Journey is a wordless game, but it’s not a silent one. In fact, it’s full of sound: the beautiful background music when you reach the peak of a dune, the tiny chime your character makes, and the thoughts in your head as you explore. As you move through the game, it’s easy to get lost and wonder what you’re really here for. I found that at these moments (if you’re lucky), the game might present you with a companion, someone at a similar point of progress to you, and you might be able to help each other. They look almost exactly like you, and have no name to call, no chat option, no signals. Oftentimes, people play through the entire game with a few companions, but only after the credits does the game name them. Through this intentional withholding, Journey shows that intimacy can come from knowing less, not more. In a culture trained to turn every experience into searchable information, Journey is unique in its ability to build a meaningful play experience through refusing to explain.
Journey’s handling of multiplayer experiences makes me think of John Green’s “Googling Strangers,” especially his anxiety around the decision to search for someone online. I can definitely relate to Green’s moral tension around modern curiosity: on one hand, we want to know; on the other hand, knowing can change our perception of a person and even alter a relationship before it even begins. Looking someone up feels harmless because the information is public, but it also turns the person into an object of private judgment. Green describes the discomfort of making ourselves available for “public consumption,” and Journey takes that discomfort seriously. The game operates as a system in which another person is present but not presented.
It seems these days that most online platforms (and games, at that) assume that connection requires more information: bios, mutuals, location tags, etc. Journey refuses all of that. By the end of my playthrough, I knew nothing about my companion’s name or life outside the game, but I did feel like I knew them. I could tell how skilled they were with the game controls, their preferred pace, and whether they were a patient person. I also felt that these qualities were things you could only learn about a person through actual time spent with them, rather than Googling them or scouring a LinkedIn page. In this way, I appreciate how Journey removes the temptation of knowing someone in a traditional sense, replacing it with a gentler form of connection where behavior matters more than identity.
I think this is also why people playing Journey have such moving experiences, even though its premise sounds lonely. Anyone who has been forced into a networking event or icebreaker knows that proximity and conversation do not automatically solve loneliness. Sometimes they make it worse. Being made to perform yourself for strangers can feel more isolating than being alone. Journey removes that performance but keeps the togetherness. It suggests that what we actually crave is not “knowing” people, whatever that means, but to have someone who is simply experiencing our lives with us.
[Image of traveling with a companion and chirping to each other.]
I have to say, even when played alone, Journey never feels empty. There are always scarf pieces dancing in the distance, and cutscenes that immerse you in the story of a lost civilization. When you try to go the “wrong way,” storms will push you in other directions, so it always feels like there is a bigger presence keeping you from going astray. It creates a sense of mystery, which reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. In the painting, a man stands on a cliff’s edge, looking out at a landscape almost entirely covered by fog. At first, he seems powerful, as if he has climbed above the world and conquered it. But the longer you look at it, the more the fog begins to complicate that first impression. It blocks the view and refuses his gaze at the same time. He isn’t really dominating the scene at all; if anything, the scene seems to look back at him too, as if to ask, “What are you going to do with me?” The fog creates depth, mystery, and desire precisely because it refuses to show everything.
Journey works because it has a “fog” of its own. The world feels profound yet so much of it remains unexplained when you finish the game. Instead of giving the player a complete history to understand, the game leaves space for wondering. It asks the player to sit with what they do not know, and to make meaning from that uncertainty.
[Image of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and the title screen of Journey.]
