A Highland Song Review: The Hills Are Alive

In Cambridge-based developer Inkle’s A Highland Song, a young girl named Moira runs away from her mother’s house deep in the Scottish Highlands. Her destination: the distant lighthouse manned by her Uncle Hamish, to be (hopefully) reached before Beltane. That gives her about a week to platform through the hills, mountains, and caves between her house and her goal, scrambling up cliff faces and scouting out terrain from atop misty peaks.

The game is played from a 2D sidescrolling perspective, but the experience is hardly a simple matter of traveling from the left side of the screen to the right. As the game’s opening demonstrates by flying forward from Hamish’s lighthouse and through rugged terrain before stopping at Moira’s home, the segments of land are layered on top of each other. To advance, you must progressively move Moira from the foreground into the background, searching for trails without a clearly marked path. Sometimes a cave may lead into the distance, while other times you might find a pass to a distant ridge marked by a cairn on the other side of a mountain.

At any given moment in A Highland Song, it’s possible to zoom out for a wider look at your surroundings. To get a truly big-picture perspective, though, you need to travel to one of the many peaks to use as a vantage point. From there, you can pan across a broad, beautiful view of the environment and search for terrain that matches the maps, drawings, and pamphlets you stumble upon during the journey in hopes of finding some hidden object or entrance.

As a result, the game’s exploration and platforming become uniquely methodical, less about traversal for its own sake than observing and correctly identifying the places you can reach. Distinguishing A Highland Song from other sidescrollers is that Moira is rarely constrained to a single plane of movement, so that a steep slope can be bypassed if you hop across the boulders that rise behind it. These mechanics take some mental adjustment on one’s part, as you must understand that terrain in the background or foreground can be equally viable, and the resulting disorientation feels consistent with the experience of a child wandering the Scottish Highlands all alone. Absent any clearly marked lanes or paths, navigation becomes a breezy puzzle.

The game conspicuously breaks up these segments every so often with rhythm-based sections, where the music swells and Moira takes off at a sprint, leaping over obstacles to the beat. As a change of pace, they’re passable enough, but their simplicity can grate when they’re done in quick succession or for an extended period. In the end, the strengths of A Highland Song lie elsewhere, namely in discovering the many secrets nestled in the Highlands.

Inkle is best known for its more story-driven works, like 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault. That tendency toward narrative is most evident in the frequent snippets of voiced dialogue that serve as the reward for reaching some new area, most often in the form of Moira’s narration or letters from Uncle Hamish that illuminate local myths and history. The man’s short, simple stories in particular are a pleasure, selling the closeness that Moira feels to him while making the world appear much grander than a collection of navigation challenges, imbuing the highlands, where your encounters with humans are few and far between, with a sense of wonder.

Perhaps the greatest compliment that one can pay to A Highland Song is that—unlike any number of games that mark traversable areas in, say, white splotches or yellow paint—it doesn’t feel obviously designed. There are areas in the game that you’ll never reach on a single run, forcing you to make decisions if you want to make it to Uncle Hamish’s lighthouse on time. A Highland Song’s rendition of the Scottish Highlands scans more as a natural space than as a bespoke puzzle, a world instead of a playground. Here, the hills are alive.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Inkle.