Year Walk

Year Walk begins with the protagonist Daniel Svensson visiting his lover, Stina, who hints that she has been proposed to, and warns the player about the dangers of year walking (a divination ritual on New Year’s Eve which involves circling a churchyard). She also implies that her cousin had died while engaging in the activity. Daniel returns home, and prepares to engage in the Year Walk anyway.

As he proceeds towards the church, the protagonist encounters a series of fairies and mythical creatures from Swedish folklore: the Huldra, the Brook Horse, Mylings, the Night Raven, and finally the Church Grim.

Year Walk started out as a film script that writer Jonas Tarestad shared with developer Simon Flesser. The two considered turning the script into a game, according to Flesser, "almost jokingly to start with". However the two eventually grew serious about the prospect and changed the script so that it would better suit the medium. In the transition from movie script to game script, according to Flesser, they "basically rewrote everything about it" keeping only the beginning and ending the same.

In designing the game Flesser studied horror movies, specifically the timing "to get the scary bits right". He has additionally cited the games Killer7, Fez and The Legend of Zelda series as well as the film Hedgehog in the Fog as inspiration.

Year Walk received "generally favorable reviews", according to the review aggregator platform Metacritic.

148 Apps praised nearly every aspect of the game, writing that "Year Walk is a haunting adventure game from Simogo that blends a dark world and involved mythology together to create an absolutely amazing experience." TouchArcade liked Year Walk's companion app, feeling it freed up the game from having to rely on exposition, "Knowing which creatures exist and what they’re capable of... makes every screen transition, every peek inside an abandoned shack fraught with apprehension". Game Informer enjoyed the puzzles, saying that they often relied on clever solutions, "each demands that you think in a new and surprising way, and draws you deeper into the cold and minimalistic presentation".