Loading…Review of Highland Song

Just finished playing this game through 3 times. Yep, you read that right—and this from a person who hates repeating anything. But part of the mystery and charm of Highland Song is that you never make the same journey twice. Moira is 15 and hates her mom in the unserious way that most 15-year-olds do. She has a letter from her Uncle Hamish, a lighthouse keeper a week’s journey away, inviting her to come see something special at the neaptide on Beltane (the Gaelic first day of summer). So, she decides to run away from home and make the journey on foot to see him.

If you’ve ever been to the highlands of Scotland, you know that there’s no such thing as an easy road through it—and that’s before the rain starts pelting down, and the wind starts howling, and the mists blow in so thick you can’t see your hand in front of you. And so Moira finds it harder than she imagined to make it to the coast in time—not just because of the terrain and the elements, which are stunningly beautifully rendered in the game, but also because of the tempting peaks, caves, ruins, secrets, and characters that materialize to waylay her from her mission—or, are they there to help her? Only one way to find out….

In terms of the gameplay, Highland Song is mostly a 2D platformer between unlocked map waypoints, interspersed with some rhythm sections that are triggered in the “valleys” between waypoints when you run into a magical red deer (red deer are one of my favorite denizens of the highlands, and they really do have a tendency to sneak around and pop their heads over cliff tops to spy on you as if they are up to the fairy queen’s business….). The deer prompts you to sprint, a highland reel kicks up, and you have to keep up, jumping with the X and Y buttons at the glowing prompts along your path; if you miss your cues too many times, the deer leaves you behind, the tune fades out with a ghostly echo, and you end up somewhere in the middle of your waypoints. If you manage to stick with it till the end of the tune—lovely ditties by Talisk and Fourth Moon—you end up at or even beyond your next waypoint, with a boost to your speed and stamina going forward, which honestly helps you cut a day or two off your journey.

The first time I played the game, I made it to the finish line 9 days late. Yep. I had tea and cookies with Hamish, and told him about my various adventures: in addition to the points of interest there are a couple of eye-popping events you can trigger…. And then there are the stories: when Moira bunks down in a cave mouth or an abandoned bothy each night, she remembers the tales Uncle Hamish told her in letters. Whenever she startles a goshawk, she hears voices she almost recognizes, a father and mother fleeing the fairy queen’s wrath with their half human, half fey child. If she falls off one too many cliffs and her life bar bottoms out, in the blackness she hears and read fragments of another story, about a fisherman marrying a giantess, and then she wakes up disoriented, far from where she fell (here I have to mention that the voice-acting is just top-notch, and if you don’t end up smitten with Moira in spite of her bratty 15-year-old self, I’ll eat the moldy sporran she finds in the cave mouth at Creag Carachd). Putting all these pieces together is a substantial part of the fun of the game and also a big reason to make multiple runs at it—because there’s no way to get all the pieces and clues, or visit all the peaks and valleys, in one run.

On my third run, I finally made it by Beltane, and I had collected enough of the pieces of the puzzle at that point to get the picture of what was going to happen. I don’t want to spoil it, though, because I hope you’ll play Highland Song for yourself and find your own way to the sea. I’m thinking I might go back in for a fourth time; there’s that shuttered lodge at Eagle’s Nest that I finally got the door code to, and I do wonder what’s inside….