Later, inside a shimmering cave, a tuneful melody is a clue as to how you should progress. Snow crunches underfoot, and only by following a siren's distant call will you find her. There's a goat-headed Church Grim to defeat, and a hidden language to decode (keep a pen and paper to hand). The dark recess of Year Walk hold all manner of warped puzzles.
One of these Mylings can be found in the pages of your encyclopaedia, hinted at by strewn letters and dripping blood. When a beast called the Brook Horse rises out of a turquoise stream carrying the ghosts of four babies (Mylings), you must search for their bodies by following trails of bright blood stained into the white snow. Written by my favourite Scandinavian folklore expert Theodor Almsten, this encyclopedia details the kinds of myths and monsters that make you glad you grew up with Humpty Dumpty. According to the in-game encyclopaedia, "A year walker had to avoid other people, so they commonly locked themselves in dark rooms and were not allowed to see fire for an entire day." In this sense, the game nails its namesake. The featureless landscape combines with an excellent use of silence to evoke a feeling of unsettling isolation. These abandoned artefacts make it seem as if you've awoken to find a world devoid of people, like they've melted into the snow. The perspective isn't as freeing as conventional first-person, as you're always facing forwards and can only travel up and down at set points, but environmental cues indicate when: a mysterious set of footsteps leading into the distance. It's a conspiring maze, luring in year walkers and displacing them amid endless trees and tundra. The midnight icy wilderness in which the bulk of the game takes place is a grid of screens that you navigate by travelling forwards, backwards, left and right.
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