My favorite visuals from the game – these show me trying to figre stuff out by jumping, and seeing how things change based off of it.
Game Info:
Name: Journey
Creator/Developer: Thatgamecompany, Annapurna Interactive
Target Audience: All ages
Platform: Originally Playstation, played on iOS.To be quite honest, I’d never heard of a walking simulator game until I read the article linked to this assignment. Once I did read the article, however, I knew I needed to try one of these out. So many of the video games that I have seen and heard of, whether they are FPS or sports games, prioritize action, intense gameplay, and rapid fire reflexes and skills, such that I could never associate video games with anything else other than these emotions. I could never see myself playing a game to relax, then. In some sense, though, I was a little skeptical about the utility of such a game. I’ve had friends that play similar games, and I’d never understood the appeal, for many of the same reasons listed in the article – why would I play a game where the sole purpose is to walk around? I’d played similar games before, where there’s an open-world format, and you have the ability to search that world (ex. Red Dead Redemption II), but I’d never really remembered finding myself interested in doing any of that sort of exploration rather than just finishing the main story. I was interested in seeing if a game where the exploration was the main story would be interesting. And Journey did not disappoint.
Set in an post-apocalpytic desert, the story has no words, no dialogue, no instructions. Your character is in a red robe with a special superpower that sometimes allows him to jump, and sometimes doesn’t – it’s not really clear why to me to be honest. The only way you can figure things out is literally by walking around and trying things out. In this sense, then, walking didn’t just tell the story – walking was the story. And that was something that completely expanded my world in understanding what gaming could be. It brought me back a little bit to the time when I first started playing video games, the Pokemon DS games, when everything was new and I had no idea how to complete the game so I would just go try different things, hoping they worked. Once I had figured out how to “win” at Pokemon, then I became focused on leveling up my Pokemon, etc, but I can still remember the emotion of wonder and exploration when I first booted up my DS for that game, and this game brought that nostalgic feeling back.
In some sense, it’s a much better way of playing. I could feel myself just becoming immersed in the game, relieving stress from other things in my life, which gaming had not done for me at all recently. All of the games I tend to play are competition games, which reward beating somebody else, whether it is in a sport, or through violence, etc. If you lose then, it becomes annoying, frustrating, and stressful. Journey had none of that – no competition, no violence, no beating someone. Just go out there and explore the world. I think the lack of violence helped push the idea forward that there is no winner and loser in the game, just exploration, which is just so cool. It convinced me to look out for more walking sims, because it made me realize that that is exactly what I am looking for in gaming.
