A surprise discovery I made a little way into A Highland Song, the latest from Overboard and Heaven's Vault developer Inkle: it doesn't matter if you fall off a cliff. This, I think, is quite weird for a climbing game. And especially one where a sense of peril seems at first to be such a central part of what it's trying to do. As a girl named Moira, you must run from a miserable home in the Scottish highlands to visit your uncle, at a faraway lighthouse. You spend a week, or probably more, scrabbling up the side of mountains, sheltering from storms in cave mouths, spelunking into dead ends in search of directional clues - you've no actual map, by the way - and you do this racing against both a shrinking health bar and each day's ever-fading sun.
But! No actual peril. Fall off or run out of health and you just pop back to where you were before. The result, combined with a few other snags, makes for a less than stellar game about hiking, or survival, or indeed climbing. But it makes for a wonderful game about the mountains - about experiencing the natural world, in fact - which is what A Highland Song is really aiming to be.
An example: A Highland Song isn't afraid to have you do things without purpose. Along your journey through layered peaks and valleys you'll find items, mostly some form of rubbish, which may or may not prove useful down the line. A discarded crisp packet contains the torn page of a mountain guide, to serve as a makeshift map. A buried key might open a nearby building, for some essential shelter. Or a particularly sturdy stick, which I thought must surely come in handy, may end up with no use at all. Between triumphant trips to mountain peaks you might come across long and tantalising paths to a dead end. A deep cave, say, struggled through for precious minutes - in-game hours - with no way out the other side.
A Highland Song review - a magical sonnet hidden beneath a game
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The Lycans are the wolf creatures. They caught a virus that was not a cure and lost their appearance and turned into creatures.
