Year Walk

Warning: this game contains jumpscares.

I honestly hope this little gem will get to be known by way more people, cause it deserves a lot of praise! A beautiful delve into northern folklore with quite clever (but never frustrating) puzzles and a beautiful artstyle; Also, the way details are slowly uncovered and especially the means by which it happens, made the experience even more engaging (as another reviewer stated, you will keep mentally coming back to the plot even after being done with the game, and that to me is better than mere longevity in terms of gameplay hours).

Un breve y muy ambiental juego de puzles con tintes de terror. Su universo basado en el folklore nórdico es interesante y jugablemente es accesible, pero también desafiante.

Year Walk is one of those rare games that feels less like a playthrough and more like a haunting. It’s a short experience on paper, but emotionally it lingers far longer — a winter ritual carved out of folklore, grief, and the strange logic of old stories. You wander through a snow‑drowned forest, guided only by the soft crunch of footsteps and the uncanny silhouettes of creatures pulled from Swedish myth. The game never rushes you. But it is a bit scary, particularly at a few key jumpscares. What surprised me most is how tragic the story becomes once you reach the end and unlock the researcher’s journal. Those entries reframe everything — the puzzles, the apparitions, the violence — and suddenly the game’s quiet strangeness becomes heartbreakingly human. It’s a story about obsession, loss, and the way folklore preserves the emotional truth of a tragedy long after the facts have faded. It took me almost three hours to finish, but that pacing felt right. Year Walk rewards lingering. It rewards letting the atmosphere breathe. And when the final pieces click into place, the emotional weight hits with the force of a folktale that’s been waiting centuries to be understood. It’s beautiful. It’s sorrowful. And it’s one of the most fascinating uses of folklore I’ve seen in a game — not as decoration, but as the very bones of the narrative.

Straszne i piękne.

Beautiful and creepy, but sparse and directionless. The encyclopedia and journal are enthralling, more so than the gameplay.

3/10 I'd have preferred a walking sim instead of a bunch of tedious puzzles. Atmosphere and mythologies were kinda cool, at least. As a game, I can't recommend.

美术很棒的游戏。在漆黑的白林中穿行，小心那些潜伏在黑暗中的家伙

I already played the game in 2014 on an Ipad. It was also released on Steam. A nice little mthyical and eerie experience into a norse ritual and legend. Eerie but not scary or gory. I can recommend it with best will. It will keep you entertained for around 4 hours. And i recommend having a piece of paper and a pencil ready because you want to write down patterns and other discoveries you will find on your walk.

You have to ask yourself: can folklore and a nice atmosphere alone carry a game for you? If the answer is “Yes!”, then this game might be for you. Because Year Walk lives almost entirely off its folklore. It lives off giving you a small glimpse into Sweden’s mythological creatures, teaching you a bit about the Årsgång and letting you experience a pseudo-folkloristic story. For me, that simply wasn’t enough, and it left me with a feeling of emptiness. That said, the puzzles are fairly simple (as long as you’re not tone-deaf). The game does a good job of conveying the loneliness of an Årsgång, and it genuinely feels unsettling at times. There is a framing narrative, but it’s neither particularly interesting nor emotional. And one thing I’m definitely not convinced by is the idea that it’s good storytelling to structure a game in a way where newspaper articles at the very end have to explain to the player what the actual plot even was.