Game: Journey
Creator: ThatGameCompany
Platform: Playstation 3, ported to PC. Game recommends controller.
Target Audience: Game enthusiasts of sufficient age to respond to the environmental storytelling and dark narrative themes.
The mechanical and environmental design of Journey focus on the character’s movement. The character’s movement communicates elements of the story through the way it changes along the character’s journey.
The mechanical design focuses on movement by making movement the only mechanic. Even the character’s song is in service of movement because it influences the silks (it also anthropomorphizes the silks and gives a measure of the character’s current animus, but the pure mechanics are about movement). The mute background of desert landscape and monotonous wind at the start of the game sharpen this focus by highlighting the look and sound of the character walking. We see the sand deform beneath the character’s feet, we hear the shifting and crunching as the character steps. The character’s walking speed also gives us a sense of scale—when the character reaches the top of the hill, we immediately realize how far away the mountain is given to the character’s walking speed.
The focus on the sensory detail of walking and the scale of the journey prepare for the first story beat: getting the scarf and the flying ability. After walking, flying is easy and joyous. Mechanically, it is also fleeting, which causes the player to develop an attachment to the flying silks without any explicit narrative exposition—the player wants to free and interact with the silks because they facilitate flight. This is crucial because of the resource management dynamic that arises from the flying mechanics as the progression of the game reveals the relative scarcity of flying power. This resource management aspect of movement aids the narrative by accentuating the desolation of the landscape—every location appears to be in ruins, inhabitants gone and resources depleted.
As opposed to other resource management dynamics, however, the reward for efficient resource management is time saved and the player’s own enjoyment rather than failure in the game. Compare to a game like The Last of Us, where any wasted resource use is severely punished by making future situations extremely difficult. In the Last of Us, this sharp difficulty spike from resource management dynamic accentuates the use of violence to tell the story. It raises the stakes by putting the main characters in danger, and nuances to those characters by showing what sort of violence they are capable of, sometimes by forcing the player to enact such violence through them (e.g. I may decide to kill an enemy I could avoid killing because they might have resources). By contrast, Journey’s only violent element—the sentinel colossi that destroy the silks—does not force the character to commit violence, and only reduces the character’s flying ability. Indeed, besides the dark environment and ominous character design, the primary reason we react to the sentinels is the aforementioned joy of flight and our attachment to the silks. Because the scarcity and vertical variability of the environment already make us care about these things, I find the violence incongruous—it doesn’t seem necessary to communicate the difficulty of the journey. I would change the game by making the sentinels read as environmental hazards. That is, they should follow a set movement pattern that challenges the player’s timing but does not react to the player. This further emphasizes the natural environment as the main adversary on the journey, which naturally leads into the penultimate section of the game in which this adversary is strongest.
In this section, the relative absence of flight and flying silks communicates hardship and sadness by forcing the player to walk more and playing on their attachment to the silks that the introduction of flight developed. The environment communicates the weight of the journey through the slow drain of flying power forces the player to work harder to manage the flying resource, while the freezing of the character’s scarf and the slower, onerous walking animation make that resource even more crucial. The frozen silks in this environment cause sadness because of the aforementioned attachment, which is further accentuated by the fact that they are rarely useful for flight—the usual joyous interplay of song and locomotion is muted to a weak chime and a lurching, inconsequential hop. The design of the walking animation is most apparent at the end of this sequence, where flight is but a memory, and the world is once more reduced to desolate landscape and monotonous wind. Once again, the environment focuses sharply on the character’s walking, but this time it communicates the toll the environment and the journey have taken on the character. This once more communicates the scale of the journey, but as opposed to an inspiring call which invites the player to begin walking, this is a somber realization that, for this character, the journey will be over before the mountaintop.
