DreamFeel

I was initially reluctant to play the game, to turn Journey from a mythical idea into a memory, regardless if it would fit the abstract idea I had in my mind or not. As I write this I’m now mere moments from completing the ‘game’; I can still feel my heart in my chest. That Journey has rendered me, someone who exists from minute to minute by subsuming himself under constant idle distractions, quietly mute and thoughtful is quite a feat. Over the next few rambling paragraphs I’ll touch some of thoughts swimming around and attempt to circle what made those two and a half hours special.

This is a game about communication and companionship. Where Journey really shone for me is through the relationships you build up between other players not despite the few channels of communication but because of. In the ending it's a surprise as you realise just how many different partners you had, and how some stood out more than others. You can tell so much of someone by how they jump around you, try to sing with you, help you, and wait for you, or not. The first person who I caught glimpses of in my game was a curiosity, kneeling on the ground as I got closer. I jumped around and tried to in vain to get through before they vanished into the air. The second companion I met actually inspired an initial jealousy: they, flaunting a slightly longer piece of cloth than myself, showed how I had missed some parts of the game already.

However we stuck together over the next hour and I really felt a kinship. Without direct communication what we had most of all was trust. The analogy to relationships is clear; we were utterly inseperable at every stage. That is until we reached the caverns. Catching my previously magisterial and carefree explorer completely unprepared my companion was painfully snatched away. I never quite had the same relationship with a player again. Perhaps if I was to take one small summating, and admittedly rather arch, thought away from this Journey it’s that it is always best with a companion.

This is a game about vulnerability. Deserts are often associated with the philosophy of sublime; the overpowering vastness and awe but disinterested danger and inconceivable threat of the natural world at its grandest and most terrifying. In Journey this isn’t quite the case: the dunes that populate the first hour of the game are places of beauty and awe but, some hidden nooks and crannies aside, they are also very conceivable and understandable, even straightforward. This is a wonderful playground and as you gain new pieces of cloth your mastery over movement grows and grows and you are lulled into warm, fuzzy complacency. However, an hour in things begin to turn just a little bit darker, indeed the game’s structure could be seen almost as a perfection of an eerily similar emotional arc in Flower. Suddenly, in stark contrast, the player is actually revealed to be very weak and is confronted by threatening, unknowable forces that symbolically tear your cloth to pieces.

The whole tenor of the game shifts. It is the following section as you reach higher into the snow swept, mountain I would posit as now one of the most powerful experiences in this medium. How can one tiny life, or two struggling ever harder to co-operate, compete with the sublime forces of nature? The dramatic conclusion of this is the high point of the entire experience, all game elements and artifice melt away and the player exists in a poignant, quietly heroic and very personal moment. I had goosebumps. The moment is fleeting, as they often are; there soon followed a hurried non-interactive and arguably incongruous cut-scene and the realisation that exactly what I, and the brave friend struggling alongside, did had already been done by tens of thousands all around the world; it wasn’t quite mine anymore.

Everyone would always stumble and everyone would always be reborn, so long as they persist through the designed content. While Jason Rohrer’s provocative call last year to once again embrace the challenge and the push/pull seemingly natural to the medium is fresh in my mind that’s okay, Thatgamecompany have slightly more egalitarian and inclusive goals in mind. Flower did wonders for expanding the audience and perception of games and so will Journey. I didn’t have a chance to ponder the seeming contradiction of that moment for long as I was now uncontrollably racing up the mountain’s highest peaks enabled by a piquant power fantasy.

This is a game about transformations. What sets Thatgamecompany as a collective apart from most other game creators, even those trying to create meaningful or emotional works, is that they, from my humble vantage point as an admirer, have seemingly tasked themselves in Flower and Journey to create works that not only push the player’s emotions further but, over an emotional arc, symbolically transform the player by the end too. After playing a Thatgamecompany game you may not see the world in quite the same way as before. Comparisons to “2001: A Space Odyssey” seem apt to me, as the player passes on he is almost pointedly reborn as a child of the universe and achieves a higher state of being. While Kubrick’s seminal film is pensive and almost unemotional, Journey’s emotive rollercoaster and feel-good ending bears more resemblance to directors like Darren Aronofsky and Steven Spielberg who have a penchant for finely controlled and powerful but sometimes transient melodrama. We can now unapologetically say we have such master craftsmen that can so carefully pull the emotional state of the player minute to minute, and in many ways that is worth pausing to celebrate.

This is a game to be remembered; a clear flag placed upon the ascent of our medium. There’s still so much I haven’t touched upon, I haven’t even talked about the narrative at all. The incredible world-building, and the sense of history among the ruins you come across or fly over. I’m currently writing a short paper on minimalism in game narrative, an ‘Iceberg Theory’ of Games, and Journey’s ruined world and the unspoken nature of its almost sacrosanct interludes are a master-class example of how to do this. No one tells you what happened, no cutscene exists to talk down to the player breaking down plot points repeatedly, and there are no pop ups letting you in on a secret you may have missed, but all the pieces are there. The game’s themes become that much more powerfully by engaging the player’s imagination. How wonderfully the game opens and slowly introduces the player. I haven’t talked about the breathtaking and already iconic art direction and character design which effortlessly speaks to the player, arguably the game's strongest aspect. Nor have I talked about the beautiful feeling of movement or the game’s complete and utter mastery of flow.  It is an embarrassment of riches.

I can’t wait to see what Thatgamecompany do next as they continue to set the bar higher for themselves and challenge the rest of us. Especially now that I feel like they have mastered what they set out to do with Flower and Journey. Their development process is one of crazy exploration and experimentation; might they loosen up and let some more of this find its way into their games, giving the players some of that privilege? Perhaps I am simply too selfish for wanting in on their fun! If I seem to have any small questions or doubts it’s because Thatgamecompany are reaching, and reaching for, heights and feelings few games do. So, most of all thank you Jenova, Kellee, Robin, Chris, Nicholas, John, Martin, Matt, Robin, Tom, Aaron and everyone! You continue to inspire me to create: to make something where nothing was before. Magic.

My last individual act nearing the top of the mountain was to pan the camera around and look back at where I came from. For a final minute in Journey I was given a chance to catch my breath and take in what I felt to have accomplished; the game calmed and I purposefully walked through the final pass. A star shoots from the mountaintop and now, perhaps best of all for being so understated, the thought of those fireworks I saw from the same but then distant point earlier took on an awesome, resonant beauty. Yes, we can all be star children.