Journey

It's been a while since I've felt this way playing a game.  No, seriously.  As a person who has played more than 400 video games in his lifetime, I can safely say I've seen a lot.  Strategy games, RPGs, sidescrollers, management, simulation, platformers, shooters, games about photography, driving, sports, independent properties, franchise games, handhelds, consoles, a computer, 2D, 3D, motion-controlled, light guns, mouse and keyboard, microphone commands, cartridge, disc based, massively multiplayer, splitscreen...

There's so much more I could list if I wanted to.  For a while, I've been feeling pretty jaded about games.

But after playing Journey, I was blown away.  After I completed it the first time, I got up from my couch, let my jaw hang open slightly, and paced while holding the side of my head, hands pulling my hair and eyelids back.  It's a feeling, a mood I barely remember experiencing, but I know it instinctively.  It's like the first time I figured out a video game all over again.  Very few games inspire that kind emotion.  I can remember Portal and Shadow of the Colossus... and that's about it.  When I was younger, I'm sure I experienced it a lot more, but I have trouble remembering those years for no apparent reason.  I could likely point to Super Mario World, Legend of Zelda, and a couple other games though.

 In Journey, you play as a figure wandering the desert.  The clothes your character wears responds to cloth with the same pattern and design, and when you use your character's indistinct shout command, the cloth will also respond.  You can pick up little balls of energy in the shape of glyphs that increase the length of your scarf, which can store power that you can use to jump.

The environments are very beautiful.  The camera is often utilized to give great shots, and the simplicty and abstractness in forms is effectively utilized to guide the player.  Usually, some object in the distance becomes your target, and one you reach it you begin exploring the area, looking for a way to progress.

This often involves the use of the previously mentioned cloth, which appears in many forms.  It can flutter around in a mess of scraps, it can be shaped like a jellyfish, or my favorite, when the whales made of cloth show up.  All of these forms recharge your jump ability and allow you to float, and the cloth scrap tornados can be used to jump great distances when you use your voice.

All of these elements are demonstrated very well.  There's no real tutorial to speak of, but once you figure out how the cloth mechanics work, it becomes easy to figure out what the next step should be, whether that means moving from jump to jump, walking across a bridge made of cloth, riding a cloth whale, or using the shout to activate monuments.

Journey has multiplayer, but it is not like any other I have ever seen.  For starters, you cannot choose to join anyone's game; all you can determine is whether or not you want other nomads to appear.  If you do enter another person's game, the only thing that identifies them is a symbol - you know nothing else about them.  I don't know if it's a matter of the game's actual audience being friendly or the enforced anonymity (until the journey is completed), but so far I've had very cooperative companions.  Maybe it's because there's no way to harm your companion in any meaningful way; the worst anyone can do is simply walk off or not stick with you.  Cooperating does have benefits, though.  Since the nomad characters wear the same kind of cloth that is charged by the cloth creatures, nomads can charge up each other if they stand next to each other.

It's tough to communicate anything; you can only make an indistinct shout noise, and you can either do it fast or do it loud.  I usually just spammed the voice button whenever I wanted my companion to look at me or find me, since any time a player shouts, the direction they are in is highlighted by white on the edge of the screen.


Spoiler Alert!

I'm going to talk about my play-through.  If you ever intend to play the game and want to be untarnished when doing so, GO NO FURTHER!

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Okay, here we go.

Everyone starts out in the desert, and I was no different.  The game wastes no times in demonstrating the controls, the elements of the world, and so on.  This very first part I played alone.

I walked towards the ruins in the distance, and discovered lots of the things I described earlier.  I started growing a magic scarf, could jump around, and so on.  The first thing I walked through seemed to be a graveyard.  There were lots of headstones, staggered and strewn about in the shifting sand.  I wonder what who or whatever left the ruins behind  looked like.

One of the destroyed building had a large blank wall with a few monuments beside it.  Walking close to the monuments activated them.  I decided to shout to see what happened, and all the monuments began to glow.  A mural then appeared on the wall.  I didn't know what to make of it, so I left.

I found another monument in the desert, but this one was different.  It had glyphs on it.  When I shouted, a spot lit up on the ground, and my character automatically walked to it and sat down.  I was shown a vision after my screen faded to white, of a figure similar to my character but in white.  I was also shown an Aztec/Incan-esque mural, which I would later figure out was a mural of my journey.

I moved on to the next area, and here is where I met my companion that would stick with me for the rest of my journey.   All I could identify him by was his icon, which looked like a little fist, and I took to calling him Fist.  I'm not sure Fist was a he, but I'm gonna just use it for convenience.  Fist didn't seem to explore to like exploring a great deal, but he kept close to me pretty well.  When I met him, his scarf was shorter than mine, and it stayed shorter than mine for the rest of the game.

I ran into Fist as he was trying to make a cloth bridge.  I quickly followed suit and began helping with the effort, sticking close and shouting.  Even if we couldn't speak or recognize each other beyond the icons and the actions, there was something comforting about the connection that seemed to form regardless.  It didn't matter where we were going, or why, or even how.  We were simply brought together, and that is enough.

