Into The Dark: Year Walk Strolling Onto Steam

Spooky games are set in hospitals, asylums, prisons, laboratories and mansions, right? The ingredients for terror are creaky floorboards, inexplicably locked doors, rusted wire mesh and filthy toilets (seriously, it's a thing - a game can barely be described as an authentic horror game unless there's at least one unflushed loo). Year Walk isn't playing along. Inspired by nineteenth century Swedish folklore, it's a game about walking toward a church at midnight, passing through cold, dark places along the way, and confronting the embodiments of fear and weakness that hide in the woods. Critically acclaimed on iOS, the game is heading to Steam on March 6th, which is fantastic news. Trailer below.

Describing Year Walk as a horror game is a little unfair. It's an unsettling game. That's a genre now.

Played from a first-person perspective, Year Walk has basic puzzles but is mostly about witnessing strange vignettes, swiping the screen from side to side or top to bottom as the walk heads toward its terminus. The swiping should easily translate to mouse control but I seem to recall Year Walk requiring some clever device manipulation, using the accelerometer to trigger interactions. Hopefully I won't have to connect a Wii-stick to my monitor and do the foxtrot with it in order to pick up a vase.

The PC version will contain new puzzles and locations, a map and a built-in encyclopaedia. The latter is most likely a replacement for the separate app that accompanied the iOS version.

Oh, and I've just realised that I can't remember seeing a filthy toilet in Amnesia. Curses.