Journey, designed by Jenova Chen and developed by thatgamecompany, is a walking simulator first released on PlayStation 3 in 2012 and now available on PS4/PS5, PC, and iOS. I played this iOS version. Its target audience is not the traditional action-game crowd but anyone drawn to quiet, visually-driven experiences. My central argument is simple: in Journey, walking is not the absence of gameplay — it is the medium of storytelling itself. The game builds its world, emotion, and meaning almost entirely through how the player moves across the landscape.
The opening scene proves this right away. You wake on a sand dune, see scattered tombstones and fluttering cloth runes, and notice a distant mountain with a beam of light. There is no text, no voice-over, no quest log. In the MDA vocabulary, this single moment pursues two aesthetics at once: Discovery (game as uncharted territory) and Narrative (game as drama). The visual composition alone tells you what to do and why to care, and it does so by withholding information rather than explaining it.
The mechanics are deliberately minimal — walk, jump, sing a single musical note (I have not experienced yet), and collect runes that extend your scarf and grant flight. From these few inputs emerge rich dynamics: scanning the horizon, drifting down sand slopes, chasing small glimmers of light. The sand-sliding sequences are physically pleasurable in a way that maps directly onto the aesthetic of Sensation. Because the design removes menus, HUDs, and combat controls, the player’s attention collapses onto the landscape itself, which is exactly where the story lives.
The plot is revealed through wordless murals activated inside the ruins you visit. A civilization of white-robed figures discovered the runes, built a radiant culture, fought over the resource, invented weapons, and collapsed. I read this as a quiet allegory for fossil fuels and human conflict — prosperity built on a finite thing and then destroyed in the struggle to control it. What matters for design is that this meaning is never delivered; it is assembled by the player while walking. Nicole Clark in her Salon essay argues that the walking sim’s real power is making players “recognize and consider” how their movement shapes what they understand. Journey is a precise example of that claim.
One mechanic I especially enjoyed was the scarf. When I collected a rune, it became part of my scarf and allowed me to fly or glide. This made exploration feel rewarding without turning the game into a typical upgrade system. The scarf also visually connects the player to the world’s cloth-like energy. It is both a gameplay tool and a symbolic object. Similarly, sliding down the sand dunes is not only fun mechanically; it also changes the emotional rhythm of the game. After slow walking, the sudden speed of sliding creates joy and flow. These small design choices make the journey feel alive.
Compared to most violent games, where the feedback comes from hitting, killing, and getting killed, Journey almost has no violence in its mechanics. The flying serpents can scare you and tear off part of your scarf, but they don’t kill you in a bloody way. Failing just sets you back a little — it is not a death screen. Still, the game talks about violence through its story: the old war, the weapons, the fallen civilization. Keeping the theme but removing the fighting is what makes the story feel different. A shooter would ask me to join the war. Journey asks me to look at what is left after it. I am not a fighter here, I am more like someone who came too late and can only watch. This works because the designers trust that walking alone is enough to carry the feeling. Taking out violence is not making the game smaller — it is a choice that lets the game talk about violence in a more honest way than many games that show it directly.
(Claude was used for wording refinement and grammar checking.)
