Journey Review
If Journey is about God, then God has played an awful lot of video games. One of the most fascinating things about thatgamecompany’s sand-blown chunk of spiritual eye candy isn’t that it reinvents gaming, or extends the medium’s reach: it’s that it takes old ideas – sometimes very old ideas – and repackages them in clever, stylish, and unexpected ways. That glowing mountain on the horizon is a case in point. It seems like a straight lift from the Old Testament at first, but in Journey it’s also your ultimate objective. It’s both goal and waypoint marker, far less artificial than the breadcrumb trails of Perfect Dark Zero or Fable 2, but no less effective when it comes to the simple, crucial things that a game has to do – like keeping its players oriented as they move through large, artfully empty environments. Or check out the scarf that billows and flaps around your devout and pin-legged avatar as you lean into the wind. It’s part of a distinctive moth-brown uniform that comes teasingly close to referencing religious garb as varied as the burqa or a Franciscan’s habit, but it’s also there to tell you how much magical energy you have left for jumping and floating. It’s a piece of standard UI, essentially, yet it’s stuck right into the game world, tracing pretty little spirals in the desert air as form and function merge. Read more…
You May Also Want To Read:
