For anyone who hasn't seen it, A Highland Song is the new game from Inkle. Like 80 Days before it, the joy lies in tackling the game multiple times, to find faster routes to reach your target; a lighthouse out at sea. You start in the Scottish Highlands and have to navigate caves, climbs, snow covered peaks, water, weather, nightfall, ski lifts, dams and much more besides to reach your goal.

Its a 2D exploration game and it looks gorgeous. Hand painted landscapes that have you taking screenshots all the time. Being set in Scotland, the folklore, narration and music is also wonderful. It really captures the spirit of the country perfectly.

Overall though, I'm a bit conflicted on this one.

For large parts of the game, I adored it.

Finding scraps of maps, figuring out where short cuts are and navigating mountains is very rewarding. And not as easy as you'd think. And it's clear that many objects you pick up won't be useful until a future run.

But it's not without issue. I had two or three bad crashes that locked my Switch or shut the game, losing some progress. I fell through the levels a few tmes. Some of the landscape is very hard to read, though a patch that came out tonight fixes some of that. The skill of figuring out where to go is wonderful when it works, but when you're lost it can be very frustrating; I lost 3 days trying to find a way off one mountain (which reminded me in 80 Days of that foray to Antarctica that kills you).

The biggest issue though is that after 2 runs, I'm not sure I want to do a 3rd. Whereas with 80 Days, I did about 20 as it was so much joy to experiment with new routes. Here, because the climbing is a bit laborious, it gets a bit dull, fast.

I've probably put about 6 hours in and feel like I've seen enough for now, until it's patched. And I think what is there is genuinely unique and charming.

It just didn't quite have the 'one more go' factor that I'd hoped it would.