The team behind the Tiny Game Chronicles podcast takes a look at a game they covered in a previous month’s episode. For May Michael delves into A Highland Song by following their usual podcast format. Subscribe to The Tiny Game Chronicles podcast for their fortnightly episodes on short-form video games, and please make sure to check out the accompanying episode to this article on A Highland Song.
A Highland Song is a deliberate departure for narrative studio inkle, marking a moment where a team known for talkative, text‑rich adventures chose a quieter path.
inkle built its reputation on branching dialogue and dense prose in games like 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, yet here they turn their attention to one girl, one stretch of coastline, and a line of hills that must be crossed mostly through movement rather than conversation. Instead of pouring their narrative energy into long exchanges, they fold it into route choices, scraps of maps, and the way music swells when you finally catch the curve of a ridge in the distance.
Set in the days leading up to Beltane, a spring festival with deep roots in local tradition, the game frames a small, personal journey against an old, indifferent landscape. The lighthouse Moira aims for is not some grand fantasy tower but a believable landmark at the edge of her familiar world, the kind of distant light a teenager might fixate on when home feels too tight. You can feel the developers stepping away from their earlier globe‑trotting narratives to focus on a single piece of ground, testing how much story can be carried by weather, accent, and the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other.
High-Level Thoughts
From its first hesitant steps along a damp hillside, A Highland Song moves with unhurried confidence, trusting terrain, weather, and music to do much of the talking. The narrative lives in how you climb, where you choose to turn, and whether you risk a direct shortcut over loose stones before the light dies. I never felt ushered along a painted backdrop so much as tolerated by a place with its own moods and priorities. The hills are beautiful but also slightly aloof, the kind of beauty that does not mind if you slip, backtrack, or lose a day to fog. Underneath the postcard views sits a quiet knot of tension, an awareness that the girl you guide is not simply sightseeing but trying to cross the rough edge of her known world before a festival deadline closes behind her.
What began for me as a cosy walk soon started to feel like an essay on leaving home, written in side paths and ridgelines rather than paragraphs. Every choice of route, every night spent short of where you hoped to be, seems to ask how much of growing up is learning to live with all the paths you did not take. Perched on a slope with no clear marker ahead, you do not have a glowing arrow or busy minimap to lean on; you have layers of rock and grass, a folded piece of hand-drawn map in your pocket, and Moira, a teenager who has decided that a lighthouse on the far coast matters enough to walk toward without permission.
A Highland Song Standouts
The first standout for me is the way route‑finding becomes a quiet coming‑of‑age story. Each ledge you test, each loose descent you risk, becomes a small argument between caution and curiosity, between staying the child who obeys and becoming someone who chooses for herself. As I learned to read the landscape, I started to read Moira differently as well. In the early hours I second‑guessed everything, clinging to safe contours and worrying about wasting a precious afternoon on a dead end. Later, when the game let a folk tune spill in and turned the skyline into a kind of improvised dance floor, her movement suddenly stretched out with a confidence that had been missing, syncing with the music and the land in a way that made hesitation feel childish. Those musical runs, free of punishment for turning back, felt like glimpses of who she might become when fear no longer makes every decision for her.
The second standout is the Beltane time crunch that shapes the whole journey. Every morning, the game quietly reminds you how many days are left, a small line of text that lands with more force than its gentle presentation suggests. At first, I read that clock as a threat. I fretted over every detour, eyed optional peaks with suspicion, worried that any moment spent listening to the wind at a summit would doom us to failure. Over time, that daily reminder began to feel less like a design misstep and more like a mirror of how we live: the pull between the inner work of figuring out who we are and the outer insistence of calendars, jobs, and obligations that never stop counting down. Beltane becomes the shape of every deadline we have ever carried in our pockets, that sense that while we are trying to hear ourselves more clearly, someone somewhere is still expecting the report, the meeting, the presentation on time.
Because the hills are broad and the time is short, A Highland Song almost expects you to stumble on the first attempt. You miss routes, spend a night in the wrong valley, and reach the far side of a ridge with not enough daylight left to correct it. Instead of treating those missteps as failure, the game invites another crossing where you remember a shortcut here and a friendlier slope there and carry those lessons forward. Each run feels like a new draft of the same week, echoing the way we replay big choices from our youth in memory, wondering what might have shifted had we turned just a little earlier or spoken just a little braver.
The third standout is how thoroughly the land itself steps into the role of the main character. After the rain, when the clouds finally lift and a cold light slides across the land, the high country reveals itself in a way that has little to do with tourism brochures. Lakes glint from far below; a scatter of white houses sits small and stubborn against the dark mass of hills, and somewhere in the distance the sea waits, flat and patient. Voices from earlier scenes hang in the air: accents, old stories, scraps of language that mark this place as unapologetically itself. It would have been easier to dress Moira’s journey in generic fantasy trappings, to offer an everywhere wilderness and a vague coming‑of‑age arc. Instead, A Highland Song leans into the specificity of its setting, letting festival, folk music, and weather do as much character work as Moira’s own choices.
Who Do I Recommend This To?
In the end, A Highland Song stayed with me not because I perfected its routes but because it gently insisted that being off the optimal path was where the real story lived. It left me thinking about how we navigate our own highlands of choice and chance and how often we discover who we are while scrambling down from a bad decision with sore knees and a better view. For all its mist and melancholy, there is a quiet warmth here, a belief that getting a little lost in a real place might be one of the kinder ways to grow up.
I would recommend A Highland Song to players who enjoy slower, grounded experiences where walking, climbing, and listening do much of the narrative work and where arriving slightly late can be as meaningful as arriving on time. I would offer it to anyone who loves strong local flavour and wants to spend time in a world that is specifically deep in its accents, music, and weather rather than generically rustic. I would point fans of the studio to it as a fascinating experiment in letting their narrative sensibility flow through structure, systems, and landscape instead of long dialogue trees, even if that means accepting a bit of repetition and the occasional muddled route along the way. And I would steer it toward players willing to accept a bit of time pressure and a messy first run, people more interested in the way a young girl quietly pushes past the edge of her old life and finds, somewhere between one ridge and the next, that the hills have begun to feel like her own.
