For players ages 12+, Journey, developed by Thatgamecompany and available on iOS, PlayStation, and PC, offers a more unconventional answer to what a game can be. Unlike traditional games that rely on combat, explicit objectives, or mechanical mastery, this game tells its story almost entirely through movement. In Journey, walking is not merely a means of traversing space but the primary narrative system itself. By guiding players through carefully constructed environments, Journey deliberately constrains player action so that movement itself becomes expressive, transforming walking into a system that communicates narrative, emotion, and player understanding through embodied experience.
In most games, movement is optimized to disappear. Players move quickly between combat encounters or objectives, rarely thinking about the act itself. Journey disrupts this expectation from the very beginning. When the player first gains control in the opening desert, there are no instructions, no map, and no explicit objective beyond a distant glowing mountain. As I began walking toward it, the lack of guidance made each step feel intentional rather than automatic. The game forces the player to rely entirely on spatial awareness and visual cues, making movement the primary way of engaging with the world. This design aligns with Henry Jenkins’ idea that games function as narrative architecture, where meaning emerges through movement across space rather than through explicit storytelling. The desert is not just a setting; it is the first narrative statement, communicating isolation and curiosity through the simple act of walking toward something unknown.
The game’s opening scene drops the player in an expansive desert with no sense of direction.
Beyond walking, my means of interacting with the world were quite minimal. I could walk, emit a musical chirp, or glide temporarily using energy stored in a scarf. These mechanics might initially seem limited, but their simplicity is intentional. Rather than layering systems that compete for attention, the game isolates these actions so that each one carries expressive weight. For example, in the opening desert, walking is the only meaningful interaction available. There are no instructions or objectives beyond the distant mountain, and this absence forces the player to interpret the environment through movement. As Jenkins argues, game designers create meaning by shaping the spaces players move through, rather than directly telling stories.
The limited flying mechanism is also an interesting design choice, for it forces the player to look beyond their own capabilities and seek collaboration with the environment. Throughout the game, there are cloth-like creatures that you can interact with, and when you call out to them, they boost the energy in your scarf, giving you energy to fly. This mechanic of dependence on other beings to enable your own abilities creates a dynamic of hard cooperation and trust as I continued to explore the unknown environment ahead of me. What makes this particularly powerful from a design perspective is that flight is never fully under the player’s control and instead is always temporary, contingent, and relational. Until I began to understand the purpose of this, I felt frustrated that I could not use my abilities to do anything meaningful. In moments where I attempted to cross large gaps or reach higher ruins, I often found that I could not do so alone. Instead, I had to intentionally move toward these creatures, time my chirps, and remain within their proximity to sustain my movement. This transforms flying from a mechanic of individual freedom into one of shared capability. This mechanic produces a dynamic of dependency and responsiveness, which in turn supports aesthetics of discovery and fantasy, as the world feels alive and willing to assist, but only if approached correctly. It also reframes trust as a spatial and mechanical relationship; the player must trust that these creatures will respond, must position themselves vulnerably in open space, and must relinquish the expectation of full control. In doing so, Journey imbues a sense of fellowship into what is inherently a single-player game, teaching that forward movement is not always self-generated, but often enabled through connection.
After chirping to call out to the cloth creatures, they help me fly across the expansive desert.
The way walking evolves across Journey reveals how tightly its mechanics are bound to environmental storytelling, transforming movement into a narrative system. Early in the game, walking blends seamlessly into gliding as the player moves down sand dunes; in one moment, I surfed down a long slope toward distant ruins, where speed, camera motion, and music combined to create a sense of flow and exhilaration. Here, the mechanic of walking produces dynamics of momentum and openness, leading to aesthetics of sensation and discovery, where the environment amplifies freedom. However, this same mechanic is later recontextualized during the mountain ascent, where harsh winds pushed me backward and each step forward felt heavy and resistant. Near the summit, I struggled to move at all, eventually collapsing in the snow as movement itself became nearly impossible. The input (walking forward) remained constant, but the dynamics shifted dramatically due to environmental resistance, producing an aesthetic of challenge that is designed to be experiential rather than skill-based.
As I trudged through the snow, the winds fought against my movement, slowing me to a crawl.
Unlike other games such as Dear Esther, where walking remains mechanically consistent and the environment is primarily observed rather than physically enacted, Journey continuously reshapes how walking feels in response to its surroundings, making the player embody the story rather than simply interpret it. By the final moments, when movement slows to a halt and transitions into a moment of release, the evolution of walking, from freedom to struggle to transcendence, becomes the narrative itself, showing how even a single mechanic can carry an entire emotional arc when dynamically integrated with the environment.
Ethics Reflection
Comparing a violent game like Grand Theft Auto alongside a walking simulator game like Journey highlights how violence (or lack thereof) fundamentally shapes both player behavior and storytelling. In GTA, violence is the primary means of interaction, encouraging players to assert control over the world and framing progress through domination and consequence. This creates a mindset where problems are meant to be solved through forceful action, and the narrative reinforces this by rewarding aggression and efficiency. By contrast, Journey removes violence entirely, forcing the player to engage with the world through movement and observation. When I encountered moments that felt like they should involve conflict, such as navigating underground ruins with looming stone creatures, the game withheld any ability to fight back, making the experience more about presence than control. This contrast challenged my own assumptions about what makes a game engaging or meaningful. I realized how often I associate agency with the ability to act upon or change a world, especially through overcoming obstacles or enemies. Journey pushed against that expectation by suggesting that meaningful experiences can come from accepting limitations rather than exerting control. Instead of feeling disempowered, I found that the absence of violence created space for reflection, making the journey feel more personal and emotionally grounded.This reframed how I think about games as systems: rather than always reinforcing power fantasies, they can also encourage patience, vulnerability, and coexistence, offering alternative ways of understanding interaction beyond domination. As discussed in Clark’s article, the exclusion of violent mechanics doesn’t make Journey feel empty. Instead, it allows the game to construct a different narrative logic altogether, one where meaning emerges not from conquering the world, but from existing within and exploring it.
