A Highland Song

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

A Highland Song, released in 2023 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a Platformer from Inkle, a company better-known for Graphic Adventure-style games like Overboard! and Heaven’s Vault. This game follows a young girl named Moira, who runs away from home to attempt the dangerous trek through the Scottish Highlands to visit her uncle Hamish at an oceanside lighthouse.

While I feel this game’s presentation suffers a bit due to a low resolution on Nintendo Switch, with occasional moments of framerate drops, it is still a gorgeous game with scenic painterly 2D visuals and nice animation for the game’s hand-drawn characters, with Moira’s animations clearly indicating when she’s winded, cold, or excited.

However, even more than the visuals, it is the sound that shines in this game. Moira is given great depth through wonderful voice acting that absolutely makes her come alive with a wonderful, adventurous, optimistic, and funny personality, and her own spoken thoughts are joined by her memories of her uncle, voiced with incredible warmth and telling stories with the sort of enthusiasm you look for from the best spoken storytellers.

These wonderful visuals and superb voice acting are backed by an excellent soundtrack of Scottish folk music that is not only wonderful, but perfectly fits this game’s themes and setting. I don’t have specific examples to point to, but you can get a feel for the soundtrack from this video of a recording session for the game.

A Highland Song’s approach to the Platforming genre is pretty unique, in that it seems less inspired by games like Mario and Donkey Kong, and more inspired by the actual experience of trying to safely work your way through dangerous terrain in the wilderness.

Players need to be mindful as they pick their way over wild and rocky terrain so that they don’t let Moira fall an unsafe distance, or attempt a climb that’s beyond her capabilities. Moira needs to take a moment to catch her breath after a hard climb or a bit of running, and staying out in the rain too long will take its toll on her health. At the same time, you can’t dawdle too long, as time gradually moves on as you’re playing the game, with Moira trying to reach her uncle within the span of just a few days’ time. Helping her make this journey more swiftly are moments where she can freely run and jump for a distance, with these sections playing out a bit like a Music-Rhythm game.

Moira’s journey isn’t just a left-to-right one. Progression generally requires players to zig-zag their way up to the peak of the hill or mountain in the current range they’re on via multiple layers of cris-crossing parts of the environment. Doing so will enable them to get a view with which they can ideally spot a passing to the next terrain farther behind the current scenery.

When it is as its best, A Highland Song is just as much about planning your route through dangerous terrain as it is actually Platforming. There’s a skill in recognizing not only where you need to go, but the ideal way to get there, and it can feel like a genuine accomplishment to navigate your way to the passing to the next area.

However, this is also a double-edged sword, because the game’s painterly art style and the multi-layered 2D scenery can sometimes add up to make it difficult to determine what areas are traversable, and can make it a real pain when you’re trying to jump onto a specific part of the scenery but the game doesn’t understand you’re wanting to move to a different layer. Not only does this lead to repeated injuries as the game mis-interprets your inputs, but it makes an already difficult trek planning your way through the wilderness even more difficult as you can’t always discern what is a path you can tread and what is a place the game doesn’t allow you to go.

If it weren’t for these frustrations, I would find A Highland Song to be an absolutely brilliant gem of a game that takes a unique approach to the Platformer genre and combines it with a beautiful presentation and great characters. However, the frustrations you have to put up with in the game’s Platforming and frustrating enough to quell some of my enthusiasm. I still believe this is a game with some wonderful qualities, but it’s also a game that makes you work through some frustrating gameplay issues to get to those great elements.

tl;dr – A Highland Song is a Platformer that has players helping a young girl to navigate the treacherous Scottish countryside. The game’s presentation is beautiful, with a gorgeous soundtrack and absolutely superb voice acting. And the game’s approach to the Platforming genre is unique and inspired. Unfortunately, the multi-layered scenery makes it a real pain to move to the part of the scenery you want to interact with, creating other problems as a result. There’s still a lot of great elements here, but you have to put up with a fair amount of frustration to get to it.

Grade: B–

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Winner:

Best Voice Acting (MJ Deans as Moira McKinnon) – There’s a lot of beauty to be found in A Highland Song, but that beauty is heightened so much by MJ Deans’ wonderful, expressive, grounded performance as Moira, helping us to see the world through her eyes, feel her excitement. Moira has such a beautiful, funny, warm, and clever personality, and it’s all brought to life with grace and subtlety thanks to Deans’ excellent performance.

Runner-Up: Best Platformer, Best Music (by Laurence Chapman, with Talisk and Fourth Moon), Best Voice Acting (Paul Warren as Uncle Hamish), Best New Character (Moira McKinnon)

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