A Highland Song Review (D00mnoodle)
A highland song sounds great in premise, a gorgeous hand painted 2D hiking adventure in the scottish countryside. But the actual gameplay is not nearly as magical as said premise. Your character gets tired instantly during climbing sections or regular running but then there are these actual scripted running sequences where you suddenly don't have this limitation. As a result the game is not immersive enough for a realistic climbing sim but also too restrictive for a fun relaxing climbing game. The exhaustion effects that requires you to rest further compounds the annoying mechanics, especially since the frequent weather does not allow you to sleep without proper shelter. The end result is that you constantly feel limited while trying to explore, and the many pathways that you can take make it hard to explore everything as backtracking with these limits is highly annoying.
So you feel like you're missing things or taking wrong paths but going back is a nuissance. Thus you push on untill you reach some cliffs that you can't mount due to being too steep or high requiring you to turn around anyways. The game's systems just make exploring not fun and roads are so convoluted that you get lost all the time. There's also a time limit to get the good ending so the game also makes you doubt your paths that way. You could say this gives reasons to replay it but frankly the game is annoying enough to not even want to beat it once. You could say i'm just not getting the game, and i'm sure that i am, but to me a game needs to be fun and all these exhaustion, weather and other systems just make it not so.
I'm certain that the game has a captivating story to tell and i'll be sure to watch a longplay of someone who knows which paths to take on youtube. The game is voiced with some great talent but in the 40 minutes that i played i wasn't gripped enough by their story to slog through the systems that didn't click for me. The presentation did though and it's the reason i picked this game up. The art is simply gorgeous though and the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. So if you're more patient and just want to relax/unwind, then i'm certain this game will be ideal for you. To me the systems try too hard to hinder you to be enjoyable so i'm not recommending it. If you do though be sure to pick up the bundle with the OST or just buy it seperately as it's a great piece of music.