The Making Of: Year Walk

You begin hungry, alone and cold. As the clock chimes midnight, you open your front door and venture out into the cold Swedish night. You have fasted. You have locked yourself away from human company, and you have even shunned the warmth of the fire. Now you are ready to embark on your solitary, perilous journey.

Heading through the dark forest, you hear the noise of your footsteps in the freshly fallen snow. Somewhere overhead an owl hoots in the trees. Supernatural creatures lurk in the darkness, ready to drive you mad. If you make it to the church, the most dangerous part of your walk still awaits: an encounter with the goat-headed ‘Church Grim’.

The medieval Swedish tradition of ‘årsgång’ (or ‘year walking’) sounded like the plot of a videogame long before it inspired one. A vision quest, a spiritual journey that purportedly rewarded the brave – or desperately reckless – with a glimpse of the future, it was designed to test the walker’s mental and physical strength.

“There is something about the structure of year walking in itself that lends itself so well to a game,” explains Simon Flesser, one half of indie development team Simogo. “I mean it’s a quest of sorts, with a very clear goal and trials to overcome.”

Ironically, though, Simogo’s award-winning 2D firstperson adventure game Year Walk didn’t begin life as a videogame at all. In 2012, Swedish screenwriter Jonas Tarestad gave Flesser a screenplay to read called Årsgång. Infused with themes from Swedish mythology, an assortment of weird creatures and a dark love story, Årsgång couldn’t find the funding it needed for movie production. So Flesser and his Simogo co-founder Magnus ‘Gordon’ Gardebäck proposed turning it into a videogame instead.

Best known for the cartoon-like art style of Kosmo Spin, Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit, the Malmö-based developer seemed an unlikely studio to tackle mystical quests that come with a whiff of sulphur. But, according to Flesser, it was something he was ready for.

“We had been talking for so long about doing something more sinister, and doing it in an elegant way that didn’t feel like your typical gory horror game. While the script was definitely horror-oriented, it had a very unique tone that clicked really well with our ambitions.”

After Beat Sneak Bandit’s release on iOS in February 2012, Simogo officially started work on its next project. Like a year walker listening to the clock strike midnight before venturing out into the dark, its new title would be a leap into the unknown. What would the team find? And what would the future hold? No one was quite sure.

Year Walk is a unique title not just for Simogo, but for the App Store itself. Nestled among familiar, colourful timewasters such as Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, this haunting, 2D puzzler has the art style of a Gothic-themed popup book and the circular narrative of a Jorge Luis Borges short story. It belies the often-stated truth that simplicity is the key to iOS success.

Far from easily graspable, Year Walk treats its audience with startling indifference. You begin trudging through the snow – the crunch of fresh snow underfoot just one of many atmospheric audio effects – with no idea where you’re going or what you’re supposed to achieve. There’s no title screen, no opening logos and no tutorial.

“We wanted to communicate a feeling of insecurity and being lost,” says Flesser of the game’s spartan UI. “It was also important to us to break free from the confines of what a game must have, to make it feel truly special. In many ways it feels just as much like a silent movie or interactive pictures as a game.”

The sense of disorientation also fed into the game’s music. Simogo spent much of early development cycle listening to Elephant And Castle, a 2011 album by Swedish musicians Matti Bye and Mattias Olsson. Its jaunty yet creepy fairground vibe has an ominous feel. If Jack the Ripper and Dario Argento ran a Victorian carousel, they’d probably pipe it in as musical accompaniment.

For Year Walk, Simogo wanted to discover something equally haunting and jarring, and the team found it in the work of fellow Swede Daniel Olsén. He describes his evocative soundscape for the game as a mix of “Swedish folk and electro acoustic music, mystery and melancholia”. It certainly is disturbing, a discordant mix of old-fashioned music-box melodies and more orchestral pieces that blend with the sparse sound effects: creaking floorboards, snow trampled underfoot and hooting owls.

Originally conceived as a thirdperson adventure, which would have been in keeping with the perspective of Simogo’s previous games, Year Walk evolved during the early stages of development into something more intimate.

“At first, it just didn’t feel like a Simogo game could be viewed from a firstperson view,” says Flesser. “But then I started to think about adventure games like Ace Attorney, or Another Code, in which many scenes are actually viewed from a firstperson view, and it suddenly didn’t feel as unfitting.” The first prototype, put together in March 2012, was designed to showcase the shift in perspective to firstperson 2D. Walking through the game’s snowy, almost monochrome environments is like being inside a picture. You navigate left and right using screen swipes and move forward and backward through set depths. Exploring the wintry woods you discover misshapen babies, strange symbols carved into trees and wooden outhouses where creepy dolls hang from strings in the darkness.

“The main purpose of the prototype was to make the illusion of walking in 3D, even though everything is layered 2D,” says Gardebäck, who handles the coding side of things at Simogo. “We learned a lot about the look and feel of the actual transition between ‘rooms’, and also of the interaction itself. We always aim to implement a control scheme that feels natural.”

That firstperson perspective in 2D environments gives the game space a strange, disorienting feel. It also adds to the mounting sense of horror as the story itself unfolds. Daniel, the player’s character, meets his girlfriend Stina in the mill and learns that she’s destined to marry another man. He decides to take a year walk on New Year’s Eve to see what the future holds, ignoring her advice that it may be dangerous.

It is a rare moment of human contact in a game largely populated by uncanny creatures. Haunting the forest is the Huldra, a strange and silent fairy with twig-like hair and clasped hands. She’s joined by the game’s most memorable creation, the Brook Horse – a humanoid nag dressed in Edwardian clothing which emerges from a forest lake.

“I wanted the creatures to feel unexpected in their appearance,” says Flesser of the Brook Horse, whose Victorian-style suit was inspired by BBC costume drama Downton Abbey. “I wanted them to have this odd sensation of not being ‘quite there’. I mean, they are there, and they are looking at you, but in many ways it feels like they are also completely indifferent to you being around them, which I think gives them all a very mysterious aura.”

Year Walk isn’t a fight-or-flight survival horror. There are no weapons and no scenes in which you’re chased through the game’s environments. There’s not even a fail state – beyond being stumped on how to proceed next. Instead, the horror is psychological: the slow drip, drip, drip of foreboding as the game pushes you inexorably towards its inevitable finale at the church.

If you visit the minimalist but brightly coloured office of Simogo in Malmö, you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the Year Walk puzzle box. Crafted by Flesser’s former colleague, Magnus Eriksson, the box is a real-life recreation of the game’s most enigmatic item, a wooden chest with a shape-coded combination dial.

Placed near the start of the game, the box is infamous for being a frustrating puzzle – an object that apparently serves no purpose. You can even complete the game (at least the game’s first ending) without opening it. But, judging by the chatter in Internet forums, it’s an item that casts a strange spell over players: too obviously important to be brushed aside as a red herring, yet too cryptic to be easily solved.

That it should have become a real-life item on a shelf in Simogo’s offices, albeit one that doesn’t actually open, seems fitting. Year Walk is a game that exploits the intersections between reality and dream-like states, paradoxically immersing players in its world by explicitly taking them out of it.

It’s something that’s laced into the very game design itself. On the most basic level, you need to keep a pen and paper beside you while you play, to jot down strange runes and map the labyrinthine environments. But it’s there too in the puzzles themselves, which make innovative use of the iPad touchscreen.

The game’s most fully realised puzzle – a search for misshapen murdered babies called Mylings – is one that asks you to go beyond the environments themselves. You get the sense that there is a larger world hiding beyond the edges of the screen, one that you can only access by escaping the frame surrounding the game space by ‘walking’ your fingertips out of it, or by turning the iPad upside down to reveal a hidden ghostly infant hiding above you.

“It’s one of the highlights of the game,” says Gardebäck of the Myling puzzle, explaining that it was also one of the first parts of Year Walk to be implemented. “We wanted Year Walk to have this feeling of being more than what is on the screen,” Flesser continues. “We wanted it to feel like the player had awakened something ancient that is far too big to understand, and how that would drip out into their world because of it.” Generating a cryptic mystery that crosses out of the game itself is something that finds its greatest expression in the Year Walk Companion app. An interactive encyclopaedia written by Swedish folklore expert Theodor Almsten, it was released separately on the App Store. Bringing the player deeper into the experience by paradoxically taking them out of the game, the Companion illustrates Simogo’s willingness to experiment with metagaming.

While many originally thought the Companion was nothing more than a glorified guidebook, it is actually an essential part of Year Walk’s grand puzzle. Without it, it’s impossible to crack the game’s second ending involving the wooden puzzle box. It’s explicitly perverse: the game’s first puzzle is the one that can only be solved last – by leaving the game itself.

For Flesser, the idea of letting the interactive world bleed into reality is fascinating. He’s surprised it hasn’t been explored more. “When you are going through all those notes, especially the hidden journal notes, you are effectively playing the role as yourself. You are an investigator unravelling the mystery of all these events that started on that cold night. That concept – of players roleplaying as themselves in their own world – is really intriguing.”

To date, Year Walk has been downloaded close to 150,000 times – which, at a premium price of £2.49 ($3.99), is an achievement. “It’s been overwhelming and for us, being a small studio, the numbers are great,” says Flesser. More pleasing than the revenues for Simogo, though, is the creative confidence the game’s success has given the team. “It was a gamble, both creatively and financially, but we have this philosophy that we can, to some extent, afford for every second game to be a financial flop,” Flesser explains. “But the biggest pressure for me personally was definitely creative. It would have been discouraging to see something we believe is so unique flopping. I think I unconsciously told myself that it would have been proof that everyone just wants the same thing over and over again.”

Instead, Year Walk has helped the fledgling studio expand its vision as it heads into its fifth project, Device 6. Flesser says that this surreal thriller will explore the metagaming concept further. “It’s overall an even more minimalistic and slower experience than Year Walk. In many ways it’s doing the opposite of where a lot of gaming is going: no explosions, no action [and it] requires a lot of reading and thinking.”

Most importantly of all, Year Walk proved that Simogo’s unusual take on what an iOS game can be offers rich and innovative returns. Received wisdom says that Year Walk shouldn’t have worked. iOS is, after all, the home of numerous physics puzzles and endless runners with in-app purchases layered in. Simogo’s success with Year Walk showcases the potential of the platform to do something unique.

“I think that me and Gordon being ‘motvals kärringar’ [literally ‘opposite waltz hags’ in Swedish] has a lot to do with us making a game like Year Walk on iOS,” Flesser jokes of the studio’s contrarian approach to game development. “We made it in an ‘OK, we’re going to do this just because someone says we shouldn’t or aren’t allowed to’ way. I think that runs through everything we do at Simogo.” In an era of prequels, sequels and me-toos, Simogo’s approach is undeniably refreshing. This is a walk that’s well worth taking.

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