Year Walk then continues to create a kind of distance between the player and its world through its two dimensional art style. ![]() In terms of Year Walk, the player is launched into a fairly unfamiliar environment in Northern Europe in what to most is probably an unfamiliar jumble of characters and monstrosities from a less well known tradition of folklore and asked to attempt to understand that space in order to solve the problems of the game’s protagonist. When one does, that world is made “solve-able” and understandable, then real progress is made. Progress in these games is represented by motion and mobility itself, but there is an underlying assumption in the game design that true progress is only achieved by piecing together the minutiae of a world. In that sense, both Device 6 and Year Walk are about space and how one needs to traverse a world, be that world composed of text or pictures, in order to pick the significant details out of that environment and then synthesize the data gathered in order to solve puzzles and progress forward. While one game is almost entirely textual in nature (with some sound and visuals supplementing the text) and the other is almost entirely graphical in nature, though, the concern for mixing exploration, data gathering, and puzzle solving is the essential core of both games. Year Walk, on the other hand, feels more like what we have come to think of what a video games traditionally “looks like,” it is a puzzle game as well, but one that is largely visually represented, asking the player to explore a snowy and somewhat barren Scandinavian landscape in search of clues that will help the main character, an initially unnamed man in love with a woman named Stina, complete a ritual that will allow him to see the future of their relationship. Indeed, Device 6 treats text as space, asking the “player” to operate as the reader of a text embedded with puzzles and clues to solving those puzzles, traversing that text back and forth until chapters can be completed by resolving the puzzles embedded within that text. On the one hand, Device 6 places the player into an almost wholly textual environment. ![]() ![]() The gaming environments built for the player of each game to occupy are also seemingly rather drastically different as well. Both approaches are interesting and unusual but have a completely different vibe, besides, perhaps, a commitment to general weirdness. In terms of the narrative genres that these two games represent ( Device 6 is a mash up of 60s spy thriller and science fiction a la the television series The Prisoner while Year Walk is a quiet, but consistently creepy horror story based on Swedish folkore), the games’ plots do have little in common. While they may seem to have little in common, playing through Year Walk almost immediately after completing Device 6 actually makes plain that there is a kind of continuity in the way that Simogo has built these two games.
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