We continued exploring, climbing a spire, investigating more ruins, sliding down a large dune hill that seemed to take ten minutes to traverse as cloth birds flew with us and the harsh sun caused the tumbling sand to glitter like jewelry.  We ended up underground, where everything was much bluer.

The underground was where Fist and I first met something dangerous.  The cloth eaters.  They don't have any universal name I know of, but they fly, and when first introduced they eat a scrap tornado of magic cloth that powers you.

Fist and I both went on not fully comprehending the danger until a blue light shone on us and then turned red.  We were both blindsided as a cloth eater charged and struck us.  We were knocked away, and part of our scarves had been eaten.  I wasn't sure if we could die then, but I resolved either way to avoid them in the future.

Eventually, Fist and I ran into an underground tower.  As we powered it up, it caused the air to glow and fill with sigils like the ones our characters had.  We found out quickly that we could hover and fly however we wanted inside the magical air.

Once we made it to the top, we received another vision from the white robed figure after another fade to white.  The entire journey had been recapped, from our stroll through the desert to the climbing of the tower.  We were then shown the future; we would climb the mountain, where many others figures like us had, and we would succumb to the cold.

We trudged on anyways, marching right into the snow.  The snow moved like the sand, but it drained energy from the scarf.  Fist and I quickly discovered that being close to each other would overpower the cold chill, so we stuck close.  It was as if we huddled closely for warmth.  This didn't stop the lengths of our scarves from growing icicles.

Mountains are always treacherous.  Winds blew us around regularly, and we had to hide behind massive grave stones to move on.  As we went further and further up, the more our characters became covered in cracked sheets of ice.  We moved slower.  We could no longer fly or jump at will.  The ability to shout became a best a whisper drowned out by the howling vortex of wind.

There were more cloth eaters, too.  Flying around, completely unphased.  Fist and I had to use the dead bodies of other cloth eaters to hide in to get by.

Fist screwed up.  He had moved too slowly, and a cloth eater's spotlight caught him.  He hid in a corpse, but it was too late.  The cloth eater charged, and launched Fist far away.  I lost sight of Fist in the snow.  I panicked.  I thought for a moment that maybe I'd betrayed him somehow, by not doing well enough to guide him.

I panicked.  It's a very rare feeling to get in a game outside of competitive scenes, and even then it's not the same kind.  Virtual death almost always lacks permanence, and the cloth eaters are not really gruesome or disgusting. But if I lost Fist, I wouldn't be able to find him again.  If I did lose him, I'd have to complete my journey without him.  He had been there since the beginning.

I had become loyal and caring towards someone I didn't even really know in just two hours.  I wanted him there at the end, whatever that end may be. I would've felt bad if he wasn't, like a war veteran pouring out a drink for fallen friends.  The strangest thing about it is I have no idea what he felt.  The only things I could see of Fist were his movements and chirps.  Maybe that was all we needed.

Fist survived.  It took a while for him to get up, but he emerged from the snow.  We pressed on towards the summit. The light nested between the split peaks was close, but a storm rolled in.  Fist and I kept going, but we were blown left and right, and it had become so cold that every gust destroyed parts of our scarves until nothing was left.  The scarlet red cloaks with gold trim we wore were now just greyed out, a thick layer of ice drowning out the vibrant color.  The grace we used to move with was reduced to desperate staggers and uneven steps, and we could no longer speak.

Fist fell to his knees, then faceplanted into the snow.  I turned back and tried to walk into him and call out, but he didn't stir.  I only took two steps in front of him before I fell too.  It didn't take long to be buried in the snow.  The screen faded into whiteness.

My knuckles whitened as I held the controller.  That was it?  We were dead?  I could feel my hands shaking.  I waited.  This couldn't be the end.  Where was the vision?  It always came after the screen faded to white.

I had almost despaired, but the vision came. This time, there were many of the white figures, and they called out in unison.  My character's body lifted from the ground, started to glow, and grew a scarf.  I could see the light between the mount peaks, surrounded by clouds.  And suddenly, I surged forward into the sky, flying faster than ever before.  I kept flying until I hit the clouds, where I broke through and could see the mountain again.

The mountain top was surprisingly calm; no storms, no hurricane winds, no falling snow.  There were tall red archways, that shined with light, guiding me up to the surface.  They reminded me of Japanese torii archs, that mark the entrance to Shinto shrines.

Fist was flying too, among jellyfish and whale cloth creatures.  Eventually, we made it to the top, where the mysterious light had been.  We began walking into it, chirping amongst ourselves as if we were having a conversation in gibberish.  It was the only way to express anything as we walked.

We disappeared into the light, and the game ended.  A meteor launched from the mountain, and went backwards through the path we went as the credits rolled.  Eventually, the meteor landed right where the game had started, but now it was night.  An achievement notification popped up, called 'Rebirth.'  After a delay, the game listed the people I had encountered (just Fist, or crcwl4, his Playstation Network profile name).


I feel like I should say more about this game, but this post is probably long enough as is.  I'd need to play through the game again to come up with any sort of meaningful analysis, criticism, or insight either.  Regardless, I will most certainly be playing this game several more times.