My journey with Journey (2012). | Falcon Talks
In which I'm about 12 years late to the game...
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Wow, Journey.
Hi everyone!
So, yeah - I know that I'm about... 12 years late to the game...
But, I recently FINALLY played Journey, and I wanna talk about it.
This isn't going to be a review or anything like that.
I literally just finished playing the game, and I was COMPELLED to write down my experiences and thoughts. (This post is months after that, but I’ve only very lightly edited what I wrote down at the time.)
It's just me talking about a video game that I had an emotional experience with.
If you don't know, Journey is a video game that came out many years ago to great acclaim.
It was developed by the indie darling at the time, thatgamecompany, and designed by Jenova Chen.
Before this, they had released Flow and Flower, two award-winning games. And even before that, Jenova was the lead designer of a team of students at the University of Southern California, and that team released Cloud - another award winner.
So when Journey came out, everyone had high hopes... and Journey did not disappoint.
It received critical acclaim, many awards, and much love from many players.
At the time, I had only played Flow on the browser - it was a Flash game before getting re-released on the PS3.
I MIGHT have played Cloud - it seems familiar, but I can't remember very clearly if I've touched it or not.
Anyways, I ended up getting the "Collector's Edition" of Journey for the PS3 - which was a physical release that they did a few months after the digital-only release. It included Flower and Flow on the disc…
… as well as the soundtrack of Journey that I'm listening to right now as I write this!
From that disc, I think I also got some premium Playstation Network avatars, and I've been (not kidding!) using the red-robed protagonist of Journey as my PSN avatar for years - even though I hadn’t played the game yet!
Anyways, life likes to screw up our plans all the time, and, for whatever reasons, I didn't get a chance to play those games for a long time.
Years would pass, and around four years ago, during the early stages of the pandemic, Sony would give away both Journey and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for free on the PS4.
So I picked up another copy of Journey, and... well, you know that I didn't play it until now.
And so, we get to the present.
After getting minor surgery (and during some time off to recover from it), I finally decided to sit down one evening and play the game.
And, wow, what a journey it was.
Punning aside, what I just said really does perfectly encapsulate what the game is about.
Because, for this game, it really is about the journey - the goal, the story, and everything else is really just there to be in service of this journey.
Let me go through my experience, and I'll try to explain, without spoiling the game as much as I can.
So, I sit down, and load up the game on my PS4.
Before this, I had only seen some reviews of the game, minor bits of gameplay, and had heard about some unique form of multiplayer.
Apparently, the multiplayer is a unique one where other players just show up if they happen to be playing as well, and there's really no way of communicating besides in-game actions. They look exactly the same as you, and there aren't even name tags.
But, it had been years since the game was released (even on the PS4) - so I didn't expect to encounter anyone.
The game starts, and I'm greeted by the now-fairly-iconic red-robed traveller in the middle of the desert.
I learn how the game plays through the fairly minimalist tutorial - you can only really make a chirp that sends out a soundwave for activating various things, and you have a jump that's limited by the amount of energy stored up in your scarf; everything else is some variation of that.
As I travel through the desert and beyond, I'm taken in by the atmosphere and the landscapes.
However, the gameplay is definitely not very engaging in that it's fairly simple and not much really happens, gameplay-wise.
I don't think you can even die? I'm not sure about that, but it never felt like it.
Anyways, the stakes are fairly low, and I begin to realize that this is a game more about the experience, rather than the gameplay.
So, with that mind shift, I settle down to continue my journey.
I come to the end of the first stage, and the first bit of story shows up.
It's fairly minimalistic and without dialogue - everything is some level of vague and ambiguous.
So, I realize that this game will also be more about the experience, rather than story.
And with that second mind shift, I...
... continued with my journey.
As I continue with the second stage, I take in the environment, the visuals, and the atmosphere.
I do the game's light bits of puzzle solving and task doing.
And in the middle of doing that, I notice... another player?
I don't know if they've noticed me, and there's no way of communicating directly.
I jump around and use that chirp to try and get their attention.
Eventually though, since the environment is huge, I lose sight of them, and go back to the task at hand.
But then, I notice that they were sitting down, as if they had the game paused.
I wait for them to get up, and I guide them over to a power-up that I had found.
They grab it.
And I am elated.
Unfortunately, I soon lose sight of them again, and I go back to finishing this particular part of the game.
(Though, thinking back on it, they might have been trying to get that “meditate with another player” Trophy that I didn't know about at the time? And maybe they had already known about the power-up there, and had just paused the game to go do something?
Well, who knows?
Either way, that was the first major moment for me in the game.)
I continue through the game, and the game starts to ratchet up - not in terms of gameplay, but in terms of the experience.
I trek through the different terrains, all hinting at a grand story from long ago, and the gameplay varies just enough to make exploring the environments feel like I'm really exploring.
Soon though, I had to go to the bathroom.
So I pause the game in front of a stage ending altar and leave to use the restroom.
Of course, since this game is basically always online, I don't really "pause" the game - my character just sits down in a meditative pose.
I come back, and I notice... that the altar had been activated!
Another player had passed through and had left already!
Hoping to catch up to them, I activate the altar myself and go through.
Aaaand, unfortunately, they're nowhere in sight in the next stage, and I find myself upset that I had missed the chance for a travelling companion.
But, I had to carry on - so I continued my journey.
I continued to travel through the different terrains, and the music perfectly enhances the experience.
I don't want to spoil too much, so I'll just say that the developers really knew how to give you interesting locales to travel in and how to put in excellent set pieces.
After a rather... harrowing part of the journey, I find myself in difficult terrain.
And as I'm trekking through... I notice that someone else is behind me!
Happy to see someone else, I wait for them to catch up.
I send out a chime, and they chime back.
And from that point on, we were travelling companions.
The game doesn't really have any puzzles or anything to solve, really - besides some really light things.
But even so, even though we were basically just moving our characters towards the end goal, I felt a camaraderie with my new travel companion.
We trekked through difficult terrain together, we (light spoilers) hid from monsters together, and we experienced the game together.
When one of us fell behind, the other would wait.
When we had gone through some difficult terrain or had been reunited after being separated for a little bit, we'd chime at each other.
It was... a beautiful tiny bit of human connection.
There's not much else that I can say without spoiling the game.
We got through some of the journey's tough times together, and we experienced some of the game's joyous moments together.
We reached the end, and we walked into the journey's end together.
The credits rolled, and I sat back.
Such a simple game, but also such an experience.
So yeah, that was my journey with Journey.
It's not a game for everyone, and it's definitely more of an "experience" rather than a game.
I don't know how I would have felt about the game if I hadn't run into those players.
And since this was my first time playing the game, I'm sure that I missed plenty of things.
But, after an experience like that, I just had to sit down and write about it.
So yeah, I hope that some of you reading will give the game a try.
Hopefully, you will get a good experience out of it too, like I did.
And, whether in a game or in real life, I hope that you find good travel companions on your Journey.
Bye!
This is a bonus bit with spoilers, so stop reading now if you don't want any more spoilers!
So, for this last part, I just wanted to spit out all the spoiler-filled stuff that I had left out.
After we met, my travel companion and I trekked through the difficult snow together.
The wind threatened to blow us back, and we had to hide from the those war machines.
We walked until the blizzard was too much and we fell down into the snow, frozen.
But then we got re-powered, and we flew through the sky together!
We reached the end of that joyous flight, and... I think we both felt that the end was near.
We walked into that white light ahead of us together.
And together we stayed until the credits rolled.
*sigh of contentment*
What an experience!