A Highland Song: Review of the game about what the homeland is
After playing Heaven’s Vault and 80 Days this year and loving both, I’ve become a fan of the studio inkle. Few in the gaming industry can write as well as these Brits – their games, where text usually plays a key role, often win awards in the spirit of "Outstanding Achievement in Narrative", but unless you count the title of "Game of the Year", which 80 Days gave away Time magazine, they don’t get bigger awards or, God forbid, million-dollar sales.
A Highland Song, newly released game inkle, and was released in December, while everyone is hastily summing up the results of 2023: the studio seems to have traded the potential opportunity to stand for the required 30 seconds on the stage of The Game Awards for additional time in development. In all my time in the game I have not encountered a single bug – in 2023, a week after release! And this is only the first of many positive impressions.
Poetic realism
If I try to describe the game briefly, then A Highland Song — a sort of Dear Esther with gameplay. Dear Esther – this, in case you forgot, is the first mainstream “walking simulator”, where the player, wandering around the island, more or less randomly “stumbles upon” scraps of someone’s letters. The game, forcing its protagonist to move at a leisurely pace, encourages gamers to fantasize about what these fragments will ultimately add up to and what actually happened to the heroes, but in the end it still avoids a direct answer, leaving the ending open and without clarifying the details. Letters to Dear Esther are written in a deliberately pretentious language, and their aesthetic content prevails over the factual one – personally, I am completely inclined to consider the entire game primarily as a work in the genre of combinatorial poetry .
Dear Esther. I know people who don’t like this style, but on the other hand, the main theme of the game is accepting death. Is it appropriate to talk about this in the same language that we use to discuss topics like cooking or shopping??
U Dear Esther With A Highland Song a lot in common. Firstly, the setting: northern Scotland, gloomy skies, wind whistling in your ears, a lighthouse as a destination. Secondly, literature-centricity: even though "Song of the Highlands" is far from the most chatty game inkle, there is plenty of text, and it is written, as always from the studio, with talent (and the narration, in comparison with Esther much more straightforward). Third, magical realism: what’s in DE what happens does not always obey everyday logic, which in AHS the main character named Moira constantly discovers that local legends and beliefs did not arise out of nowhere.
There are also plenty of differences, and the most striking of them is the mood: in Dear Esther it is melancholy-depressive, and in A Highland Song inviting-nice-friendly – what in English is called the word wholesome. “Song of the Highlands” also has mechanics besides walking – on the way to the lighthouse, Moira, risking her health, climbs boulders (mechanically this is reminiscent of the latest “Zeldas”) and crawls through caves, and in relatively flat spaces, movement turns into a simple rhythm game – you need to press buttons to the beat while folk music with bagpipes plays in the background.
The only thing better than mountains are mountains that you have never been to before
Key Feature A Highland Song, in addition to the quality of the text and the charming accents of the characters, in the way she suggests perceiving space. To pass it, you need to overcome several mountain ranges, for which you need to look for transitions from one to another, and you want to do this quickly: Moira runs to her uncle, who asks her to hurry up, but there are many accessible paths, and if you are late, nothing fatal will happen. Games inkle never relied on difficulty: even if you fall into A Highland Song from a great height, the game will simply take away some hit points from the heroine and move her back to the top. Losing your health is also not a tragedy, on the contrary (I won’t go into details: spoilers). That is, passing from beginning to end does not present any problem, but “Song of the Highlands” is, first of all, not a journey to the final credits at any cost through the endless Scottish rains and winds, but the friends we met along the way, and the peaks we climbed.
My favorite mechanic A Highland Song https://sistersitescasino.co.uk/casinos/virgin-games-casino/ – improvised cards. Moira finds pieces of paper everywhere: newspaper clippings, advertising leaflets, sometimes her own drawings – which indicate the location of all sorts of secret caves, hiding places and the like. Having conquered the next peak, we can try to find out what specific place is depicted in the next such image – to do this, we need to stop and peer into the distance, comparing the pictures with the outlines of mountain ranges on the horizon and the shapes of fortress ruins.
This mechanic is interesting because it forces you to act contrary to typical gamer habits. Mainstream action games – imagine, for example, some Tomb Raider of the latter – they encourage you to constantly break down objects on the screen into ludic categories: this is a shelter – behind it you can hide from bullets (and it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the wall of a house, a cobblestone or, say, a box); these are supplies – they can be collected to be used later; this is a note – you can read it to better understand the plot; These are collectibles that are collected for trophies; and this tree is just decoration. The functional component of the object displaces the rest, and everything non-functional is filtered out, and the result is “Predator vision”. A Highland Song, on the contrary, he suggests scanning space with “herbivore vision”: taking in with your eyes and remembering as much as possible, constantly moving the camera away, because there are no excesses in its world – even the smallest details help to identify places in the drawings.
At all, A Highland Song I really want to praise how well she breaks herself down into layers for the completists. You can complete it in just 3-4 hours, without straining too much, cross it out of the backlog and abandon it. You can set a goal to meet every NPC and visit every peak – you can’t visit everything interesting at once, and in order to fill out your catalog, Moira will have to run from home to the lighthouse repeatedly (the landscape, if anything, does not change from time to time). The third level is to collect all the cards and find out the names of the vertices. You can also leave an offering on each of them – to do this, you need to get acquainted with local folklore, understand what kind of objects they should be, and find them along the way, for which the game also rewards with content. You can stop at any stage and at any moment: the mountains are not going anywhere.
At the same time, the locations are designed in such a way that they are not easy to explore in breadth. Again, large projects like The Last of Us encourage “vacuum cleaner mode”: you can run forward to the goal by the shortest route, but if you are not a speedrunner, it is much more logical to search every corner along the way – there may be loot that will make future challenges easier. IN A Highland Song this strategy will not work: from many locations the only way is forward, willy-nilly you have to move on. At the beginning of each race, you can try to choose a tactic: “Now I’ll be in a hurry to get to the lighthouse as quickly as possible and get achievement A.” – or “Now I will move slowly and thoughtfully to find out the names of all the mountains on the way and get achievement B”. But it’s not a fact that the tactics can be followed for a long time. My fastest playthrough, for example, began as an attempt to explore the area as thoroughly as possible – just in the process, a cave was accidentally discovered that took me from the beginning almost to the finish. At first, you just move wherever your eyes look and wait to see what interesting things the road will lead you to – the ability to think a few steps ahead (“In this race I will climb that mountain over there.”) will thin out only after many hours, when the Scottish Highlands, at first foreign, become practically native.
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
This is what the landscapes of real Scotland look like (photo courtesy of a friend of mine who lives near Edinburgh). It seems!
I hear my great homeland singing
A Highland Song – this is, excuse the terrible cliché, a game with a soul. What I mean: it seemed to me that it very successfully conveys the feeling that the authors wanted to put into it. The theme of “Song of the Highlands” is obvious – it is, first of all, a work about love for the homeland. Not in the official sense – “The place where I was born, and therefore I am obliged to associate myself with it and love it unconditionally,” but rather, “The place with which I feel a mental connection”; what the Germans call Heimat.
Again I will compare the game with Tomb Raider. There, as in many other open-world action games like the latest ones Far Cry, the player, exploring the space, conquers it: the avatar pumps up his own skills, opens more and more marks on the map, extracts valuables, clears outposts from enemies – in a word, remodels gaming ecosystem for yourself. Moira ecosystem A Highland Song quicker opens: what in the first hour of the game seemed like a pile of tall, but otherwise completely ordinary stones protruding from the ground, over time transforms into a living, breathing, legendary world, the history of which does not even need to be studied from notes – it tells itself.
There is a feeling of home: a place of power, where, as the film character said, "Alexander Nevsky", “every stone is a friend, every stick is a sister”. Together with Moira, we learn to find beauty in seemingly insignificant things, to become imbued with details and become attached to them. Taking into account magical realism A Highland Song turns into something close to how the reality around them is perceived by the African natives, who see spirits everywhere and do not understand what the white aliens mean when they say that they do not believe in any spirits. How is it possible – they don’t believe it? Here they are, everywhere! How can you not believe in what is right in front of you?.
Plus, it’s just a really great game. Once you accept her rules and throw away the formed habits (which can be difficult), she will drag you into the “flow”, from which you can then get out. One more mountain and that’s it! One more card, and I close Steam and sit down to write a review! So, what is that over there?? Oh, why is it already dark outside, where did the day go?.
Pros: sense of adventure; a friendly atmosphere that conveys love for the native land; talentedly written text; a catchy gameplay loop that makes you rethink your own habits; the opportunity to quickly complete the game and quit it without remorse, or find something to do for as many hours as you like.
Cons: The gameplay can be difficult to get used to; English version only (also with a Scottish accent).