This week, I played Journey, a game developed by thatgamecompany and released on all platforms. Being a relatively easy and short game, only taking around 2 hours to finish, the game’s target audience consists of anyone interested in a narrative experience. Even in this short time frame, however, Journey tells a compelling story. As the traveler, the player explores a fallen civilization while making their way towards their ultimate goal, a distant mountain with a shining peak. Through the use of environmental narratives, unique puzzles, and player-driven exploration, Journey offers players an engaging and fulfilling narrative experience.
Journey contains zero dialogue, only briefly showing in a cutscene that the intended goal is the mountain’s peak. The game also lacks written instructions, only showing a controller diagram for each of the limited controls offered. This approach forces the player to explore and discover both the world and their ability to navigate on their own terms. Being a walking simulator, aside from basic movement, the game only offers two abilities: flight using a scarf that consumes energy, and a chirp to interact with the world. With this limited set of tools, the player is dropped in the middle of a desert with the mountain being their only guide.
The game world is broken up into levels, each one having a door that the player must reach to progress the story. At their core, each level employs a combination of introducing a new mechanic, utilizing existing mechanics, and advancing the narrative. While levels usually require some kind of puzzle to be solved to reach the goal, no explicit requirements are stated or necessary. This forced exploration is what highlights the embedded and enacted narratives that the player discovers and creates on their journey.
As players navigate through a level without any initial direction, they are naturally drawn to the various structures and landmarks scattered throughout the world by curiosity. Doing this, they begin to piece together that these remains belong to a now-gone civilization, building their own narrative from their perceived surroundings. Players quickly realize that their path to the door is often distant or obstructed, which requires them to continue following their intuition to discover the goal. The levels are not just a pretty backdrop, however. Each level contains a carefully designed puzzle, ranging from rebuilding a fallen bridge to scaling a snowy mountain, that challenges the players’ preexisting notions of the world. Players must learn to use their abilities to activate strips of cloth and use their energy to fly to new areas. At the end of each level, the player is shown a cutscene depicting the actions of the fallen civilization you are now traversing. The puzzles and cutscenes tell embedded stories of their own, while also leading the player to compare their own idea of the story to the one being presented to them.
Players also begin to discover new mechanics and how they can use their abilities to aid in their exploration from the start. Through experimentation, they may discover that a swarm of cloth can replenish their own scarves’ energy, or that their chirp may activate a mural revealing a piece of the world’s history. Crucially, the player also quickly learns that interacting with runes can increase their scarves’ length, improving their movement ability. While these features are made to be easily accessible in the game’s first level to familiarize players with them, they are never forced onto the player. All discovery of the world is up to the player, whether this entails focusing only on the main story or taking the time to search for runes or murals on the outskirts of the map. This gives full agency to the player, letting them advance the narrative as they see fit.
Overall, Journey did an amazing job of using its environment and its features to build and expand its narrative. The upgrades and pieces of lore scattered throughout the game gave purpose and meaning to the player’s freedom to explore the environment. I thoroughly enjoyed its mysterious nature, and I plan on replaying it in the future.
