Year Walk Review

Year Walk Review

Year Talk

            Originally published for the iOS by Simogo, Year Walk got a release for PC in March.  The game is heavily influenced by the old Swedish tradition Årsgång which means year walk.  This “tradition” has not been in open practice for a couple of generations at least.  It consisted of starvation of the body and mind of natural senses for a full day during certain events.  When the clock struck midnight, the person would leave and go to the church encountering many obstacles on the way.  Once completed, the person would supposedly see their future.

               The first thing I noticed when I opened the game was the art style.  It had a very charming yet creepy aesthetic to it.  It is very simple, but very telling.  It looks almost like everything was cut out of coloured paper and placed onto the scene, and it was very pleasing to the eye.  It added to the atmosphere which was itself very unsettling and well thought out.

               At its core, Year Walk is a puzzle game and quite a difficult one too.  The puzzles themselves are extremely well done.  Everything is given to you right from the get-go.  You are then left to piece everything together.  The puzzles seem quite difficult but are actually quite simple once you figure out what needs to be done, although some can be quite difficult to complete.  For example, one puzzle uses sounds but it can be quite difficult to figure out what is being asked through simple notes.  There is a hint system, but I never used it and so I cannot comment on its usefulness.  It requires you to remember, so I would suggest having a pen and paper on hand to write things down rather than trying to remember them.

               The story elements are surprisingly the strongest part of this game because each puzzle tells its own story.  Everything in this game is symbolic and it shows that the developers put a lot of time into this game, despite it being originally made for iOS.  It gives the game a new layer that not many games have and it makes it feel very special.  Some of the places the story goes are extremely dark and quite upsetting.  Yet it touches these topics with so much maturity that it really feels genuine.  It does have some horror elements in it and made me feel very uncomfortable at times.  The characters are so fleshed out and rounded, despite rarely ever seeing any of them.  I felt actual guilt while playing this game, genuine guilt.

It left an empty feeling in my gut when it ended and I wanted more, but after some time I feel that the game would have been ruined if it were any longer.  It is still quite short.  There is a lot of walking to extend the length of the game, which is a dirty trick but it is forgivable because the environments are so engaging.  There is also a lot of reading, but it is so worth it to read everything.  I did not regret reading a single word in this game.

The simplicity of this game makes it easy to suggest anyone buy this.  Even non-gamers will find this something they could get into, especially if you like to read.  For $5.99 it makes it even easier to call it a must-have in anybody’s library.  If it had not been released on iOS a full year before its PC release, I would not be surprised to see it in the Indie Game of the Year category.

9.1/10

P.T Review

P.T Review

*Warning: I will be discussing some spoilers about the game*

      During the Sony conference at Gamescom in Germany, they announced that a new studio had added a demo for a new horror game on the PlayStation store and that it would be available to the public following the conference. The game, called P.T, developed by 7780 Studio’s, had garnered a lot of attention from the public because it had followed Metal Gear Solid during the conference.

   
      When the game starts you wake up in a room, with a very detailed cockroach crawling around. The only choice given to the player is to walk forward through the door and thus into the game. This mechanic is masterfully done and is used quite frequently throughout the game. It forces the player to continue progression and continue to learn more about what is going on. So I walk through the door and find myself in a very narrow, almost claustrophobic hallway. I continue down the corridor trying to open any doors, but none of them open except for one at the very end of the hallway. After walking through, it loops me back to the beginning  of the hallway. This is when I realized I should not be playing this game.

   
      P.T is more or less just a puzzle game, where the player triggers certain events and those events allow for progression. Sometimes the puzzle is as simple as the player just needs to walk forward, but most of them are extremely cryptic. It makes the game very good, but sometimes the puzzles go a little too far. For example, I had to watch a walkthrough for the last few puzzles, with the exception of the very last one, I was just too scared to try and figure out for myself. The last puzzle however, is just ridiculous and really hurts the game overall. For those wondering, you have to wait until the clock strikes midnight then take ten steps and stop. With a mic plugged in, you wait for the ghost to stop making sounds then whisper "Jarith" into the microphone and stand still again until your controller stops vibrating. If done correctly, a phone will ring.  If you answer it, then you can walk out of the front door.


      Now this is not cryptic, it is simply unfair. I understand that Kojima wanted players around the world to work together to complete it, but it seems far too cryptic. I could be wrong considering players eventually did figure it out. After watching others playthrough it, I noticed some people were able to beat some of the earlier puzzles completely differently than I had.


      Do not think I disliked this game, because it is quite literally the scariest game I have ever played. I actually had to have a friend sit with me and watch me play through it. Everything about this game screams terror. So little exposition is given to the player and the player is left to decipher what happened. I love that it lets the player answer their own questions simply by playing the game. Every single sound in this game is perfectly executed and the atmosphere was spot on. From the moment I started the game, I felt extremely uncomfortable and was scared before anything had even happened. I actually had to stop playing and take a break because I almost soiled myself.

       When I found out that Kojima had scaled down the graphics of the game to make it look more like an indie game. This is extremely exciting because it is one of the best looking games I have ever played and it iss on the PS4.
   

      I am not going to give this game a score simply because it is not a full game and is a demonstration of what is to come. That being said. I am extremely excited to see what comes of this as I was thoroughly impressed. For players who are smart or lucky enough to complete the final puzzle, they were treated to a surprise. If you do not want to know what the surprise is you can stop reading, but by now I assume everybody already knows as this game has garnered a huge amount of attention. Regardless of the surprise, I believe that you should pick this game up and try it out because it is extremely well done.
   

      First of all, 7780 is not actually a new development studio, in fact it is not an old one either. We now know that the demo was created by Kojami Productions and published by Konami. So this demo was actually created by some AAA developers. At first I was not really interested in playing it, but later I had found out that it was actually a teaser for a new Silent Hill game called Silent Hills. The game is being directed by the legendary game designer Hideo Kojima and the horror guru Guillermo Del Toro, and stars Norman Reedus. The game is slated for release in 2016 and I hope that it is still cryptic, but not as much as the demo as I feel it will stop a good game from being a great game.