A big letdown for me given how much praise I had heard about it through the years. Journey is very cinematic and pretty to look at – clearly a lot of thought was put into the art direction – but as a game it's just stupid and mechanically shallow to the point where it's hard to see any real merit in it. Most of the gameplay just consists of holding the left analog stick to traverse a set of linear levels, sometimes randomly mashing the jump button to follow a vertical path, like scaling a guard tower in Assassin's Creed. You are constantly fighting the controls and the camera to find and arrive at whatever trigger points the devs want you to hit to load the next zone and cutscene. While you get contextual clues and environmental highlights to help you out, this just makes it trivial to progress and the whole thing ends up feeling as braindead as following the quest markers in an Ubisoft game. Whatever challenge it has seems unintended, usually from things like getting stuck on geometry or various unexpected results from your button inputs. The game assists your movement in ways that feel wholly unpredictable and take away from any feeling of mastery it could have provided.
Fortunately I was able to meet some other players during my playthrough. That presented the game at its most enjoyable for me, unfortunately you just don't seem able to express yourself with them in any meaningful way, short of spamming the shout button. Having experienced the online play of the original Demon's Souls, I had an infinitely richer anonymous online play experience to compare it to and couldn't say I was all that impressed by what it offered.
To be honest, it's an absolute travesty that this game gets held up as an example when people discuss video games as art. It's pretty much a perfect example of what video games should not be doing if they are to earn any level of respect as an artform. Despite the cryptic, pathos-laden presentation, there's little meaningful unity between what the player actually does and what the game is ostensibly communicating audiovisually. The game elements just end up detracting from enjoying the art and the music that seem to have been the main focus of the devs. It's short and shallow to where even the $15 price tag of the PC version seems excessive. One of the biggest gaming disappointments I can remember in later years. Two and a half stars.
Fortunately I was able to meet some other players during my playthrough. That presented the game at its most enjoyable for me, unfortunately you just don't seem able to express yourself with them in any meaningful way, short of spamming the shout button. Having experienced the online play of the original Demon's Souls, I had an infinitely richer anonymous online play experience to compare it to and couldn't say I was all that impressed by what it offered.
To be honest, it's an absolute travesty that this game gets held up as an example when people discuss video games as art. It's pretty much a perfect example of what video games should not be doing if they are to earn any level of respect as an artform. Despite the cryptic, pathos-laden presentation, there's little meaningful unity between what the player actually does and what the game is ostensibly communicating audiovisually. The game elements just end up detracting from enjoying the art and the music that seem to have been the main focus of the devs. It's short and shallow to where even the $15 price tag of the PC version seems excessive. One of the biggest gaming disappointments I can remember in later years. Two and a half stars.
6 Comments
Your comment is insightful, and I agree: my expectations may have been dialed too high, and you also have a good point about the context of the game when it first arrived versus when I happened to play it. It will inevitably have lost some of its freshness due to influencing other games after its release. Journey is pretty upfront about not being a systems-driven game, that's not its thing, maybe it isn't right of me to judge it too much on what it does or doesn't deliver in that respect. I could benefit from adjusting my mindset and try revisiting the game somewhere down the line with a more right-brained approach. In my defense, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some coherence between the systems and the audiovisual layer, I don't think even the most ardent defenders of this game will say that the core gameplay loop is somehow very deep or engaging. I guess it's more a case that the other qualities of the game are so strong that the systemic inadequacies become less relevant to the discussion.
To be clear, I definitely think it is still on the game to try to pull a player in who maybe isn't sold on the conceit or perhaps isn't in the 'right' mindset. Journey did this for me. I found the game intrinsically fun in the way controlling Mario in Mario 64 is. It sounds like you had some technical issues which I didn't encounter, but that would have soured me on the experience if I had.
However, while I agree that the gameplay loop of Journey isn't deep, to me that's like saying Super Mario Bros. doesn't have an intricate or engaging story with great character arcs. What can you say to that other than 'yeah ok'? Journey doesn't try to engage with the player by making them learn/master a bunch of complex mechanical systems. It pulls the player in via other means. My criticism of your criticism boils down to how ultimately we must engage with art on its own terms, not ours. Bit dramatic but the extreme version of this is going to a museum and arguing that Van Gogh is a bad artist because I can't listen to his paintings and I really wanted to hear a bop today.
However, while I agree that the gameplay loop of Journey isn't deep, to me that's like saying Super Mario Bros. doesn't have an intricate or engaging story with great character arcs. What can you say to that other than 'yeah ok'? Journey doesn't try to engage with the player by making them learn/master a bunch of complex mechanical systems. It pulls the player in via other means. My criticism of your criticism boils down to how ultimately we must engage with art on its own terms, not ours. Bit dramatic but the extreme version of this is going to a museum and arguing that Van Gogh is a bad artist because I can't listen to his paintings and I really wanted to hear a bop today.
