PixlBit

*Note: this is something I meant to post when I played Journey back around Christmas time. For whatever reason, I never got around to it.

Exclusively downloadable games are a blind spot in my gaming view. I've played a few, but not enough to have confidence in knowing who is producing quality work in that side of the market. This will hopefully be an issue I'll rectify this year, but i hope that any I do try are of the cailbur of Journey, a game that more than earned the accolades that have been pinned to it.

Journey is an experience. It reminds me more of something that would be found in an art museum's installation about video games. It was beautiful in it's presentation. The screen is not cluttered with much of anything, just the wonderful visuals that draw in the player to the world.

The play is simple. There's nothing complicated about the game in this respect. Truthfully, the game didn't require it. You play a humanoid that travels across the landscape to reach the site of a meteorite. I had thought early into playing that it was a McGuffin to get the player into the "action" of the game. And it was, to an extent.

This game can be taken as a metaphor for everyone's journey: the journey of life. I will not give the ending, as new players deserve to play through it fresh, but it left me slack-jawed at 2AM and again at 11AM when I played through the game again.

Journey is not an exercise in melding gameplay with tremendous graphics, constructed to provide a narrative; it's about putting itself into a person's head. It's about using the medium as a method to create a specific user experience. In this case, of course, a journey. The lack of narrative made this game's premise stronger. I worry that any other downloadable games will have to meet a very high bar after this.