Salvando el cuestionable gusto de las secuencias musicales y valorando una primera partida a ciegas y no rejugadas buscando el completismo, A Highland Song presenta una estampa abierta de una Escocia llena de misterios y secretos. Lo cultural y lo mitológico a través de la naturaleza. Si Breath of the Wild mataba la magia de su mundo una vez descubierto lo artificial de su diseño, A Highland Song solventa este problema relacionando las colinas que trepas con folklore real, dándole una proyección mayor que la del microverso que se pueda inventar el videojuego. Y esta narración de leyendas autóctonas, proyectada en una exploración protagonista. Con todos los acertijos confluyendo en la interpretación y navegación del entorno y todas los cuentos e historias retornando hacia los lugares que pisas. Porque no solo va de conquistar terreno, sino de reconectar con esta tierra.

I will give it to the developer - the aesthetics are among the best I've experienced in any indie title, and coupled with the amount of praise I've seen, I decided to give the game a try.

I am sadly regretting that decision. The game mechanics, conceptually and in themselves, are fine enough - health management, rain, and terrain navigation are obviously a part of the experience - but it's almost like the game is intentionally made with obtuseness in mind. It's incredibly difficult to get Moira to choose which layer of hillside to get onto, and unintuitive would be a mild way to describe what seems to be very meticulously deliberate counterintuitiveness in what is one of the game's primary mechanics. I understand that it's in part intended to make me feel lost in the Highlands, but the amount of jank does not contribute to a pleasant experience.

I hope to see past its faults after I come back to it at a later date, but so far, it's not an experience I'm eager to recommend to anyone.

Interesting concept but falls a bit flat, unlike the hills you have to climb. While the art is beautiful, the gameplay & animation feels a bit too stiff too my liking. At some points it almost felt a bit like climbing a mountain with low stamina in Breath of the Wild, never ending rain included.

Music is fantastic & you do meet a handful of quirky & interesting characters on your journey. I finished the game arriving one day too late so I‘ll probably pick this back up for another go later in the year. For now I’m good however.

Donde Overboard! invita a que nos relajemos y nos pongamos travieses con las posibilidades, A Highland Song es un reclamo regionalista del paraje y cultura escocesa. Siendo como es, el juego decide celebrar este pedazo de tierra con cabriolas y exploración.

Inkle demuestra aquí algo que ya sabíamos desde Heaven's Vault pero que no terminaron de demostrar bien: que su modelo narrativo admite más capas de interacción sin romperse. No es una ejecución perfecta, y en ocasiones se hace pesado tener que rastrear los mismos sitios una y otra vez para localizar el sitio que tu mapa te está diciendo que existe. Pero la belleza del escenario y la intimidad que desarrollas con el mundo compensan la repetición e invitan a una mayor exploración. Por desgracia, eso también lo hace a costa de los personajes, que se sienten mucho más planos que en Overboard, pero es comprensible. Tu relación ahora no ha de ser con las personas, sino con las montañas.

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Where Overboard! invites us to relax and get naughty, A Highland Song is a reclamation of the Scottish landscape and its culture. In doing so, it chooses to celebrate it with platforming and exploration.

Inkle demonstrates here something we already knew from Heaven's Vault but weren't able to show before: that their narrative model allows for more layers of interaction than just dialog. It's not perfect at some points, and at times it gets tiresome to track down the same places over and over again to locate the place your map tells you. But the beauty of the setting and the intimacy you develop with the world make up for it and pushes us further. The added exploration also comes at the expense of having complex characters, who feel much flatter than in Overboard!, but that's understandable, because your deal now is not about the people, but about the mountains.

What a beautiful experience.

This game captures my favorite feeling in games - a true sense of exploration, where I am navigating my own way through an unknown world, discovering secrets mundane or (in this case) something approaching magic. I have seen it framed as "the exploration of Breath of the Wild put into 2D," and I don't think that's wrong.

On top of that, it has an evocative score (with occassional rhythm game), great voice acting, and a narrative consistent with the studio's history.

I have a great appreciation of Scotland, a lot of connection to it but it always feels distant.
Scottish friends, Scottish family, but miles between us although on the same island.

I’ve never roamed the highlands and I’m not sure I ever will but I can fit so much of it together in my mind, between stories I’ve read, tales that have been told to me and my own time living by heathland - I can respect and imagine the glory of it all.

A Highland Song captures the idea of journeying across these paths well, not following roads but paths by others, innovating ways across where nature has returned to block your way.
In a way the game could be seen as a 2D walking simulator, but due to the scale of the walk it very much has platforming elements too.
A brilliant edition is how the game replicates the idea of running through a long stretch of clearer land, hopping over stones and other tripping hazards but never needing to stop and climb. The wind flowing through Moira, the protagonist’s hair as she is inspired by the deer and wildlife. Rather than just holding left or right the B button initiates a sprint which becomes a rhythm game backed by beautiful classical Scottish music, plenty of flutes, that simply involve presses of X and Y where Moira needs to hop.

When the paths aren’t so clear, Moira is climbing, finding items, sheltering in overhangs, caves and preferably buildings from the typically wet weather as the game leads into Spring.
The climbing is simple, there is no stamina gauge you can see, but Moira will sound out of breath, she will eventually need to stop to get it back and when night falls not only will it be nearly impossible to see, even with a torch, but she’ll need somewhere safe to shelter or risk losing health that typically only drops if she’s managed to bump herself on a fall.

During all this climbing and running, your aim is to find peaks, get up high to survey the rest of the land in your grand journey to the sea - a lighthouse in the distant background that guides your way.
As you progress Moira will either have notes she has bought or maps and things she has found to help her journey from one peak to another. It gives the journey a back and forth feel as you may find a new guide but need to get back to the peak to see where this shortcut will be.
Occasionally there will be other things, even people that may help guide the way but a large element of this game is discovery and I don’t want to completely ruin that.

All in this game looks fantastic, the art is lovely, the sights for the peaks are wondrous and there is plenty of colour and emotion conveyed throughout every sight.
The voice acting is brilliant, I have some bias because I have been known to watch the protagonist’s VA on Twitch. In general it is so nice to hear actual Scottish voice actors using Scottish dialect, it adds authenticity to the story and helps you believe in the characters and their tales - I just wish more of it was voice acted than it is.

With my connection with Scotland, minor connection with this game and love for everything it is trying to do, A Highland Song had massive potential to sneak in as a Game of the Year for me.
Unfortunately though there were times where this song for me, was less a beautiful ballad and more similar to hold music with a company you don’t want to be speaking to.

Many elements of the game gave me minor annoyances. The rhythm game at first seemed exciting but when it first introduced a second button the icons were less clear and felt more of a gotcha than an increase in difficulty. This game made me feel incredibly stupid because it never gave me the prompt or tutorial of how to hop down from background to foreground and, not the only time, I felt I was stuck with no way to progress.

Progression can feel irritating. The idea of finding notes, picking out what is being highlighted while on a peak, to then find a shortcut or an item to lead you further down a treasure hunt is, on paper, great. When it works it is genuinely quite fun but the issue is finding these clues, these breadcrumbs as it were in the first place.
They are highlighted in classic video game shiny spot form but if you’re rushing you can easily miss these pop up and more often than not there is nothing else visually to show you there is something of interest to stop at.
Too often the maps lead you back to places you have already been and more often than it should the reason Moira didn’t notice the path when there the first time is extremely contrived.

Throughout this treasure trail are little items, these can be used to progress certain places or as offerings when you are at the peaks. Sadly I am reminded of older, less-good point and clicks too often with these - sometimes there is obvious logic of what you can use or what you need but too often you can just be clicking each option until something works.

The game itself encourages multiple playthroughs, the item finding leans into this as, for example - one time I discovered a stone with a hole in that looked towards the lighthouse but could not use it, on another run I had the correct item to combine and it gave me a short scene and only then did Moira see a path to go forwards.
This sounds like typical game logic, finding the blue door but without the blue key, but because it can be obtuse and backtracking isn’t encouraged as the game is leading you to make this journey in a set amount of time this “blue door” feels like a wall and often then just has you running in circles to either find that key or another exit.
Going around the same peak twice feels fine but beyond that it becomes tedious which is further exacerbated if you are aiming for a quicker time, more peaks found etc. on other playthroughs as the movement is good but not exciting enough to want to do the same thing over and over.

I spoke about moving from the background to foreground and this is another reason that traversal can also be an irritation. Sometimes the painterly art doesn’t make things clear, not being 3D also makes judging distances in a third direction hard to judge and this leads to experimentation which can go wrong, hurt the character, slow you down and once again lead to repetition.

There are other minor things, bits I didn’t love and after my second session with this game, I started to believe I might even hate it but in the end it was more that I was just disappointed.
I wanted to love this game, its art - audibly and visually is fantastic. Its ideas and innovations are great but the actual act of playing the game never felt amazing and the idea of repeating it for just a few drops of more goodness are not enticing to me at all.
It is strange, because when I see others praising something I didn’t enjoy I tend to believe that they must have gotten something out of it that I could not - but A Highland Song ticked so many boxes, I wouldn’t say it was ever like it was designed for me but it definitely falls into my interests and sadly that just made it a bitter pill to swallow.

A Highland Song is charming in that classic Inkle style - it's a small, personal story told non-linearly in a visually interesting world. Climb hills, find strange objects, read some maps, talk to strangers, and make it to your destination.. days too late. Until you go again and see the different way your story unfolds.

The downside to A Highland Song is that the other gameplay mechanics - the climbing/platforming, and autoscroller rhythm game - aren't particularly engaging. The climbing is a bit slow and tedious, in a world that's so easy to get lost in because of the visual similarity of the overlapping layers of hills - while the rhythm minigame feels a bit light and lacks any real sensation to nailing an action on the beat.

It's an interesting game - it's Inkle, of course it is - but not one that I felt compelled to play more of.

Presentation is great, the visuals, music and voice acting both work really well to set up the atmosphere.

Gameplay is... alright, the survival style systems are a bit annoying at times, and the controls can feel a bit slippery.

Not a bad way to spend a couple hours, but I'm probably not going to come back to it.

Now, I do want to stress that I had pretty high fever while playing A Highland Song so I was probably a bit off my trolley, but while it is an absolute beauty of a game, I really didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped. I played through it twice, once sort of learning the ropes and getting to the uncle late, and then a replay where I understood the game better and got there on time. I hated the game on my first playthrough, probably because I wasn't entirely up to speed on how I should play the game, but also because it's pretty glitchy on Switch so I had to reload my save several times because I would die and not respawn or the ground would just disappear under protagonist Moira's feet and she'd just fall in perpetuity. But I was probably also a bit annoyed by the constant rain, everything looking the same, and having to replay the fairly long (though charming if only ran through once) rhythm sections when I realized I needed to backtrack. Switching between different layers also felt sort of bad, and Moira having the grip strength of Nathan Drake but the stamina of Alan Wake while climbing cliffs certainly didn't help matters much either.

I certainly learned to enjoy the game more on my second playthrough when I met more people on my journey, understood the map mechanics better (you actually have to get to the peaks and point out paths to be able to progress in the game, which I somehow beat the entire game without realizing previously. I blame the fever.), and learned to better appreciate getting lost in the beautiful setting and the struggles of traversing across the mountains, which required a bit of planning and getting to know the landscape. Still didn't love the constant rain, every collectible being yet another scrap of a map, or not really being given time to appreciate the world since I was going against the clock (and I usually don't dislike timers, but this one just felt a bit antithetical to the gameplay of exploring and discovering the highlands to me), not being able to interact with things while Moria or her uncle were narrating, and the ending when you get to him on time is just terrible. Actually reaching the lighthouse is one of the most beautiful moments of my gaming year, however.

This was the first indie game I've taken a chance on and spontaneously bought in a long while, and I feel like I was rewarded. Although Switch performance is a little spotty, it was never an issue during regular gameplay, and looks and sounds gorgeous. Despite the game's short runtime (it can be beaten in just a few hours), the variety of routes you can take to reach the end is enough that it almost begs to be replayed. The game merges narrative and gameplay extremely well – you can't approach exploring the highlands like you would a normal video game. While A Highland Song is far from merciless, it is more than happy to punish you for not paying attention to Moira's well-being or underestimating the danger of the seemingly peaceful Scottish highlands. I had to restart the game about four times to complete it because I made a mistake and got stuck, but it almost felt like an intentional approach to the game, and I was rewarded for my persistence with a better understanding and appreciation for the landscape.

The rhythm sections felt a little wonky, as despite my best efforts to synchronize inputs, it still felt slightly off with the otherwise gorgeous (licensed) music (I have Echo by Talisk on repeat as I write this).

This gets a solid recommendation from me.