

Daniel receives a knife along with a newspaper article from the future describing his execution for the murder of Stina, and a letter from Almsten telling him to do what must be done to save Stina. Ultimately clues from the Journal can be used in the game itself to reach an alternate ending, considered the ultimate ending (as it says "the end"). However, Almsten believes that the desire to Year Walk alone is enough to be punished for the Watchers, so it’s implied he met the same fate as Daniel Svennson. The fate of Almsten himself is also uncertain his research seems to have taken a toll on his mental state, and his final entry takes place immediately before he goes on a Year Walk of his own.
YEAR WALK SWITCH FULL
Through his research, the full story is revealed.

YEAR WALK SWITCH PC
If the player uses the hints given after the credits to access the Journal component of the PC Game/iOS companion app, they can discover the journal of Theodor Almsten, a modern-day man obsessed with Swedish folklore, as he investigates the meaning behind the year walk. At first, she appears unharmed, but then blood seeps from her chest onto her clothes and the grass. When they venture right, they see Stina on the ground, her eyes closed. In the end, the player succeeds in receiving glimpses of the future, in the form of ominous bits of conversation that are presumably from Stina.
YEAR WALK SWITCH SERIES
Daniel returns home, and prepares to engage in the Year Walk anyway.Īs he proceeds toward the church (the object of year walking is to get to a church and see the future), the protagonist encounters a series of fairies and mythical creatures from Swedish folklore: the Huldra, the Brook Horse, Mylings, the Night Raven, and finally the Church Grim. Once proceeding into the vision of the future, you would witness what would happen the next year.Year Walk begins with the protagonist Daniel Svensson visiting his lover, Stina, who hints that she has been proposed to, and warns the player about the dangers of year walking, implying that her cousin had died while engaging in the activity. It is also said that if you were to touch the Church Grim's heart, you would see into the eye of creation itself. Once they were at the church, they would have to walk around it in a certain pattern to unlock the key to seeing the future, which brings out the Church Grim, believed to be the spirit of the goat that was ceremoniously buried under churches during their making back then.

Walkers reported songs coming from open graves, dead spirits walking about, and fresh graves that did not exist before. This let the walker tap into the prophetic power of the season, but it also meant opening oneself up to frightening encounters. The walk took place on New Year’s Eve or another winter holiday, when Europeans believed dark forces and supernatural beings were active and the dead mingled with the living.

With greater reward, however, came greater risk. While rituals like circling the house three times counterclockwise with a porridge scepter before eating Christmas dinner were supposed to provide a limited glimpse of things to come, the year walker had the potential to learn not only his own fate but that of the entire village. Årsgång is far from the only form of supernatural divination in Swedish folklore, but it is one of the more extensive. Participating in the ritual known as årsgång, or “year walk,”, promised information about the future-if a walker followed the rules and reached the local church or graveyard. These creatures would of course include a lot of the mythical creatures from the Scandinavian folk lore. This was not an easy task as strange and dangerous creatures roamed the night. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. One was not allowed to talk to anyone or have anything to eat or drink. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, during the night.Īlmost all variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room. The folklore surrounding the phenomena varies widely regionally. Its purpose was to see what would happen the following year. Årsgång, or Year Walk as it is more commonly known, is an ancient Swedish form of divination.
