “concentration” of gameplay ideas that Simogo applied to take advantage of the hardware Year Walk runs on. With this in mind, Year Walk the game has been developed as a first-person “adventure” into a snowy forest with the sole purpose of reaching a vision that would show you, the “main character”, a glimpse of the future. These creatures would of course include a lot of the mythical creatures from the Scandinavian folk lore. This was not an easy task as strange and dangerous creatures roamed the night. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. One was not allowed to talk to anyone or have anything to eat or drink. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, during the night.Īlmost all variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room. A vision quest for the future, essentially. It consisted of a “walk” around the woods at the midnight of Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, with no fire and food, aimed at “seeing” what would happen in the following year. As explained by Simogo in October 2012, the Year Walk was a sort of ritual that, according to old Swedish folkloristic stories, some people went through in the 19th century. The premise of Year Walk lies in an ancient Swedish phenomenon called Årsgång, translated in English as Year Walk. I’ll try my best to describe its appeal in this post. Year Walk is the most unique “game” I have played on iOS in years. Even though it plays like a game, Year Walk is an experience spanning various aspects of storytelling, Swedish folklore, multitouch interactions, sound, and additional reading material available in a Year Walk Companion app. Last night, I finished Year Walk – the latest game from Simogo, creators of Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit – and even if games don’t belong in my usual area of coverage here at MacStories, I think Year Walk deserves a special mention.Ĭalling Year Walk a “game” is actually reductive.
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