In our review of A Highland Song we found ourselves analyzing an extremely particular product, since we cannot talk about this title without it look inside yourself. Towards that sense of escape and recklessness that characterized our adolescence and which perhaps is still part of us in a latent way today.
A Highland Song is a portrait, unfortunately imperfect, of a specific moment in our existence. That moment we are in looking for something unspecified and smoky. That moment of challenge towards the world around us, but also towards ourselves, which serves to bring us to an apparently banal but always satisfying conclusion, the possibility of saying: “I've done it!“.
Don't look down, Moira
A Highland Song is a game with a dual protagonist. One is the adorable Moira, a 15-year-old Scottish teenager who wants to face the dangers that life puts before her, sometimes regretting and sometimes surprising herself. The other protagonist is certainly the context. The Scottish Highlands they will serve as a memorable backdrop to our adventure for the entire duration of the game, which is short in itself, but with high rate of replayability.
Moira's adventure is divided into moments that can pass from “chill” to deep tension in a few moments. The girl, lost among those hills that also stopped the Romans from invading Scotland, will have to deal with tiredness, bad weather and a sense of perdition.
The path that the game puts before us It's not linear at alland in a possible second run we will hardly find ourselves facing the same road as the first time we played, since the landscape unfolds in an irregular manner, without reference points specific. We will find maps that will take us in a direction, and objects that will make us think we can resolve situations that we have left behind who knows where. In our first run, for example, we found a knife to cut the rope of a boat… but we never found the boat and we fell into a ravine.
A Highland Song is a game apparently simplewhich does not require expertise in using the controller, but which requires some inuse of reason. We will repeatedly find ourselves in situations that will make us feel tiny compared to the rock face to be climbed, while our stamina drops and the rain lets us slide down.
We will keep in contact overwhelmed by despair the moment the snow prevents our protagonist from running easily or from finding a way out of a cave, and we will think we have lost the road, that sunny road that just before was making us feel so safe before the darkness of the night would curl around us.
But then suddenly we will sleep among the trees to regain some energy and to hope for some light that can guide us again. We'll come out and review that beautiful landscapenow once again familiar and devoid of hostility, while the notes of a splendid folk soundtrack they will make us feel safe again. Again at home.
And we will understand that A Highland Song put us in front of a very realistic state of mind. She threw us in the mud and rain to make us find a way to resurface when we had almost lost hope. And in doing so, she gave us the opportunity to believe in ourselves.
This makes Moira one very powerful protagonista character who seems to have emerged from what is a halfway between a teen movie and a novel by Stephen King. Which collects the dramas and hopes of an adolescence that spiritually perhaps never ends.
Let's jump together with a deer
The gameplay of A Highland Song, as we said before, is not very complicated in its controls and is basically divided into three clear moments:
- The survival part: which places us in an exploration context that (to a MUCH SMALLER extent) could remind us of a Death Stranding, where we will walk blind and calculate our movements based on the weather, the time of day and the degree of danger of a climb.
- The puzzle part: in which we will find ourselves deciphering maps that we will find around to better understand some routes and choose the road more wisely
- The Rhytm Game part: definitely the most far-reaching moment of the work, in which after all the attention paid to the path and the ravines, we will find a deer that will invite us to run together to him with a remarkable musical urge that will see us hopping along a path to the rhythm of the music and will take us profoundly away from our original path to get closer to new places to discover
The mix of these three atmospheres of gaming will accompany us throughout our journey which, we must say, Unfortunately, sometimes it will be frustrating, and Moira's mobility, not exactly very precise, will make us miss jumps that will make us fall into places with no way out. And all this within a very specific deadline: La Beltane: a Scottish pagan festival celebrated between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.
This will be our deadline in the game. Arrive in time for the Beltane. Even if in the first run we will almost certainly arrive at the party over and at that point… do you remember when we talked to you about replayability?
You never stop growing
In short, all things considered, A Highland Song is an artistically precious adventure which puts many good ideas on the table but does not develop any of them to their maximum potential, but certainly shows the talent of the independent studio Inkle which we hope to see grow as our protagonist grows during her journey. With the awareness of a teenager who discovers the problems of being an adult and who manages to teach them even to those who find themselves with the pad in their hand. In a mixed process of frustration and rebirth.
#Highland #Song #Review #journey #maturity
