@“Funbil”#p41341 In direct opposition to me finishing Ico the other day, I‘ve just last night played and finished Journey as well. Hot take - anyone ever say this game is good before?? Because dang! Like Ico, I went into this blind, save for what little screenshots or vague words on the wind I’ve heard throughout the years. Not that Journey has much to actually spoil in the base gameplay itself, but not even knowing what kind of experience Journey is led me to being very surprised and deeply moved with how much was said with so little, which the developers trust entirely in the hands of its players without basically any guidance at all. For this reason, I‘ll be spoiler tagging my experience and thoughts going forward in case anyone else was lucky like me to have made it this far without really knowing what Journey is, and does still plan to play it some day. The rest of this post is basically just me writing up my entire experience with the game, since it impacted me so profoundly, and I can’t imagine talking about it without detailing all the little ups and downs I went through personally. tl;dr, the legends are true, this game owns.
||Just to preface, what I *did* know about the game going in was this: It's pretty, there's some kind of multiplayer thing somehow, and it makes people cry. Nothing more and nothing deeper than that. Didn't know the extent of the multiplayer, how many people it could support, if the multiplayer was opt-in or if it would work perfectly well as a single-player game (I prefer single player games 95% of the time!), I really knew nothing at all. So, when I got to the first full area and saw another player, I played around with them, exploring and learning to fly together, that kind of thing. As with probably most people, I was really bad at flying, by the way! This other person showed a lot of patience though, and a lot of playfulness. To put it mildly, we both liked chirping quite a bit. I eventually started making my way to the progress point, and it seemed like this other player was hanging back. I figured they were just sitting around in this area all night to hang out with whoever showed up. Made sense to me! I continued on by myself, assuming that's normal behavior in this game.||
||Early into this next area, I had to deal with some irl stuff so I was away from the controller for a couple minutes. Imagine my surprise when I come back and see another player chirping and waiting with me! I'll admit I was a little annoyed... I had in my mind that this game would be really nice to just slowly stroll through and soak in the environments. It was nice playing around with that other person in that closed-off space that seemed intentionally designed for multiple people, but ahead of me was this large open vastness dotted with interesting little ruins and features. To me, that's a huge invitation to take things slow and explore things thoroughly. Under the watch of a second person though, I felt a little more compelled to just go straight to the next objective so they wouldn't be annoyed with me. They obviously wanted my company, they had just stood around for several minutes waiting for me to come back! So, we progressed onward, and I'm still pretty clumsy at flying. Again though, this person showed patience, and would run back to me if I ever fell too far behind. This time we interacted with the endpoint cutscene at the same time. I noticed the position of my character was no longer centered to the little circle of light that bookends each area, but now I was a little to the side to make room for the second player.||
||The cutscene ends and I find the same player still next to me, finishing up the cutscene just a little after me. This didn't happen the other time either... In any case, I waited for them to finish as they once waited for me, and we continued like this until reaching The tunnels. Beautiful area, but you don't need me to tell you that. This is when things got a little personal for me. At this point in the game, there's been no real opposition or enemies or anything, so when those serpent monsters showed up, I assumed they were essentially just decoration to make the world feel more lived-in. Running ahead of my companion, I went directly into the path of one of the serpents, and got sent flying across the room. What caught my attention more than my character sailing through the air is how my companion immediately pivoted and came to where I landed. They stood by me as my character struggled to get back up. Once again, just waiting for me. I start thinking about how they really don't need to, if they wanted they could just continue through the game. Either I'd catch up eventually, or we would just go our separate ways. They always waited for me, though. I started to feel like they cared about me. We continue on together, with my character once again making room for my partner to enter the cutscene at the same time as me.||
||At this point I'm getting better at flying - or more accurately, realizing it's not necessarily about "getting better," but being in sync with the other person you're flying with. I'm not getting better at flying, me and my partner are getting more familiar with each other and figuring out a pattern that works between us. It's not about me; it's about *us.* This comes to a head in the tower, where looking back we absolutely did not do this area the intended way. Me and my partner would stay in mostly the same spot and just keep boosting each other upwards. This would not have been possible between the two of us a few areas ago. We continue on together. The cutscene depicts me and my partner braving a harsh snow storm. One of us has our head up, the other down. I start worrying that one of us might not make it through this next part. Since I'm the main character and the game needs me to progress, I worry about my partner not making it through. Then I realize I'm no more of a main character than they are. I wonder if I've been the partner this whole time. I worry that I haven't been a very good partner. I worry that I might be the one who doesn't make it through.||
||For anyone who's played this game before, this is probably the part you've been waiting for. The mountain. Me and my friend start trying to fly together, but even though we've gotten so good at it together, the oppressive winds keep forcing us down. My friend keeps trying to fly anyways. I chirp a few times to let them know it's not worth the effort. Every now and then they keep trying. I always oblige, but also always give up. I feel bad that between the two of us, I'm the one who always gives up on it. The serpents from the tunnel return. Now we have to hide under scattered pieces of debris to avoid detection from them - our first attempt sends us both flying, and both scrambling to find each other in the snow. During the second attempt, I notice the serpent seems to target the debris more than it targets us as individuals. I run out from under the debris in time to not get caught in the attack, but my friend doesn't. It's my turn to run to their side and wait for them to get back on their feet. We continue on together. As the storm thickens and it becomes harder to make a single step forward, me and my friend are still chirping at each other, encouraging the other to keep going. We continue on together.||
||At the top of the mountain is a beautiful sequence that encourages you to start flying with your partner again; after all that time of convincing my friend to stay grounded, we finally return to the air. It's a quite large area though, and one way or another I wind up losing track of where my friend has gone. The path forward is very clear, and I'm actually half-convinced that this is planned by the game designers, since they might want you to finish the game without another player. But instead of moving forward, just as my friend has done for me all this time, I find a spot on a rock next to a waterfall to sit and wait, hoping they eventually turn back up again. I have no idea how long it will take, or if will ever happen, but I decide right there and then that I will wait as long as I need to see my friend again. I sit, I wait, chirping to myself, wondering if they've moved on without me. That doesn't seem like something they would do, though. My friend wouldn't leave me behind. And after a few minutes, I'm proven right. My friend start floating up over a distant horizon, chirping like mad. It was weird seeing them so far away! We continue on together. As we walk through the final passageway, our chirps to each other become quieter and harder to see against the light slowly washing over the screen. To circumvent this, we start doing full chirps since those make the player characters do a small little animation. At no point do we ever let each other feel like we're being ignored.||
||That's how the game ends. Me and this perfect stranger affirming to each other that we care about each other, which at that point hardly needed saying. No game has ever made me feel so genuinely cared for before. I don't think any game really could in the same way. This is me and another human being who have literally no reason to attend to each other, the game is perfectly playable single player. The only reason we stayed by each other's side so much was because we wanted to. It was a choice we made to keep each other company. So many games spend so much time making you take care of things, so to take part in this system where you are the thing being cared for, and can care back to your caretaker, it's a wonderfully beautiful and deeply intimate thing. At the end, the game revealed to me I had only ever met one other person that whole play session; ThatPolishPerson. The person I had left behind in the first area was the same one who waited for me so many times throughout the rest of the game, and who I learned to wait for as well. It made me feel warm knowing my name was on their screen, too.||