The world has been mostly tamed over time, at least in the convenient areas that are useful to people. Plains and lowlands are easy enough to civilize, and the ocean shores are lined with areas where fishing towns and villages fit snugly along the coast. Roads connect everything with smaller towns in between, but there are areas where it’s just not practical to build as densely, giving room for the old mythologies to survive in the crevices. People may visit from time to time, but that’s fine, no story is ever remembered without a witness. The Scottish Highlands are a sparsely-populated mountain area, part of a range that originated in Pangaea before life got past the single-celled stage, ancient and striking and with plenty of nooks and crevices for secrets to survive undisturbed for centuries on end.
It’s also the home of Moira McKinnon, a teenage girl who’s not at all happy with her home life so has decided to accept her uncle Hamish’s invitation to visit on Beltane by running away. This is an objectively-terrible idea seeing as to get there she’ll needs to run on foot from the mountains to the sea, but she’s packed a few snacks and is therefore fully prepared for her journey. Dropping out of her second-floor window Moira takes off into the hills and mountains that have been home for her entire life, racing to see somewhere new and leave her dissatisfaction with not fitting in behind.
Reduced to its most basic form, A Highland Song is a beautifully-painted 2D adventure semi-platformer, which doesn’t touch on the strong narrative or importance of music in the game. The story is told through short voice-overs, rarely more than twenty seconds long or so, that give a little information on Moira’s family life or the history and mythology of the Scottish Highlands. While the bulk of A Highland Song is spent running, climbing, exploring and even occasionally spelunking in the mountains, these little snippets of narrative add up over the course of each run to create a rich image of Moira and her mountainous homeland.
As someone who grew up in the area, Moira is familiar with the necessary climbing skills to get past the challenges of the mountains. Quick and nimble, Moira can hop from rock to rock or scale cliffs by hand, although she’s only got so much energy for the latter activity. Running and climbing too much will wind her after a bit, at which point it’s time to find a place to stand for a rest. If nothing is available and the winded icon turns red Moira will fall, taking damage or possibly even dying if her health is already low. Meanwhile rain storms come through regularly, slowly dropping Moira’s health unless she heads for shelter, and sleeping in an uncomfortable spot will drop her maximum potential health on top of that. There are ways to restore the health bar to its original size, if you may find them, but for standard health restoration, it’s best to find a convenient overhang and blow off a little time resting. Oddly enough, when everything fails and Moira dies, she’ll wake up the next day fully healed and not quite sure what happened.
There are opportunities to enhance Moira’s strength and stamina found throughout the mountains, though, when she runs after a deer as the soundtrack kicks into overdrive. While these sections aren’t all that complicated, hit X or Y on the indicated spot to jump, the traditionally-styled music steals the show and makes each section a treat to play through. Unlike the standard mountain sections, these areas are generated in time to the music, with the important part being to get lost in the music rather than worrying about any specific path.
Back in the peaks, valleys, lochs, dams, caves, waterfalls and ruins of the mountains, though, Moira has her work cut out for her to find a path through. One of the first things she does atop the hill beside her house is pull out a map to find a spot in the trees where a path lies, with the camera zooming out to give a much broader view of the area than normal. Moira’s map has a few recognizable landmarks on it, with the path being between two obvious sets of trees to make for an easy start. Later maps, however, can range from illustrated newspaper articles to crude sketches, found in marked points of interest along the way along with many other items that may come in handy.
Aside from the climbing and exploration, there are a good number of environmental puzzles kicking around. Keys and notes, bits of wire, various trinkets, and much more are scattered through the landscape, and finding where they go is a major part of uncovering the Highlands' secrets. The mountain peaks all have names and figuring out which one is called what, not to mention what offering would be best left at its summit, is all part of learning the area’s history. Thankfully, especially in light of the time limit, Moira isn’t required to do this all at once, and in fact the initial journey to the sea is probably impossible to make in the five-day limit for anyone with the slightest bit of curiosity.
A complete run from home to sea takes a few hours, but during that time several in-game days will pass, and at least in the first run, the Beltane deadline will come and go while trying to figure out a way to the next set of mountains. Smaller trails take Moira from one ridge to the next, and she can jump between upper and lower paths easily enough when there’s different ways to go, but major scenery changes require finding a path that can take a couple hours out of the day to navigate. Arriving to her uncle’s late means missing what he wanted to show her, and while he can explain, Moira’s going to want to see this in person. A second run sees her start off with most of her maps from the previous attempt plus the discovered mountains and their paths marked off, giving more time to explore properly. There’s both a time limit and time to explore, and the mountains are rich and beautiful enough to make Moira’s personal quest a slightly lesser concern.
Closing Comments:
A Highland Song is a wonderful adventure through mountains that were old before people arrived and will be there long after their ruins have eroded away. Moira’s journey is as much about the Scottish Highlands as it is about her life so far, with history and myth being equally important to both. It can sometimes take some thinking and experimentation to find the way through a new area, clambering back and forth over rocks and cliffs to find a clue that points to the path forward, but the information is there for an attentive explorer to uncover. It all comes together to make for an engaging, unforgettable and frequently musical trek you’ll want to make several times over to learn the histories and hidden paths of Moira’s mountain home.
A Highland Song
