Reviews
Journey
Andy Robertson
thatgamecompany
PlayStation 3
Playing a console game online introduces you to an underbelly of
darkness and pain, of teenage smack-talk and juvenile postulating.
It only took me a few visits to online matches in Xbox Live or
PlayStation Network to realise this wasn’t a place for me, not yet
anyway.
Journey, on the PlayStation 3, changed all this.
Reducing player’s communication to their Bedouin character’s
movement and simple bird-like chirrups transforms the rules of
online play and creates a revealing study in otherness.
In the game, which is best played from start to finish in a
single three hour session, you find yourself in a wind-swept desert
as meteors rain down from a distant volcano. Like Flower,
the developer’s previous game, travelling through the environment
imbues the videogame interactions with mythical qualities.
The game progresses through different landscapes, in which there
are floating fabric elements to collect and discover. Each new
piece of fabric is added to your clothing and grants the ability to
jump higher and reach new areas. Over the course of the game
proficient players can transform their jumps into a beautiful
soaring ballet around the different environments.
While each element of Journey is well delivered, the
real surprise is its overarching direction. Whether desert or polar
or tundra each landscape knits together with the last to create a
real sense of voyage, of travel, of journey.
It’s reminiscent of epic biblical desert traversal or the pass of
Caradhras from The Lord of the Rings. But to make these
comparisons too strongly is to undermine how different it feels to
take responsibility for the journey oneself. Leave the experience
intact and it moves beyond entertainment and addresses itself
instead to meaning.
Journey not only offers a new narrative with intriguing
suggestions about human relationships, but it does so without
words. Interaction with the game, walking, jumping and sliding
create a grammar that is entirely new yet talk as clearly about its
subject matter as any book or film. If videogames are to find a
voice for themselves, and offer new ways to understand being human,
it is on these terms that they will do it.
Each element presses the player for a particular answer, a way
forward, a next step, a direction. Over the course of the three
hours you unwittingly become responsible for the hope of reaching a
destination, the journey becomes your own.
Perhaps it’s this that makes the arrival of another solitary
player in the game such a compelling moment. Having travelled
alone, the presence of a stranger on the horizon is anything but
strange. Instinctively you find yourself wanting to stay near to
these uninvited, but welcome, guests and travel together for a time
— jumping in exclamation, chirping in response, and communicating
wordlessly in a surprisingly deep fashion.
During one play through, I faced a windswept mountain with my
companion, being blown back down the slope and unable to progress.
Seeing my trouble they quickly ran to a pillar halfway up and began
chirping furiously, calling me over to share some safety from the
wind. It was a wordless moment of collaboration and support. There
was no incentive for this in the game, it came purely from two
people taking responsibility for what was occurring.
In line with monastic wisdom, it is Journey’s enforced abstinence
from complexity and unfettered communication that creates a place
where humanity somehow manages to better itself. Without narrative,
without speaking, without words, the game turns movement and simple
bird calls into meaning and emotion. It finds hope in the quiet
stories of the desert and questions the wisdom of excess and
autonomy in service of progress.
Andy Robertson
www.gamepeople.co.uk