Pixelhunter – Year Walk & The Silent Age

With its large clickable interface the iPad has always seemed the perfect platform for point and click adventures, but rather than original works its roster is generally swollen with ports of PC games old and new. Whilst it is of course wonderful to have yet another excuse to play Broken Sword, games like the compellingly original Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery are still a little rarer.

The last month or so has seen the release of the first episode of the dark serial killer drama Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller by Phoenix Online Studios, the pixel art cyberpunk Gemini Rue by the wonderful Wadjet Eye Games, and the charmingly cartoonish Runaway by Péndulo Studios (the Spanish studio behind Yesterday). All good games (and worthy of note here), but all made for mouse and keyboard. More exciting was the release of two little Scandinavian indie gems designed specifically for tablets, and demonstrating that the idea of games as art is taken very seriously in the Nordic countries.

Year Walk
With its roots in Scandinavian folk lore and its aesthetic strongly reminiscent of silent film and magic lantern shows, the magical Year Walk by Swedish brothers Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardebäck, collectively known as Simogo, is a deeply atmospheric, almost spiritual experience. The title refers to the titular mysterious tradition, a kind of Nordic take on the Aborigine’s walkabout, although inevitably shot through with a peculiarly North European dark introspection (don’t know what I mean? Watch any film by Ingmar Bergman).

In this sense you are actively undertaking the actions required by the year walk itself: interpreting things you see on your way as signs and omens for the coming year.

Embarking on such a journey you wander a snowy landscape in first person by pulling the screen left and right, forward and backwards, the landscape falling into place around you like a children’s pop-up book as you travel from node to node. Your view never turns however, giving you quite a strange feeling of being disembodied and lost in the woods. In this sense you are actively undertaking the actions required by the year walk itself: interpreting things you see on your way as signs and omens for the coming year. You’re only hope is to find the landmark in eachscreen (a babbling brook, a rotten tree stump, a set of hoofed footprints ominously leading into the distance) and desperately try to fit them into a pattern in your mind. In this sense you are actively undertaking the actions required by the year walk itself: interpreting things you see on your way as signs and omens for the coming year. As seems to be the case with most of the great recent indie games form, content and media are perfectly working in harmony to create an experience that is much deeper than the sum of its parts.

Rather like the excellent Limbo (also Scandinavian, as it happens) the game sports a decidedly minimalist sound design and deliberately holds back any information, heightening the sense of mystery. The game comes with a separate free companion app that gives a little insight into the history of the strange creatures you encounter, such as the Brook Horse. Some welcome and interesting context that doesn’t get in the way of the mysterious, evocative experience of playing the game itself.

Silent Age
In Silent Age you play a Burt Reynolds look-a-like who works as a janitor in a science lab in the seventies. One day you follow a trail of blood into a lab to find a dying old man who claims to have come from the future to avert environmental catastrophe, and pushes a time travel device into your hands, begging you to find him in the present and forewarn him of his demise. The device, which is at the centre of all the puzzles in the game, takes the form of a big green button that sits at the bottom of the screen and just begs to be pressed. This being an iPad you can do just  that, and guess what? The result of succumbing to that most ancient of human desires is a satisfying and instantaneous flash that transitions you between the present and a point about forty years in the future, where the buildings are tattered and overgrown and strewn with skeletons. It’s hard to believe that such a simple mechanic could be so satisfying and yet it could never work half so well with a mouse because of its tactile nature.

Silent Age is largely made by Thomas Ryder (responsible for graphics, story, design and music), who founded Danish indie House on Fire in 2011 with Linda Randazzo (programming) and Uni Dahl (programming and production). The self funded first episode of this minimalist drama takes the theme of environmental meltdown and time-travel, which was recently explored in A New Beginning by Daedalic Entertainment, in a more subtle minimal direction, eschewing grand locations, voice acting and inventory puzzles for elegantly simple, yet clever logic puzzles in very contained settings.

Its visuals are beautifully stylised; all clean, sharp lines and bold colour gradients. Through its subtle attention to detail and sharp, witty writing it’s able to not only perfectly capture its sense of time and place (essential for a game about time), but also to transmit a vivid sense of loneliness and loss that are often missing from bigger post apocalyptic games and films. House on Fire are currently raising money for the second episode on their website.