Yet another title on my list of “thanks, Steam Summer Sale,” Year Walk is an adventure horror puzzle title. Luckily, the “horror” part of it isn’t too overwhelming, and I was still able to enjoy it.
The base story of Year Walk is that in the old days on New Year’s Eve, men from Sweden would go out that night to get a glimpse into the future. For the particular story the game follows, you are a man who is in a secret relationship. As you go through his walk, you will experience some incredibly scary sights.
As a horror game, and as a person who typically doesn’t play them due to how they are usually handled, I found Year Walk kept it down just enough. There are still the occasional jump scares that will happen, and you will definitely see some very horrific sights. However, from my time playing the title, I didn’t find most of the things you would typically associate with a horror title.
Graphically, the game looks like a mobile title – and considering it is a port of one, this makes perfect sense. Thankfully, it doesn’t play too much like that, so I would like to say well done on the developers part for being able to smoothly transition it onto Steam. Also, the sound effects are spot on – you will mostly only hear snow crunching, though the spots where they needed to add in something else worked quite well. The music will come in at just the right time and is not too overly distracting from your exploration.
The controls are simple – your basic WASD or arrow keys, along with the occasional mouse usage to point at, drag, or click on objects. There was one puzzle that is quite a stumper in that the hints tell you there are “keys” you need, so your mind instantly thinks keys in the game. It turns out what you actually need to do is hit the appropriate keys on your keyboard. I only realized this after looking up the solution, and found I was not the only person who had been stumped by this.
Overall, I found Year Walk to be a nice, quick distraction from everything else going on. While I feel some puzzles could have been easier, and navigating around could have been slightly less annoying (admittedly I completely ignored the in game map), the game is overall well put together. If you scare easily even from small jump scares I would not suggest it, but as someone who doesn’t typically play horror titles, the jump scares that happened weren’t too bad.
Year Walk Review Score
4/5
Year Walk is available on Steam for $5.99.
