A Highland Song Review (Switch eShop)

Scotland. The final frontier. At least, as far as games go. Despite many games being made in and about the glorious north, very few actually represent its natural wonder without also featuring an embarrassing stereotype of haggis-eating, ginger-bearded, tartan-clad men, and/or clobbering the English (although we do deserve that last one).

A Highland Song, the latest offering from the narrative game wizards at Inkle, steps lightly in to right this wrong. Its mountains and its music flow like honey, showing a side of the highlands that most of us rarely get to see without taking a long train up north. And you, as the teen runaway Moira, are tasked with exploring this daunting mountain range with one goal: to get to the sea.

Moira is a typical teenager, meaning she wants to put as much distance between her and her mam as possible. Her ticket to freedom comes in the form of a letter from her uncle Hamish, who lives in a lighthouse just over the other side of about two dozen hills and mountains, summoning her to come visit before Beltane (Gaelic May Day) in about a week's time. Most of A Highland Song is about climbing up, down, around, and through these beautifully painted mountains, all of which need to be mapped, named, and crowned by Moira with whatever treasures she has to hand.

If you've played Inkle's 80 Days, this may sound familiar. Get from X to Y in Z number of days, find interesting story tidbits as you go, and try not to die along the way. In a sense, it's a direct descendant of 80 Days, and you can see a lot of similarities as you wind your way around this stretch of granite, heather and gorse. But 80 Days is about two adults spanning the globe to find fame and success; A Highland Song is about one young girl walking to the edge of her tiny world and finding herself.

Climbing these mountains is no easy task, even for someone with experience and equipment, and Moira has neither. Her little lungs can't handle climbing a sheer cliff, so you need to find another way. Her small hands will lose their grip as you attempt to drop down a steep drop, and she'll often fall and graze her knee, scrape her toe, or bend her elbow, taking valuable chunks off her health bar. If she can't find anywhere comfortable and sheltered to sleep — a bothy, a shed, or a cavemouth will do — that same health bar will shrink in size, and if you're caught out in a rainstorm, it'll drain slowly but constantly, limiting how many mistakes you can make.

Luckily, you'll find maps to shortcuts along the way which you'll need to scale the nearest peak to pin down. It's a little test of cartography, matching hill silhouettes to their simplified versions on these scraps of paper, checking that the landmarks line up just right. These shortcuts are your saviours, allowing you to skip difficult sections of the hillsides and shorten your journey to make it to the lighthouse in time.

But until you have a significant number of those maps and pinpoint the shortcuts, you'll have to do things the hard way. And it is hard — there are difficulty settings, but even the mildest one is punishing enough to fray your nerves at times. You'll be forgiven if, like us, you cultivate a sense of being a worried parent as you watch Moira tumble down loose scree, listen to her nervous cries of pain, and hear her panting for air as she pulls her fragile body up a vertical rockface. "Mum's gonnae kill me," she'll say, and you'll nod in agreement. "I'm gonnae die out here!"

Bu Inkle's strength has always been its narrative, and we found ourselves eagerly awaiting all of these story threads to be tied up into a neat bow, only to be a little disappointed. These shortcut maps hint at people leaving secret messages and hiding treasures for one another — but they never seem to go anywhere. And if Moira is running away from home, why are there seemingly no consequences for her reckless journey (or is that just the boring grown-up in us talking)? And what exactly is the point in the rhythm sections, which break up the climbing by asking Moira to run to the jaunty but irregular beat of Scottish folk music?

Our best answer to this question is our heroine herself. Moira, being a teen whose world extends only to the nearby coast and back, has an active imagination, and her mind is steeped in Gaelic folktales. As she runs, she hears Hamish in her head, writing to her about the witch-queen Morag, the elusive selkies, and all the myths and legends that have soaked into these mountains like the blood of clans past. Moira, bless her heart, takes it all at face value — but as she explores, you start to see this magic blur into reality, too. Echoes lead you through secret cave passages. The goshawk, an avian emissary of Morag, watches over you. Secret messages carved in ruins hint at a long-lost cult of some kind. It's hard not to fall in love with this richly woven tapestry of a world, even when the mountain-climbing gets irritatingly backtrack-y.

Like 80 Days, A Highland Song wants you to play again, and again, and again. In the first run, you're underpowered, underprepared, and don't yet understand that sometimes the way to progress is not obvious, leading to a frustrating experience. The second run is better. The magic of the hills saves all your shortcuts and maps, and the story builds on what you already know, sketching a fuller picture of why Moira's running away, and what she's running towards. The third is better still. The fourth run is close to something truly great.

But the pull of mystery and discovery isn't quite enough to mitigate the necessity of repetition. You'll tire of trekking up the same mountains, hearing the same words from Hamish, and getting stuck on the same tricky bit of hill over and over again. You'll try to put together the puzzle pieces of which item to use where, like keys and coins used on doors and statues, only to find that you dropped that particular item on top of a hill way back at god-knows-where. You'll want to take new paths through the hills to find new stories, but realise that you don't remember which way you went last time. A little sherpa-like assistance — or better yet, more variety at the beginning — might have made it a little easier to work our way from the bottom to the top again. After all, don't they say you never climb the same mountain twice?