The game Journey, created by ThatGameCompany, is distributed for Playstation and IOS. The target audience of the game is young adults who enjoy calmer adventure games or games with significant meaning. In the game, the player navigates as an ambiguous anonymous masked character.
Player’s character, closeup
This allows the story to begin without preconceptions from the player. Similarly, the environment appears mysterious and lacks much context. Thus, walking is forced as a method of gaining context about the story itself. The origin of the character, the goals, the powers, and the techniques of the character all begin unknown. They require exploration of and interaction with the environment to uncover them. This is significantly different than some other games, even games like Minecraft, which offer significant amount of tutorials.
Beginning scene
The environment thus begins by giving a picture of opportunity and freedom. In every direction, there is open space. Over time, the player learns more about themselves. For instance, as the player encounters glowing symbols, they upgrade the character’s ability to interact with flying red paper notes that provide the ability to power flying. These notes act like tokens, analogous to chips in an analog game.
Interaction with red notes
Through these upgrades, the character thus appears supernatural and powerful. This is only unveiled by walking through the environment. It begins to tell a story. The design of the game, in particular requiring information to be found and discovered rather than given, creates a journey for the player. Thus, the player begins creating their own story through walking and thus interacting with the environment. They seem to have autonomy within the environment.
At times, the game provides cutscenes and artifacts that build upon the ominous feel and reveal the presence of both the past and the future. The past, through graves distribution across the desert, and the future, a larger version of the character that looks through a vague screen of white fog. These formal elements, specifically objects and placement, serve to guide the player’s discovery of a backstory.
Graves in the desert
Vaguely revealed powerful figure
However, while the illusion of control and autonomy is strong, over time that illusion begins to fade. As you move towards the large mountain in the distance, which is the only visible landmark to pursue, boundaries begin to restrict the ability for the player to continue.
For instance, sandstorms and steep hills form strict boundaries around artifacts that stand in the way of getting to the mountain. Instead, the only way to advance is to power large red banners and jump to the artifact that unlocks a passage to the next level.
Finding the new passageway
Unlocking the artifacts
Advancing to the next level
Over time, through this manner, the game first opens with a high degree of perceived freedom but retracts it over time. The player learns that there is only one way to get to the next level. They need to find the symbols, complete the red banners, then go to the passageway. This repeats and constrains the game’s win condition.
By forcing the player to choose a goal and choose to actively pursue by walking, without explicit instruction, it makes the player feel embodied in the character. Furthermore, walking in the game thus tells a story of pursuing a singular goal while discovering that the path there is more and more constrained than you thought. It creates a sort of irony for a game named Journey, because the Journey becomes somewhat monotonous. You are not creating the journey, you are discovering it, and you only realize that distinction by walking through the environment.
Clear, singular paths guide movement
Generally I enjoyed the game and thought it was interesting. I played about two hours and felt like there was much left to do, but how much, I did not know. The music unfortunately did not work on the mobile app, which I feel might have added some suspense and even emotional context to the story. When I listened to the trailer, I felt the music added to the suspense but was not much different from what I would have expected given the scenes. I think the game could give more freedom and paths to win, unless the goal truly is to convey a story of getting closer and closer to your goal while narrowing the freedom you perceive yourself to have.
The mountain to pursue
