For centuries, humans located the sublime in experiences that overwhelmed the limits of ordinary life. Romantic artists and writers turned toward vast mountains, storms, ruins, and deserts in an attempt to confront something larger than themselves: nature, time, mortality, and even God. In Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure stands above an endless landscape, dwarfed by fog and stone (Friedrich). In Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a shattered monument buried in the desert transforms human ambition into evidence of inevitable decay (Shelley). Both works frame the sublime through scale; the individual becomes small against the immensity of nature and time.
“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”
But the modern world has altered humanity’s relationship to awe. Spectacular landscapes are no longer inaccessible mysteries. We can see Mount Everest from a phone screen, we navigate sprawling cities on our commute to work, and we travel across oceans in hours. What was once monumental has now become ordinary through repetition and technological advancement. The game “Journey” asks what happens after this shift. If nature and architecture no longer produce the same overwhelming emotional force they once did, the sublime must migrate elsewhere. Now that technology has created ubiquitous availability of awe-striking vistas, we must turn to other people to experience the sublime.
Journey initially appears to inherit the visual language of Romanticism almost directly. The player begins alone in a vast desert, a tiny robed figure crossing dunes toward a distant mountain. The imagery recalls Friedrich immediately: a solitary wanderer confronting an incomprehensible landscape. The game is filled with ruins swallowed by sand, towering architecture, and remnants of a collapsed civilization. Its environments resemble the desolate world Shelley imagines in “Ozymandias,” where the “lone and level sands stretch far away” around the wreckage of human ambition (cite poem). Journey’s civilization, too, has failed. The game’s buried towers and abandoned machines may even suggest a society consumed by its own grandeur.
Journey’s opening scene mimics Friedrich’s painting.
Yet despite the visual similarities, Journey ultimately rejects the emotional logic of these earlier works. In Friedrich, the sublime emerges through isolation where the wanderer stands alone before nature, emotionally separated from both the viewer and the landscape itself. In Shelley’s poem, human achievement is reduced to ruin, and the desert remains indifferent to human longing. Journey begins within this framework of solitude and decay, but then quietly transforms it through the multiplayer system and NPCs encountered along the way.
Along the journey, the player encounters a series of nonhuman guides and helpers that quietly shape the experience, such as the cloth creatures that inhabit the ruins and deserts. These living ribbons respond to the traveler’s musical call, restoring the magical scarf that allows the player to fly and often leading the player toward hidden paths or objectives. Unlike traditional video game companions, they never speak, explain, or demand attention, and assistance is offered freely and wordlessly. Even the glowing symbols and ancestral figures encountered throughout the game function as guides, revealing fragments of history and gently directing the traveler forward. These encounters feel emotionally significant because they suggest a world that remains responsive despite its apparent desolation. In a landscape defined by collapse and abandonment, small acts of guidance and care still persist. Rather than emphasizing mastery over the environment, Journey presents progress as something made possible through moments of unexpected help from beings the player can never fully understand.
The cloth creatures guide the player across the landscape.
The game relocates the sublime away from nature itself and toward the realization of another consciousness within the vastness. The mountain matters less once another traveler joins you on the path toward it, and awe no longer emerges solely from scale, but from companionship amid scale. The emotional climax of Journey is not reaching the summit alone, but struggling upward beside someone you don’t know and will never see again.
John Green’s podcast episode “Googling Strangers” describes a similar transformation in how technology mediates human emotion. Green recounts googling an injured child he encountered while training as a hospital chaplain, discovering years later that the child survived (Green). The internet becomes a mechanism through which a stranger’s continued existence can suddenly reveal itself across time and distance. Importantly, the emotional power of this moment does not come from complete knowledge. Green still does not truly know the person he searched for. Instead, the experience is overwhelming because technology collapses existential distance between strangers. Journey operates through the same emotional structure. The game suggests that identity is not necessarily the foundation of connection, and that presence can be enough. A stranger waiting for you at the top of a snowy hill can feel profound not because of who they are, but because they chose to remain beside you.
In this sense, Journey presents a distinctly modern form of the sublime. Earlier works located transcendence in landscapes, monuments, and the terrifying scale of time, but Journey argues that in an interconnected technological world, awe increasingly emerges through fleeting encounters with other people inside systems vast enough to make us feel alone. Technology, often criticized for alienating human beings from one another, has instead become a medium through which anonymous companionship becomes possible.
