“How does walking tell the story?”
Journey: App store on my IPad
For this week’s critical play, I chose to purchase Journey on my IPad. It is developed by thatgamecompany with Jenova Chen as the creative director and published by Annapurna Interactive on IOS. The game’s targeted audience are players who enjoy beautiful, emotional, and meditative games that prioritizes exploration and atmosphere, not violence or complicated actions. My first initial reaction was, “What am I even supposed to do?” with a sense of surrender.
In the beginning, I was completely lost about where to go or what to do. I simply had zero about anything that it took me about a solid 10 minutes to figure out how to start the game (please feel free to laugh; I’d laugh at myself too in retrospect in the future.) Afterwards, I just chose to brave it and try anything, so I chose to go to the highest mountain since it seemed like the most important landmark, the first obvious nudge I noticed. After, I continued to chase mystical shining spots and buildings. This became one of the main ways Journey told its story to me: not through explanation or any pop-ups but through environmental nudges—tall buildings, mountains, flying red banners, winds that pushed me away. The game’s world kept ensuring I was heading in a certain direction towards something in every step of the way even if I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I had to go.
As for the MDA framework, Journey’s mechanisms are simple: walking, making sounds, gliding through sand and air, short flights (that can become longer.) These mechanisms created dynamics of wandering, experimenting, and slowly learning the world’s narrative. Starting off lonely and confused, the mechanisms and the wonderful way of storytelling led me to other emotions as I kept playing. Sadness when I saw numerous red flying banners locked in some giant building with some moving mechanism, joy each time I freed another red flying banner, fear when I first thought my red flying banner companion was leaving me, etc. The fear part, in my opinion, was such a delicate and amazing implementation by the game designers—they definitely utilized the knowledge that humans are social creatures to ensure this nudge of red flying banners flying away would lead me to follow them, which enabled them to unravel their narrative. I simply can’t cease in praising this aspect, not considering how beautiful the visuals and sounds were that complemented all these emotions.
The formal elements of the game also support this. The objective seems to be to reach the highest mountain you saw since the beginning of the game and keeps reappearing throughout the gameplay. However, the conflict is not fighting enemies. Rather, the conflict seems to come from limited movement, uncertainty of directions, and fear of loneliness. I also spent a lot of time before I understood what my sound ability was for, from freeing red flying banners to collecting disposable flights and gradually increasing my disposable flights capacity. Slowly learning with exploration gradually lessened my confusion and aversion towards the game. I started to enjoy the game more as I kept doing more and more. The method to utilize “Blend tutorial into the game,” was done so wonderfully.
Compared to other walking sims, I think Journey is unique due to not having any dialogues or any pop-up notifications. It was truly immersive, with simply its visuals and sounds. Unlike the others, it also doesn’t use objects like journals and words to tell its narrative, but rather through wall paintings discovered at each step of the story amid the ruins left behind. By the time I stopped, I had no way to come close to an inkling of what the end of the narrative would lead: freedom, mayhaps?
Ethically, Journey made me think about how different other games I’ve played like PubG or Mobile Legends that focus on violence are. In those games, my tension came from always being alert—kill or be killed. Those game mechanics made the whole game world a battlefield to clear the obstacles of ranks to climb to a higher achievement. However, in the walking sim Journey, I was not progressing through killing but through softer emotions. Since I am more used to games that use violence, the feeling of aversion in the beginning was very evident, and I just wanted to close the app right away. I was also frustrated with the very limited movements. Although both types of game require observation and patience, the exclusion of violence led me to a more meditative state of mind, the sound of the winds and chimes helped too.
Overall, it was a wonderful game that I’d continue playing from time to time. However, I really wish it had a better indicator that I had to click that button on the bottom left to start.
The shock as I flew so far up for the first time