Well, the platforming in SMB is actually quite deep when you dig into it. It has a simple but effective physics model simulating momentum, giving it that signature slippery feel. There's a real sense of skill-based progression and mastery to it as you get further out in the game. To clarify, that's what I'm getting at when I talk about systemic inadequacies. I would never expect this game to have a deep crafting or RPG progression system. Instead, I think what I did expect and didn't get was some sense that I was learning and getting better at what the game required me to do.
The game's themes are a bit cryptic, but let's accept for the sake of discussion that it's at least partially about persistence and overcoming challenges (the "journey of life"). My problem then becomes that there is no challenge to overcome for me as a player. Instead, it's like I'm hand-cranking an animated movie about the themes. Most of the game I just hold the left analog stick without any meaningful input. The game seems to assist me covertly, making sure that I land tricky jumps, instead of letting me fail and learn from that failure. Players are not allowed to screw with each other when they show up during a play-through. I'm not the type to do this, but letting me have the choice would have made it feel meaningful not to. My argument is that the game disempowers me. It gives me very few choices to make, and doesn't present a unity between the choices I do make and what's happening on screen. It could have been about virtually anything. This is the opposite of what I want in games. To me that makes Journey a failure.
For what it's worth, I did play and enjoy the original Flow and Flower back in the day, so I'm not reflexively opposed to this style of game. I'll confess I've been quite obsessed for some time with the Miyazaki philosophy of games as vehicles for meaningful player choice. With this mindset walking simulators and titles like this obviously fall short. Maybe there's place still in my heart for a less rigid idea of games quality. It would be worthwhile for me to get back to this at some point and see if my opinion has changed.
I hope I don't come across overly defensive, I fully agree that the game may simply have found me at the wrong time and in the wrong mindset to properly appreciate it. I just wanted to clarify my initial thoughts.
The game's themes are a bit cryptic, but let's accept for the sake of discussion that it's at least partially about persistence and overcoming challenges (the "journey of life"). My problem then becomes that there is no challenge to overcome for me as a player. Instead, it's like I'm hand-cranking an animated movie about the themes. Most of the game I just hold the left analog stick without any meaningful input. The game seems to assist me covertly, making sure that I land tricky jumps, instead of letting me fail and learn from that failure. Players are not allowed to screw with each other when they show up during a play-through. I'm not the type to do this, but letting me have the choice would have made it feel meaningful not to. My argument is that the game disempowers me. It gives me very few choices to make, and doesn't present a unity between the choices I do make and what's happening on screen. It could have been about virtually anything. This is the opposite of what I want in games. To me that makes Journey a failure.
For what it's worth, I did play and enjoy the original Flow and Flower back in the day, so I'm not reflexively opposed to this style of game. I'll confess I've been quite obsessed for some time with the Miyazaki philosophy of games as vehicles for meaningful player choice. With this mindset walking simulators and titles like this obviously fall short. Maybe there's place still in my heart for a less rigid idea of games quality. It would be worthwhile for me to get back to this at some point and see if my opinion has changed.
I hope I don't come across overly defensive, I fully agree that the game may simply have found me at the wrong time and in the wrong mindset to properly appreciate it. I just wanted to clarify my initial thoughts.
I think your latest argument about Journey disempowering the player is more interesting. I disagree with you, but at least here I feel you're talking about what Journey was trying to do and how that failed for you (maybe this was your point all along, but I didn't get that from your previous writing). I feel the changes you propose would make the game worse overall.
I vehemently disagree that the themes of Journey are cryptic. I feel the themes are laid bare and are very simple on purpose. Again, everything you've said makes me think you came at the game with critic/harsh overanalytical brain instead of just taking the experiences for what they were. You can always go back and try to uncover why a game did or did not work, but you can only experience a game for the first time once. It's a lot easier to have a good experience with a game if you just try to take it for what it is. Sometimes what it is is a predatory cookie clicker skin but sometimes it's Journey.
I vehemently disagree that the themes of Journey are cryptic. I feel the themes are laid bare and are very simple on purpose. Again, everything you've said makes me think you came at the game with critic/harsh overanalytical brain instead of just taking the experiences for what they were. You can always go back and try to uncover why a game did or did not work, but you can only experience a game for the first time once. It's a lot easier to have a good experience with a game if you just try to take it for what it is. Sometimes what it is is a predatory cookie clicker skin but sometimes it's Journey.
Fair enough. I do think I alluded to disempowerment in my initial review without using those exact words, but in the interest of not getting us bogged down further in a back and forth, I'll just conclude that we had a radically different experience with this game and it may be a fault on my part for approaching it too analytically and expecting it to be something it was not. I'll follow your reviews and try to chip in if I feel I have something interesting to add. Thanks for the discussion.
sadurrasti
1 month ago