A Highland Song

Much to my dismay I couldn't play this game. Not because of any gameplay problems but because the sound mixing is not particularly good. There is NO WAY to turn down all the grunting, groaning and huffing the girl does beacuse it doesn't seem tied to the Voice Volume, making those sounds stand out a lot above everything else. I could not find a good balance between music volume, voice volume and just turning everything down so I didn't have to hear this loud, damned grunting. Sound quality on the voice recordings are also not that great. The man's voice was fine but the woman's voice recording, well, I could hear the room she was sitting in, recording herself. It's all beautiful. The music is wonderful and the performances are good, but it's not mixed well and that's a really big issue for me that's rather good at noticing things like that...

As a native Scotsman who now lives in Thailand this game has been on my radar for a while. When it popped up on a Steam sale for the price of a big Leo I was like *hell yes* - I even bought it as a gift for an American friend of mine. First off - the good bits. The use of Scots vernacular is cute and funny and I really like it. Mainstream review sites when this game first came out in 2023 praised its graphic design and its a beautiful game, even down to the constant rain. The graphics are gorgeous. The protagonist, Moira McKinnon, is rendered in a really funny way, she gets out of breath, needs a rest and occasionally spits out some 'I'm knackered' type of vocabulary. I found this hilarious and super entertaining. The controls though. Every game for the last bazillion years uses the WASD system so why are the original keymaps set to cursor keys?!? This makes no sense to me - its a huge barrier to entry and even though a patch allows to remap the keys some of the original keymaps overlap the A button and its a process to make the keymapping normal. Its a terrible design decision and even a few hours into the game I'm getting twisty finger trying to handle the zoom and view map thing. Its really annoying. Final annoyance, and the biggest. Ultimately this is a parallax platformer with a really quirky story and utterly gorgeous scenery. The wider map is rendered beautifully but the actual interaction with the environment and the depth between rocks / cliffs / caves / hills when Moira is moving around the map is near impossible to identify. I found myself jumping around trying to go *into* to the environment - which oddly doesn't move, when the background environment does. Why doesn't the immediate environment follow the same parallax rules? I found myself getting lost constantly because the actual interactive areas of what Moira is moving though DON'T MOVE - while the wider parallax world DOES move. The inclusion of Scottish folk music, and somebody brave enough to make a game about the Scottish Highlands I absolutely applaud you for - the art direction is incredible. I still have no idea what the Deer is for, but .. I like it anyway. There's a lot to like about this game. I'd give it a solid 7/10 but it could be a 9/10 if normal keyboard controls could be used and better visual cues in the environment could be improved.

Highland Song is a really charming game set in the scottish highlands, unfortunately it gave me some serious motion sickness and I could thus not finish it. If you are sensitive to motion sickness, sit this one out.

Feels unfinished - poorly coded controls. If you get lost or stuck, you have to start over and lose all progress. Just climbing and climbing and falling and resting and complaining about the rain until you're willing to just start over. No real guidance on which way to go, so you just keep climbing and running and complaining about rain. Can't skip through cutscenes, poetry, songs etc. even if you've been through them several times before. Boring, kinda frustrating, wish it had been developed further.

Story-rich adventure/exploration, with bits of platforming, climbing, geoguessing and even a few (light) rhythmic runner sequences. Young Moira McKinnon undertakes a journey across the wilderness of the Highlands, aiming to reach her uncle Hamish's lighthouse within a week. The game plays on a 2D plane but across multiple layers of parallax, creating a real sense of depth and offering tons of branching paths to explore. This is tied to one of its most interesting core mechanics: pathfinding, not only in the sense of going here or there, but also, as hinted above, literally "geoguessing" points of interest in the scenery using vague hints, recollections and scribbled maps, then going on-site to confirm the map and uncover a new passage. Those eureka moments are wonderful and the game is ripe with them (across the multiple playthrough needed to 100% the achievements, I've confirmed over 80 maps, and I'm sure there's even more to discover). Finding these paths is also a massive help to your goal of reaching the lighthouse in time, which is not a given on the first playthrough, but gets a lot easier as your knowledge of the land expands. And what a beautiful land it is. inkle's world building talent shines once again, with 36 peaks to scale and explore, all filled with history and folk tales. The oil-painted sceneries are gorgeous, and you'll be looking at them a lot. Adding to those immaculate vibes, the writing and voice acting have that lovely scottish flavour, which blends in perfectly with the environment and the music. Some very minor nitpicks - climbing can sometimes get a little frustrating, and you may experience frame drops on certain weather-heavy vistas - but nothing to offset the many areas where A Highland Song truly shines.

A very hard game, too easy to go around and around in circle, and get stuck in a loop. After 4 hours I gave up.

Really wanted to like it, had it wishlisted for ages, got it in the sale for a fiver, ended up refunding after 30mins because it feels [i]very[/i] unfinished, almost like a gamejam prototype - and its also just not particularly fun. There is some good to talk about; it takes place in a weird alternate history Scotland, the girl is dressed in a modern manner but says things that only really make sense if its the high middle ages. Likewise the story will reference real objects, groups and events but with a strange fantasy spin. This was all quite compelling and I wish more had been done with it. The animation of the girl is good, fluid and quite charming. The art style is also impressive when zoomed out, even if a little patchy close up. The climbing and platforming is not particularly varied, interesting or fun. The controls are pretty unintuitive and limiting, sometimes you'll accidentally press the wrong button and she'll fall asleep for the night and you'll be punished by listening to a rambling narration about a fisherman being a fisherman. A lot of the dialogue feels like placeholder text and the sound mixing is very inconsistent, some voice lines are flat and you can even hear environmental buzz from the room they're recording in. The writing isn't particularly deep or meaningful, its all thin background colour. At moments it seems like they're going to establish some kind of story beat or plot point only for it to not go anywhere. The rhythm game elements don't particularly work, no matter how it is calibrated, the timing is unrelated to the beat, sprinting in these sections causes screen-tearing, the music is genuinely unpleasant to hear - its repeating phrases of twee ceilidh music but badly blown out. There is also the issue that being on or off beat has no effect, there's no benefit to doing well, or consequence to doing badly. There's a item collection mechanic out of 1990s point and click adventures, rusty keys for rusty doors, broken poles for replacement levers, you know the schtick - but to truly engage with this would require an [i]insanep[/i] amount of back-tracking and it largely feels slapped on and unintegrated, like the rhythm game. I have other issues with it, but it boils down to A Highland Song being too finickity and awkward to be a cozy game, and there's not enough actual game there for anyone looking for something deeper.

I really wanted to love this game, but was so disappointed by the level of exploration and the challenge. I want the challenge to come in musical timing and I wanted the hills to be linear. I didn't make it in time? That's dumb. I wish the game was laid out differently. Oh well. I might give it another try in the future, but it really wasn't like what I was expecting.