A Highland Song Review (löyly)
I'd been longing for a great adventure with beautiful visuals to immerse myself in, with the feel of an epic journey, but without demanding heavy gameplay or a huge amount of time. That's exactly what A Highland Song gave (and gives) me.
The first thing that stands out is the stunning 2.5D art with breathtaking views of mountaineous landscapes. You could screenshot just about everything. There's a photo mode that supports that, but I hardly even used it during my first playthrough because I was too immersed to enter the settings. There's that sense of exploration and adventure, enhanced by your teen character who gets (often comically) annoyed as easily as she gets impressed and enthusiastic about all the new experiences. There's the sound design that does a lot for the atmosphere and immersion, and the same goes for all the bits of stories, myths and secrets. The nightly animations with excellently voice-acted letter passages give a sense of pacing.
Overall, this game feels much more refined than Heaven's Vault by the same devs (of which I loved the concept more than the execution). It's not perfect, but its level of polish is unfortunately rare these days.
Gameplay-wise, the update from 14th December (Look Further with path highlighting, helpful comments) helped with a lot of frustrations that I surely would have had.
I wanted to play this game for the narrative, exploration and beautiful landscapes. I'm absolutely terrible at dexterity-based gameplay and easily stressed by survival stuff, so I checked off ALL the accessibility settings. That made the survival aspects and rhythm sections almost trivial for me, which was awesome.
The adjusted rhythm sections don't require any rhythm if you can roughly time pressing spacebar on visual cues, and generally you don't even have to do them at all.
The platforming was still a bit annoying in some parts, but it wasn't terrible, which is the best thing I've ever said about platforming in any game. There's little precision and timing involved, just some figuring out how to reach places and when to rest for a few seconds. And in fact, if you're a fan of colourful profanities, you should make sure to fall at least a couple of times :behappy:
My biggest remaining source of frustration was the map system. I was terrible at identifying locations from some scribbles I found, even after my character told me I should be able to see them from the current peak and I spent a lot of time looking. Over time I learnt that I could usually just ignore them and find a different path, though, and I did discover more helpful shortcuts gradually.
Content and accessibility notes:
While you don't experience any violence directly (as far as I can tell), some of the stories you hear are quite grim. I encountered one mention of domestic violence.
Controls are keyboard or controller only and can't be remapped. There's an update in the works that lets you switch from moving with arrow keys to WASD.
UPDATE: There's now a beta build with remappable controls (except for some uses of Enter)!
My first playthrough took about 5 hours, which felt long enough for deep immersion and a "serious" adventure experience while also providing a clear break rather than derailing my life because I can't stop while I'm in the middle of something.
The game is meant to be replayed and can be played a lot of times without running out of new peaks, paths and secrets to discover. I've done two playthroughs so far and was a bit afraid that my second one would feel less exciting and enjoyable, but it was actually even better.
(Update: my 4th playthrough was still exciting: new routes, new discoveries, and new dialogue in old settings)
TL;DR: A masterpiece and probably my GOTY together with Saltsea Chronicles.
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