Journey Review

Developer: Thatgamecompany
Platforms: PS3 and PS4

So your journey begins and you’ll never want it to stop. From the moment that you pick up your  controller and boot up Journey you will be hooked.

You control a slightly odd looking becloaked and bescarfed character (not unlike Obi Wan Kenobi) who just appears in the desert – with no explanation given as to how he (or she) got there – and embarks on a journey towards a great beam of light on the horizon.

If your PS3 (or even on your PS4 eventually) is connected to the internet you will encounter similar looking characters on your journey, who help you along your trek to the summit of a far flung mountain with the protruding beam of light. These other characters appear at first to be scripted, but upon further investigation, the other strange Obi Wan Kenobi type characters you meet are actually other players, playing online.

 Journey really is a modern masterpiece in the field and one to cherish for many years to come.

Journey’s world is strange and mystical, full of magic, wonder and broken bridges; you will find yourself having to fix a lot of these bridges with the help of your magical scarf. You will also come across some rather sinister looking flying objects who will kill you on sight – best stay out of their way.

The whole premise is so wonderfully simple – get to the beam of light – that you soon find yourself entirely enamoured with this world. You want to spend as much time in this universe as possible and never want the game to end. Unfortunately Journey does end – slightly too quickly and abruptly for my liking – but this just means that you can play Journey again and again and always get something new out of the experience.

It is exactly that, an experience, and it’s no real wonder that Journey was almost everybody’s game of the year back in 2012. Developers Thatgamecompany, known for their brilliant little indie titles Flower and Flow, are famous for pushing the boundaries of gaming, both physically and metaphorically. Journey is beautiful – it looks just like a moving painting – and the score is absolutely sublime, yet what is very different about Journey is the way the story is told. It doesn’t just tell you a story, it shows you one.

There is so much that game developers can learn from Thatgamecompany. Journey really is a modern masterpiece in the field and one to cherish for many years to come.

Here’s a trailer for one of the best video games made in our lifetime: