Journey is a game about nothing.

You have played “Journey” before, 
even if you think you haven’t. You and everyone you have ever known 
has already set foot in this place,   seen its dunes and walked its path. Let’s 
do it all again, together this time. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is a 
book written by comparative mythologist   Joseph Campbell in 1954. In it was the first 
proposal of the Monomyth, a proposed cyclical storytelling pattern that popped up over time 
in societies with no contact with each other,   spread out both across the planet and across 
thousands of years. It’s more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, the backbone of 
stories that serves as an imperfect and   not quite all-encompassing, but universal 
pattern written into our very subconscious. Nearly every story you have ever 
read has in some way fit these steps. Comparative mythology, the field, is exactly as it 
sounds. It’s the study of myth itself, the stories that are spread and refined and changed and 
perpetuated through every culture on the planet,   and seeing both where they connect and where they 
don’t. To analyze mythology on a practical level, comparison is not just helpful but necessary, 
these stories otherwise being impossible to frame   within our own existence. The people that made 
them, spoke them, and changed them are long gone, any evidence that most ever even existed 
in the first place entirely erased by time. In these individual myths are echoes, 
wisps of minds we can no longer speak to,   but in these patterns is conversation, webs of 
humanity strengthening the bonds of people that never met and never had the chance to feel 
just how like each other they really were. Mythology is a thing deeply important to 
the story of Journey. It begins with you,   a hill, and one single meaningful button: the 
forward key. Being surrounded by barren desert, you’re given nothing but anticipation for what’s 
at the peak. The walk is excruciating and long, slowing even further once you begin to climb 
to the top. The camera, near the peak, starts to linger behind, leaving only your unnamed 
character to see what’s truly ahead, until… Journey is a game where you 
walk towards a mountain. If you enjoy artsy indie games, 
you have Journey, in part, to thank for it. Games are still to this day 
not treated quite like an artform by many,   most especially in the West, but compared 
to how it was in the past, games today have a much wider window of what can be expected of 
them. In the wake of the games crash of 1983, Nintendo took over Western markets by 
advertising games not to the whole family,   but rather entirely to young boys. It was painted 
from that moment on as a fancier version of a toy, and for the longest time, it was cursed with that 
image with every single video game to release. For AAA studios, moving, intricate stories 
were being made and released, but even those weren’t often treating video games as their 
own medium, but rather just emulating movies   via cutscenes with gameplay segments in between 
them. They were able to separate the game and the narrative as much as possible, separating what 
made video games video games, in order to isolate the cinematic story. The player and character, the 
two agents that can affect the story, were parted. For any new medium or genre trying to break 
through in popular culture, there is a fight for   acceptance that needs to be won, but for video 
games, they were already a step in the wrong direction. There had, without a doubt, been many 
artistic masterpieces released before Journey:   Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, Braid, each 
making somewhat of their own splash beyond the scope of just video game culture, but 
while their artistic impact on what video   games can be during their times was notable, 
Journey’s impact was a relative explosion. Indie games, much like any other independent 
art scene, is where those tried and true   withmethods could really be broken. Wild 
experimentation followed the indie game explosion, coming with the wake of the Steam 
greenlight system, but throughout all of this,   for years afterwards, not much progress 
was made in the wider gaming community. Journey did not come early into that explosion. 
Thatgamecompany, the studio to make Journey, is not even quite an indie studio. While they 
began as one in the time before Steam Greenlight, still taking advantage of the general 
increase in digital distribution methods,   Sony took interest in them after the 
release of their very first game: Cloud. From then, they were contracted to make 
three new games for Sony’s playstation   store. Journey is the third in that set, 
with much higher funding, resources, and development time than most indie 
games at the time had access to. What   we had was one of the earliest examples of indie 
developers being given access to real funding. Only after four years of the indie game 
explosion did Journey finally hit the scene,   showing up on the playstation store exclusively 
in 2012. And yet, the moment it did, it broke the record for the fastest selling game in 
playstation store history, getting several   game of the year awards and placements, and 
its soundtrack being nominated for a Grammy, the first ever video game to accomplish such a 
thing. In this new and rapidly changing medium, the game to finally break through this barrier 
of acceptance if even only for a moment is… well… Journey is not a long winding experience, being 
beatable in less than 2 hours. It is not packed with stimulating gameplay, it is not even 
necessarily a lush story, being entirely   wordless and composed of very little explanation 
at all, a game where your only goal is only to keep moving forward. And yet, in spite of going 
against everything the larger game industry was   trying to be, it has become one of the single 
most influential video games of all time. You are an unnamed cloth creature, and your 
goal is to get to the top of the mountain   you see in the distance. The only thing you 
know is how to move forward, and the first thing you’re shown is that you can briefly slide 
down hills. Approaching the ruins of a building,   you find one thing further: your character 
climbs things *for* you. The basic movement controls seem to cover *everything* you need to 
actually do in the game to progress normally:   climbing, sliding, and walking. However, 
you’re given something new, a scarf, one that allows you, briefly, to fly in the air. Beyond you is what seems to be a now 
dilapidated temple in a small valley, one with a gate blocking your way. You speak, 
via meditation, with some mysterious being; one that reveals a chunk of what this 
place is and what happened to it. The mountain appears to be the source of all life 
in this desert, of you and of all the other cloth   beings you’ve seen so far. Past this gate 
is 6 major areas, roadblocks and trials on your path to the peak of the mountain. First 
in all of your challenges is [The Bridge]. In the first area of real gameplay, just 
past the gate, your problem is simple:   you need to cross a bridge, the bridge is not 
built. Journey is a game with two controls and two controls alone that you always have access 
to. Fate is a theme that pervades Journey,   but unlike many games that try to separate 
gameplay and story, it’s integrated into the narrative of how the video game feels to play as 
well. The most dynamic and most in your control is your shout. This is the entire way that you’re 
able to interact with the world, being able to   heal the long-dead cloths stuck in this barren 
desert, as well as your way to talk to them, being able to be carried and flown well above the world 
for brief moments of lofty freedom before falling   back down to the landscape. The only other control 
that you always have access to… is moving forward. This scarf must be recharged not by waiting, but 
by moving to the right spots in the environment,   given energy through the tiny little cloth 
friends you make, and giving you a short burst of freedom from the monotony of just holding 
forward. This cloth gets progressively longer as   the game goes on and as you find more of these 
symbols, allowing you to feel more and more in control of your surroundings and encouraging 
you to search and study the world you’re in. The bridge is contrasted heavily with the wall 
you’re trying to scale. While the bridge stands immobile, the cliff is cast with an endlessly 
flowing river of sand, making it feel not just   unscalable, but actively working against 
you. The only other bits of grey joining the bridge are metallic lumps in the sand, each 
accompanied by a dusty ribbon reaching endlessly   toward the sky. Your shout, like an extension 
of soul, revives and resonates with the ribbons, allowing you to free your species from the 
unexplained cages they were trapped in. As you look around for more, you might come 
to notice something odd: there are bridges stretching out seemingly infinitely to your 
left and right, all dilapidated and falling   apart in their own ways. Despite being able to 
see those other bridges spanning far beyond you, you can’t actually make your way to them, of 
course you can’t. Those who have played video   games for most of their lives and know about the 
limitations of the development process know that there could never be a world where these are 
explorable, but they are there for a reason. Each is their own story, their own path, one taken 
many times before by people you will never meet, but one that you, the player, will never 
be allowed to see here. An invisible wall   of wind mounts the closer and closer you get 
to either side, eventually pushing you away. While you’re allowed to see and allowed to 
ponder, to explore them would entirely defeat   the point. It is literally and metaphorically 
out of bounds. Because, Journey is not a game about going sideways, a game about choice. 
Journey is a game about moving forward. The eternal struggle of game design is reckoning 
with the fact that even for the games with the   most expensive of budgets, you can really do 
very little. Freedom is a commodity slaved over for thousands of man hours for even the 
smallest wisps of wide-scale interactivity, and so, for most games, games with a focus 
on not just freedom but visuals, narrative,   and making sure the gameplay is actually fun, the 
best you can do is simulate the idea of freedom. The single greatest sense of control given to 
the player at any given time is through movesets,   quite literally the only means we have of 
interacting with almost every video game in existence. If there is a character 
and they go to places and do things,   a moveset is necessary for games to function 
at the minimum. The feeling of true freedom of movement has been sought after 
since the very first platformer,   and yet, it has a paradoxical relationship 
with video games as a designed product. Nearly all games have what is, essentially, 
a bubble of expectations for what the player   can and will do over the course of its existence. 
Movesets are one of the single greatest indicators of these expectations, and level design is 
created not just in tune with your movement,   but positioned actively against 
it. It is, on a literal level, the source of conflict and true enemy combating 
your sense of control. The bridge is not built, you need to find a way to cross it. In 
any game focused on movement, a level   that allows too much freedom becomes painfully 
boring, while one that leaves too little, well… Beating the area is quite simple. On some machines 
are, rather than small banners, ones that are monstrously large. The gaps between the bridge 
are formed not by stone, but by a merging of   the ribbons you’ve freed, allowing you to glide 
to the top without very much effort at all. To call this difficult would be to outright lie, 
but the conflict exists for reasons otherwise.   By forcing you, the player, to interact with 
this place, you’re given the time and space to mentally wander; to look at the bridges cascading 
out from you, to find the hidden tablet, to learn the range and extent of your movement. Without 
the need to interact, you lack the need to linger. At the top of the bridge is a spot for 
meditation, and with it comes another   meeting with a spirit of the past; however, 
more important, is the gate to [The Desert]. The desert comes, in large part, with 
an even simpler task than the bridge, just moving forward. While the actual 
play area you can encompass is small,   the desert around you is incredibly vast. 
Compared to the cliffs before, you have almost too much freedom in vision. The desert stretches 
seemingly infinitely around you in all directions,   with the only thing breaking from the horizon 
being the mountain itself. With it once again in your eyesight beyond the bridge, you can 
start to catch a glimpse of something odd. Glowing lights seem to be coming from the 
peak. One flies over and beyond your head to somewhere you can’t see, while others start to 
crash directly into the sand. As it turns out,   some of the lights to crash from the mountain are 
the very same symbols that gave you your scarf, the biggest sense of freedom you’re granted 
in the game. While from the prophecy we see   that the mountain provides life, it 
literally provides it in the gameplay. Even further, these upgrades tend to 
be placed in spots that are difficult   to reach on your own. This life piece 
is stuck atop a collapsed building,   and unable to reach it on your own, you 
need to rely on someone or something else. The creatures you free are not just helpful 
and adorable, but often necessary to reach   your goal. With each to help you in 
return, you bond not just emotionally, but functionally. You are made as much of a piece 
of this environment as everything else, and these interactions give life in a very real sense to 
this wordless desert you’ve been placed into. Even further, there’s one more aspect of the 
game that I have not yet spoken about. While it can be played and completed entirely alone… 
you can have a friend. This is a multiplayer game, or a… one more player game. There is no chat 
function or means to even see the username of the other player until the very end credits, but 
they’re there and you can interact with them. The one way that you can communicate, in lieu of 
other options, is through movement. While it takes developers great deals of effort to make you, 
the player, be able to affect the environment   in interesting ways, that’s not the case for 
other players. We, as sentient beings, are built to respond to our environment, and every form of 
limited movement we have is a way to communicate   to the other. The shout is the most intuitive 
means. It can be used to catch the attention of your friend, but it also just be… like silly 
and fun. Look at this, absolutely nothing of value is being transferred here. Is this why dogs 
bark at eachother? I- I get it now, I think. The shout can also be used to give your 
friend energy, and for your friend to give it back. The game, what is normally a push and 
pull between flight and excruciating walking is tilted heavily on its side, letting you 
literally lift eachother up above the endless   desert for longer and longer. You can breathe 
that freer breath only and entirely through collaboration and it makes these sweeping 
dunes a playground instead of a marathon. But just as you’re finally soaking in the light 
of the day… you cross into what seems to be a perpetual sandstorm. Two towers churn and churn 
in an endless cycle, cast in the endless shadows caused by its own work. As you scale it with the 
help of your newly freed friends, you see that they are the very things powering this creation, 
trapped in a cage for an unknown amount of time. Their lifeforce is being used to make… 
something, the heads of which seem to have   some sort of life of their own. The segments 
that trapped creatures earlier in the desert before are made from the same material, implying 
that whatever is being made is designed for that   very purpose. However, as you make it to the very 
top of the tower, and through consulting the past divine spirits.. you’re finally able
to free them. Just past the towers, crossed with 
the help of your newly freed friends,   is one of the most enjoyable chapters in 
the game. Scripted events in video games are often a way to get around a moveset. A 
game consisting entirely of the same 4 or   5 button inputs, especially for a world 
thats trying to be convincingly alive, simply cannot mend a real relationship between 
the character and the world they’re in. When the   player cant ignore the fact that Kratos can ram 
someone through boulders during cutscenes while in gameplay he can’t climb a single rock, that 
dissonance brings you out of the experience. At the same time, though, while many gamers 
wish for and constantly ask for more freedom, more possibilities, more game in their games, it’s 
moments like these that make blockbuster games what they are. Some games are based almost 
entirely on completely scripted movement,   only able to do the majority of movements in 
the game, the things that make up the entire gameplay loop, at specific locations entirely 
planned out for you. We exist mentally in two realities in gaming culture, and so, 
AAA games simply make both a reality. The illusion of full control is handed to us until 
the moment it gets in the way of the cinematics. In this section of Journey, you slide, smile (:)). 
In a stark contrast to the pulling tension of   movement in prior chapters, you’re sliding down a 
seemingly endless valley descending to the core of this ancient civilization. Shifting movesets 
is a common trope in platformer games, with   games like Super Mario Odyssey founding its core 
gameplay on it, movesets that would not be robust enough for a full experience, but in brief doses, 
give a nice break from the usual gameplay loop. Oftentimes, there’s a scripted events button, most 
often called “interact”, the thing that gives you permission to actually leave some effect on the 
world around you, only in incredibly limited ways.   Press F to pay respect, press X to [“Shaun!”], 
press middle click to- [spiderman explosion meme]. Even for things like opening doors or shelves, 
anytime you interact in a specialized way,   your mind connects itself for the briefest 
of moments to the world you’re in. For games not specifically movement focused, 
this is often literally the only way to   create an amount of adventure or tension 
with the world you’re moving around in, moments where control is actively removed 
from you for the sake of tangibility and   narrative and stakes. Many of these full 
well could be triggered automatically, but it’s given to you not just to add 
some interactivity, but also because it’s   not that much more limiting than your regular 
moveset. Yes, it’s basically a mini-cutscene, but it’s not like you’re necessarily much freer 
than that in most narrative games normally. While you can jump any time you want, there’s only 
very specific points where it actually matters. The camera can sometimes be moved freely, but 
the level is aligned to have one or more specific   chosen places for you to go. Navigation is put in 
your hands, but to a defined waypoint conveniently handed to you on a map. Any game with a linear 
narrative, with a place that starts at A and goes to B can only give you so much freedom. In a truly 
interactive world, anything could hypothetically happen, but we simply don’t have the ability to 
create something like that, even to this day. Everything done to give players a sense of 
control, to add difficulty, to give variance is ultimately an illusion. Nearly every game with 
a story to be told is an exercise in linearity, in fate, and we simply put that thought away 
to be able to engage with the world. The arguably free-est game of all time in a genre 
that best emulates the feeling of freedom,   The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 
actually understands this idea more than nearly any other game in existence. It’s known 
for its ability to be tackled and progressed in   a million different ways, with endless physics 
interactions and enemy nuances and places to go, cleanly and evenly distributing content 
all across the entire game world. However, if you look at the linearity 
chokepoints, the parts where you start at A and need to go to B, there is only one 
true required destination in the game. Point A is Escaping the The Great Plateau, and point 
B is defeating Ganon. Nothing else is truly, absolutely required. Freedom is much 
more possible in Breath of the Wild   because the entire game is the journey, 
without a moment of required destination. Journey is a very linear game. It is perhaps 
one of the first capital W capital S Walking Simulators to ever exist in the way we think 
of them now, a term for a game that you simply   move and interact through rather than fully 
playing within. However, in truth, most games are merely a few steps removed from being the very same way. Journey, in contrast to the ever pulling desperate need to hide that feeling from its audience, decides to bare itself openly. And in that embrace, it explores what our limited control on these worlds can really make us feel. While the entire game is linear 
like a path through the forest is,   this chapter is closer to a rollercoaster. You’re 
given small differences in paths you can take, some of which give you more pieces of life, but 
this entire section is meant in large part just   to be fun. After the disheartening visual 
of that endless prison factory sandstorm, you’re able to tangibly feel the newfound 
freedom of the creatures you freed,   them joyfully weaving in and 
out of the sand alongside you. And this game is just beautiful, right? 
I can speak at length about symbolism and   gameplay mechanics and everything, but you 
don’t need me and my words to experience this excellence. It’s present on the face of 
it. The music and environmental design and   adorable cloth creatures and- it’s just 
so fun. You’re overwhelmed with it all, soaking in this synthesis of so many different art 
mediums and forms of entertainment combining that   you forget… oh… yeah… I’m going 
somewhere. I’m going to the mountain. This moment of staring at the mountain is an 
inflection point; one of the most beautiful   shots of the game, but also one of the most 
sobering. You’re so awash in the fun until it hits you just how temporary this moment 
is. It holds on this view for more than long enough to bring you back to the moment, back 
to your goal. You begin to slide down again, but this time you know that it’s soon going 
to end. The dunes get steeper and steeper and   steeper and steeper until you’re completely out of 
control, careening towards the heart of the city, but… you don’t get to see it yourself. With 
the briefest moment of feeling somewhere, you quickly fall down, down, far below the 
ruins, to a place where, for the first time, the Sun isn’t shining over you; a place where 
the mountain has no influence. At the end of every chapter up until this 
point, you’ve been granted visions of the past,   given to you by what seems to be goddesses or 
old spirits. Each spells out one new passage of an ornately told, but ultimately simple 
story. As previously said, the mountain, some time long ago, suddenly gave birth to all 
life in the desert, pieces of light forming the species that you’re a part of. Ribbons 
too, sources of power and further life,   sprouted out from the sand. With this power 
sprouted buildings, bound by this living cloth and made traversable, filling and powering 
structures to expand this growing civilization. Either built or formed directly by the light, 
towers sprung up, and given power by the influence of the mountain. However, right at the peak of 
this civilization, a rot seemed to manifest. Life began to fundamentally break down, to be 
hunted and captured by giant metallic snakes, from a place seemingly entirely unknown. 
And, with no way to fight against them, the civilization, just like you, 
quickly fell into a dark ruin. As said, Journey is a game about fate, and unlike 
most games to come before, it understands that truth. These narrative video game worlds are 
caught eternally in a pulling tension with each   other, all due to one thing and one thing only: 
the fact that you, the player, exists. In order for this world to exist at all, it needs to 
be justified. Budgets must be set, developers must work for months to years, and for projects 
geared to actually make money, it must be designed for the consumer. For that to be interesting, 
the story and gameplay need to widely appeal,   and for that to happen at all, the world that 
you’re in must be in a state of constant conflict. In these underground chambers, the only things 
to guide you are the tiniest cracks of light able   to shine from up above. Enough sand has fallen 
into this place to make it as much a desert as everywhere else, but there is a certain protection 
that everything to have found itself fallen down   here has. While the world up above is vulnerable 
to erosion, the desert consuming itself and returning everything to sand, the structures and 
more importantly the creatures here remain safe. Your newfound friends, in between the cracks 
of light, all take their time to guide you   along your path. The not-so-moving ribbons 
are also distinctly different. While on the surface the sunlight is abundant, it only 
exists in the smallest of pockets here. So   while this is merely open air, the life below 
the surface more closely resembles sea life: seaweed and jellyfish decorating the 
chambers on your path beneath the surface. On average, the video game worlds we play in are 
hellish, and it is due to our presence within these places. Many games and shows wrestle 
with this concept, this aura of conflict   that surrounds the main character that seems to 
cause suffering to everyone around them. Nearly every story told necessitates this in at least 
some way, but in the case of Journey, an entire civilization had to rise and fall all just to 
give you a reason to be here. The underground, though, seems to stand in sharp contrast to the 
conflict of the surface. In hiding from the light, these creatures have found an oasis, perhaps the 
only beings in the city still left alive. Which makes you remember… there’s a reason that 
this civilization died. It’s easy to forget that danger exists 
here, because for the majority of the game,   it simply doesn’t at all, not towards you at 
least. These creatures, ones that likely came from the underground by evidence of the statues 
around you, prey and feed on the life energy of   you and your species. What comes next, in 
stark contrast to the rest of the game, is a stealth section, avoiding the first enemies 
to ever exist to you, more than halfway through the entirety of Journey. Light, what was 
just earlier a guide, a source of life, is now a death sentence. The search lights of these 
metallic creatures spell disaster for anything   to get in their way. But in that proposed danger, 
this newfound tension, there is one small issue. While most games hinder progress in 
a way that feels like you’re the lone   being fighting against greater threats, 
using resets and quote unquote “deaths”, it is impossible to actually die in 
journey. You cannot fall off of the map,   you cannot be reset, you cannot even 
take damage in the traditional sense. While most games give you a moveset and use 
difficulty as a means of controlling it,   Journey removes difficulty in place of the actual 
core of progress: giving or taking away movement. When you get caught by these terrifying metallic 
creatures, you aren’t killed. Everyone knows   that’s a farce, just the fail state that has 
to be put into a game for stakes to exist, the conflict that needs to happen; you are fated 
to reach the end of the game. When you’re caught in Journey, you do not die. Instead… you lose the majority of your scarf. A massive chunk of the only tie to freedom 
you have is violently ripped away from you. And, once you’ve been caught, you can 
never get it back. The rest of the game is made permanently more restricted, more 
uncomfortable, less free. In that way, Journey is more punishing to mistakes than 
almost any video game out there. And yet, despite you being punished, the truth of 
the matter never changes. You have a fate, and that fate has been inscribed into both 
stone and stars. You will reach the mountain. With patience and a bit of luck, you can make it 
all the way through the underside of the city.   You’re saved at the last second by a field of 
protective runes, and, in one final meditation, your civilization’s story is put to rest. 
Entirely unable to fight back against the menace of the metallic creatures, the dead fell 
into and were covered by the ever building dunes. The sands of time only built higher and higher, 
until any trace of their life only existed through innumerous small graves dotting the landscape. 
With the influence of the light fading away, only small wisps could manage to return to the 
ground once again… wisps that came to form you. The Tower is where past, present, and future 
combine. Despite the fall into the underground feeling unplanned, like an unexpected mistake, you 
find yourself exactly where it is you need to be: a tower constructed specifically for you to find 
it. While the past of this civilization has caught up to the beginning of your story, this tower 
seems to know where it continues from there. Following the theme of light as water, your 
goal is to ascend by unveiling new tablets,   and with each comes more energy that bouys you 
further and further towards the top. However, on each of these tablets is something very 
interesting: depictions of every single   chapter of the game, every exact step you 
have gone through to get where you are now. Comparative mythology has something 
of a holy grail for comparativists,   those who fixate on similarities over differences 
between myths. If comparison is the goal, then the ultimate achievement would be to find 
something of an origin point. The “protomyth”   is a hypothetical story, event, or commonality 
between us as people that led to every branching myth that we’re aware of today. It could either 
be a literal event or universal part of our world,   like the sun rising and falling in the sky, or 
something more universal, some undeniable part of our very minds that seems to create these 
patterns and seems to endlessly pass them down. it could have been something within our minds that 
naturally bent those concepts. There is almost certainly no single protomyth, but 
likely a combination of many things,   either worldwide events or universal parts 
of our world mixing together with our minds, combining the things that bind us externally 
and internally all in one. Collections of   words spiraling and interlinking into a web 
much stronger than any one person could make. What is spoken about now in Comparative 
mythology is protomyths as patterns:   each one a common point in that 
growing constellation of storytelling, each one analyzed to its own specific 
origins and delved into with the goal of   finding what makes it so special. You had what 
may have appeared to be many different routes, thousands of potential bridges, but the world 
knew exactly where you were destined to go, and now you’re here. And finally, at the top 
of this tower, when filled to the brim with light… you’re finally able to meet this spirit 
physically, outside of visions, face to face. What surrounds you, through a vision, is the 
mural. *The* tablets shown to you, the past, present, and now future combined into one full 
circle, a circle at the top of the tower. You see the fall of the civilization, your arrival, your 
trials, your triumphs, all in one unbroken cycle. Perhaps more importantly though, you 
also see something else… what’s beyond. There is just one more segment past this 
point, one without a clear ending given:   right beyond this tower, right through the gate 
ahead of you, is the M- The mountain is not a place that you survive. While every other area in the game uses brief 
moments of extra movement to make you feel free and hopeful, the mountain is where all hope 
goes to die. Your scarf, the source of power lifting the chains of this world begins, slowly, 
to freeze. In fact, everything living around you seems to already be long frozen. You can briefly 
bring them back to life with a shout, what would normally give a flourish of energy, but they soon 
return futilely back to their lifeless state. Insurmountable winds blast through the cramped 
crevices you’re forced to trek through,   a seemingly endless valley that has taken the 
lives of creatures far stronger than you’ve ever been. Your weakened state only 
makes the trek seem more impossible,   your only chance of moving forward coming 
through the towering gravestones that litter this long-deadly path. Each death of some 
great being before you grants you a mere   few extra feet against the crushingly strong 
forces trying their hardest to hold you back. In most games, when it comes to death, control 
is in no way actually taken from you. We get to glimpse into a hypothetical world where 
it happened for all of a few seconds, your   impact on this world fading and that world fading 
alongside it, but it’s understood from all parties for what it really is: purely imaginary. It cannot 
possibly give you permanent consequences without some way to find a real, satisfying conclusion. 
Everyone simply engages in the fiction within   fiction that death has consequences, that there 
is tension and a reason to fight with desperation. If death truly means the end, then the only 
true death in a game is not when you lose to the game’s world, it’s when you succeed. When 
the game has no more reason to exist, a true, final nothingness casts over everything. In 
that way, death in video games often has very, very little stakes up until the very end of 
the intended experience… Each straight through the mountain pass is 
unbearably long. You’ve been without any   powers for the entire game, but only now have 
you truly felt powerless. The frost consuming all life on the mountain is creeping its way 
on to you, your cloth frosting at the edge,   your shouts weakened, and your flight becoming 
increasingly shorter. The wind doesn’t stop you, but it does slow you, and in this 
place, that is just as dangerous. While the underground is the 
home of those serpent monsters, they have no reservations about being 
in the sky. You see them hovering,   hunting in the distance over and over, the 
life lucky enough to avoid the frost falling right into the hands of these monsters. 
This is a place that drains everything. You’re given, on occasion, reprieves from 
the endless winds. One, a narrow ravine,   peppered with the graves of 
your fallen brethren; another, a heated lamp, restoring your life for the 
rest of the trip ahead, and one further,   a river frozen in time, caged off from 
the chaos of your surroundings. However, with each oasis you’re given, the next 
stretch through hell is harsher than the last. Each and every field comes 
with less cover, more danger,   and constant winds. While you start with at least 
the assurance of protection from the monsters, you quickly enter a wide open space past the 
ribbon bridge, one patrolled by an especially   insistent monster. Your primary form of cover is 
the corpse-shells of ones that came before it, single segments as the smallest 
shelters from everything around you;   not strong enough to prevent the frost, but just 
delaying long enough to keep pushing forward. Past the final oasis is what seems to be the 
final sign of civilization: a pass on the side of the mountain, one that seems to be impossible to 
actually exist. This was something built entirely for travel, for making this exact Journey, having 
to be built by someone or something that cannot be killed by the perpetual snowstorm. Even then, 
weather has taken its toll over the years,   with holes carved out from the path. The wind is 
at its harshest here, being nearly impossible to just barely inch your way to the next piece of 
cover. But, finally, bending the temple wall, you’re left with a stunning sight: the 
mountain peak, closer than it ever has been. The path here has already worn you down, and 
there is nothing to hide behind anymore. There   is nothing in sight but snow, the peak, 
and the countless graves surrounding you. Each before you a traveler, one much like 
yourself, and each one succumbing to the   impossible odds. The wind doesn’t just push you 
back, but throws you violently back and forth, taking everything in your power not to tumble, 
wasting your final ounces of energy. The game, through all of the freedom introduced, has 
been stripped back down to you, a hill,   and one single button. And even then, 
that button is starting to fade too. As you push forward, slower and slower, the 
graves begin to thin, from many to some to few to eventually none: you being the furthest 
to have ever made it. Your body begins to slow, and as it does, the light of the mountain 
seems to disappear. Able to be seen from the very beginning of the game, despite how 
close you are, it’s infinitely far away now. The camera patiently lingers behind you 
as you slow to shuffle, then a drag,   then a crawl. Your control in the 
world, the life of this universe, falls away. The traveler collapses. 
You’ve suffered a true death. In a game spent chained to the ground, moments 
of freedom coming in the briefest of flashes,   the ground has become entirely impossible 
to see. You are infused with light, saved by the spirits that have guided you along 
to the point where you are now. As if you’re in   resonance with the world itself, nearly 
everything from the creatures to the very air you fly through recharges your flight. 
While toiling away in the belly of the city,   dodging monsters and having your sense of 
freedom literally ripped away from you, your scarf now often flows entirely off 
the screen, becoming nothing more than an   afterthought. Every single moment of this, both as 
the traveler and as the player is pure euphoria. With everything in the game until this point being 
built on restriction, your freedom here feels,   tangibly, like divinity itself. The shackles 
of gravity are undone before your very eyes, and the narrative is transferred into and 
through your control on the game itself. Every   section of the game is revisited for brief 
moments. You glide above the land bridges, slide down the snowy mountainside, swim up 
through the faux-water, grazing the jellyfish   and riding alongside the cloth version 
of the very monsters that hunted you. These obstacles exist only for the sake 
of play, entirely optional now and yet   something most people willingly choose to do 
again, gliding their way through memory lane. In what feels like the first time since 
the desert that you’ve seen the full sky,   now a perfect blue, the land left to fly over 
seems to finally be running out. At one final gate overlooking a small pond of water is a 
divine beam of light, like a god themself is   staring right down upon you. And, much like the 
burst of energy to make you ascend the first time, you are engulfed in a pure glow as you 
make your way across the final gap,   a complete void below you, hardly 
even noticed. Finally landing at the peak is a somewhat 
sobering moment. The scarf you were given   at the very start of the game dissipates, 
jumping and flying no longer a necessity. Again, you are left only with the shout and the forward 
key, and just one more place to go. That light you’ve been chasing is now surrounding you 
entirely, near-blinding and all encompassing. The walk, nearly as slow as the crawl up the 
mountain, is, this time, a peaceful moment. In a way, though, you’re walking to your death 
in both. Whatever is inside the mountain is the end of the world, the end of your influence 
and as such the end of all reason for this   place to exist. The sound of everything 
but the music fades away with the light, the medium itself consumed by the 
destination being finally reached. Our view into this universe, the camera, lingers 
behind, behind with the walls meant to hold the traveler, not us, within the game world. They 
begin to walk on their own, into a place we aren’t allowed to, or perhaps aren’t able to see. 
As the glow of the mountain consumes them whole, all that’s left is the pure white light, 
as everything finally comes to an end. When the game first released, there was a relative 
chaos in story interpretation. Despite being such   a smashing success for hardcore, casual, and 
non-gamers, very little consensus was reached on what the story was actually specifically 
about. Journey is a game about mythology,   fate, and prophecy, it’s a game about friendship, 
about life and… deserts. It’s a game about cycles, or… something. But if you were to 
interrogate the core of the game,   the soul at the very center of what is trying 
to be told to you… you run into some trouble. Theories circulated about religious 
interpretations and all other sorts of   things, but even those were hard to specifically 
justify in one way or another outside of imagery, for the simple fact that there is no 
textual evidence to really support   anything. It’s impossible to argue semantics when 
an idea itself isn’t particularly present. What   Journey undoubtedly is, however, is a deeply 
moving experience. There must be something tangible in the process that Journey takes us 
through, something so core to us that despite   no actual information existing to latch on to, 
we experience something very real regardless. What each person gets out of the game’s 
experience seems perfectly tailored to them,   each detail to stand out being a natural 
reflection of the landscape of that person’s mind. Despite the beautiful visuals and 
soundtrack and clear intentionality,   Journey seems to simultaneously be a blank canvas. 
The natural conclusion to come to eventually is that Journey, the game, was designed not to be 
a creation, but to be a process of creation. As you’ve likely pieced together by now, 
while the game isn’t quite about mythology,   mythology is important to Journey for a 
reason. While the backstory of the game is given to us via hieroglyphs, it’s deeply 
important to note that it does not end with   the civilization turning to dust. It continues 
into our time, the one we get to play through. The story in that tower of light we ascend 
is not a separate story, it’s a continuation,   left off at the exact moment that we arrived. 
Most often, prophecies and hieroglyphs serve as symbolic representations of much more 
complex stories and moments and feelings,   remnants left over from lives so nuanced that 
they could never be accurately represented. However, with each tablet revealed as you ascend 
the tower, you may realize that despite each   entire chapter of the game existing inside of 
one single picture each, the entire summation of its story is shown more or less without leaving 
really anything out. In chapter 1, you arrive in the desert. In chapter 2, you construct a bridge 
made of cloth. In chapter 3, you move through a desert and up a tower with your cloth creature 
friends. In chapter 4, you slide down a hill.   In chapter 5, you enter the underground 
city and avoid the metal snake monsters. The game of Journey and these prophetic 
glyphs have the same amount of dialogue   and plot progression. In the case of the 
backstory, speaking plot point for plot point, it has even more story than the game has. The only 
real difference between these tablets and the game of Journey itself is that one is written down 
and one is made for us to play through. Journey is not a cycle of the monomyth, like every 
other iteration of video game narrative, yet   another reincarnation of the hero’s journey with 
different names and faces and story beats within that structure. Instead, it is, in a literal 
sense, the Hero’s Journey. The structure itself. Journey being named as simply as it 
is is not some random artsy choice,   it is the entire point of the game. What 
is presented to you is a literalization, a world constructed entirely for the purpose 
of symbolizing and showcasing the simplest,   most beautiful painting of the monomyth 
that you yourself can take part in. One of the single most talked 
about elements of the game,   and perhaps the most important for the 
sake of its emotional impact is the game’s original soundtrack. Each track is beautifully 
tailored to every moment, being filled with an   anachronistic blend of timeless strings, modern 
ambient, distant horns and drums and woodwinds, making every song feel as big and as small 
as it needs to be at any given moment. If you were to look up this soundtrack as many, 
many people have, you’d get something that hardly exists at all in the game of Journey itself: 
names. The soundtrack has names for its songs, as most do, but rather than calling it something 
as brutalistically simple as Gameplay 1,   Gameplay 2, Gameplay 3, and so on, or as 
individual as Resurrections, Starjump, and Reach for the Summit, the song names are 
all connected in a deeply interesting way. Nascence, The Call, Threshold, The Road of 
Trials, Temptations, Descent, Atonement, The Crossing, Reclamation, Nadir, and Apotheosis, 
with 5 confluences weaved between them. There are exactly 17 songs that play over the course 
of the main game, with nearly every single   one named in some way in relation to the steps 
of the Monomyth. Not anything within the story, but the structure of storytelling itself… however. 
If you’re familiar at all with Joseph Campbell’s   17 steps, Apotheosis is not the final one. In 
fact, it is hardly past the halfway point. Out of the song names presented, only 6 or arguably 7 are 
actually steps in the Hero’s Journey specifically. The Call, Threshold, The Road of Trials, 
Temptations, Atonement, and Apotheosis,   and arguably the Confluences themselves. 
Between these are songs of additional meaning and significance. While the game 
is undoubtedly a realization of this cycle,   it has more to speak on than just a recreation 
of it, and we can peek into these cracks through the meanings of the remaining songs… 
including the 18th and final one. Nearly all stories play pretend in a very 
specific way. They assume that the world   being opened to your mind is one that has existed 
for thousands to millions to billions of years, that we are being shown a brief window into 
a long-living place. Even further we enter   into the life of someone that has lived 
for many years before this point as well, often implied to have a life stable enough most 
of the time as to not require a story being   written of it, only the most conflict-ridden 
points of time being given that distinction. However, for the traveler in Journey, we come 
to learn by midway through the game that we   were not joining this being as it arrived to this 
civilization: it was born at the very spot that we began controlling it. Nascence is the first song 
in the OST, the very opening to the game. The word means “To come into existence”. Each confluence 
coincides with the meeting of the goddesses,   or potentially past spirits if the composer’s 
view holds some weight. The three songs after the Final Confluence, where you learn of your fate 
to face the mountain head on, are The Crossing,   Reclamation, and Nadir. Reclamation is a song that 
plays in the few spots of oases on the mountain, those brief moments of warmth that allow 
you to keep moving just a bit longer. As for the The Crossing and Nadir, 
they seem to be steps borrowed from more modern interpretations of 
the Hero’s Journey: The Approach,   a conflict you must face as you get close to your 
destination, and The Ordeal, the final conflict that decides whether you live and grow or die 
where you stand. Nadir is an astronomical term, meaning “lowest point”, a place that, in game, is 
the highest you’ve ever managed to get to. It’s   the song that plays as you do die where you stand, 
the peak closer in sight than it has ever been. And then… there’s the credits. The next step in 
the Hero’s Journey, the one we don’t get to see, is “The Ultimate Boon”. In the monomyth, this 
is the thing that was ultimately sought after,   the reason for the entire journey. It is, 
presumably, what is inside the mountain. As on the nose as it is to state this, 
the game is literally about the Journey   and not the destination. It is only a 
showcase of the middle of the Monomyth, that journey into the unknown world, 
and it’s for a very specific reason,   one we’ll speak about in a moment. What we 
do get to see, however, is the journey back. The credits are scored by the song, “I Was Born 
for This”. Unlike every other song in the game, this one has lyrics. Each section of the song is 
sung in a different language, the native tongue of various famous myths and historical figures. The 
first is from The Aeneid in latin, then Beowulf, The Iliad, the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, and 
the tagline of the song, “I Was Born For This”, being the final words of Joan of Arc, speaking 
to destiny and fate. The song is a connecting point of cultures all across time and nations, 
and serves as the backdrop for the journey home. Our traveler, now a being of pure energy like 
the ones we’ve seen throughout the game begins   to fly back – fly back through the mountain, down 
the tower, under the city, over the ruins, beyond the factory, above the dunes, and back, right 
down behind that very first hill in the game. We watch the night time slowly turn 
to day as the credits come to an end,   and as the sun peaks over the sky… we’re back to 
the starting menu, seamlessly connecting to the very beginning of the game. Just like it’s your 
fate to reach the mountain, it’s further your fate   to do it all over again. Due to the short nature 
of the game, it’s not just possible but fairly common to decide to return to it and play through 
the entire game again in one sitting. What begins as a life changing experience becomes a comforting 
one, its soundtrack, visuals, and co-op experience being a welcoming hug and trip down memory lane; a 
way to re-experience what you originally had, and to pay mind to each and every moment of not just 
the literal journey, but your internal one too. And even further, very importantly, you 
get to share these moments with a nameless   friend. These artistic storytelling cycles 
manifest over and over and over in different people and places and structures, but 
art as a whole happens as a community,   and Journey gives you the ability to do so. 
While everyone was new to the game around launch, there is still to this day hundreds of 
people online that serve as shepherds for   newer players. Often adorned in the white robe, 
the one you get for collecting all life pieces, they serve almost as a tour guide. They 
show you what this world has to offer,   what to collect, what to see, and where to go. 
Even for a pair first travelers, the moments shared together far outweigh how they feel to be 
experienced alone. There is truly two different video games played here, changing entirely 
in its DNA the moment you have a companion. The mountain’s design is rather special. It 
has two peaks, but is rounded off at the top of both of them. As revealed in the design notes, 
the mountain is shaped this way for a reason;   it’s meant to resemble the embrace of two people, 
two bodies in a state of permanent connection; the source of life, the power of the 
mountain is, in a way, love itself. Art is the interaction between two or more minds. 
You connect to the artist, but you can also use art to connect to each other. In this game, 
there is no reason not to keep moving forward, no specific thing keeping you tied to this 
world, except for another player. You can mess around with someone, sit around, do cute 
little rituals, explore, their presence,   the presence of another living being to experience 
this art with gives a whole new dimension to it. Not many games out there have co-op with 
strangers against no opponent at all. We’re so   often compared against each other for the sake of 
play and competition, but we all see and know the consequences of that. Online play is so commonly 
seen as unfixably nasty, but Journey is this oasis of almost intimacy with each other. You’re 
only able to communicate in shouts, you don’t   even have the privilege of a name, a customized 
look, anything that states that you are a person outside of this place. No, to them, and them to 
you, both are just travelers on the same path. By removing our individual senses of identity, 
we exist in Journey in the *context* of Journey. Our need to feel special melts away into the 
sand. All we can do is take this path together. Once the tools and societal pressure to be 
competitively selfish disappears, we become   as we always have been; travelers together, 
helping eachother across wind, sand, and snow. While the song names are based off of the 
steps of the Hero’s Journey, what’s important   to note is that a lot of what happens in those 
steps are simply not communicated in Journey’s actual story. The Hero’s Journey as a story is 
not based exclusively on external conflicts; just as much as the hero struggles with the 
outside, they struggle from within as well.   And yet, our nameless, wordless, expressionless 
traveler simply can’t provide that for us. In lieu of the protagonist having that progression, 
that conflict is placed on you, the player. Most games place you in the position of the 
observer, feeling secondhand emotions from the   actions and reactions of the protagonist. However, 
outside of those brief moments with the goddesses, you are the only being controlling every 
action the traveler takes. It only exists to be an extension of you, a tour guide through 
this world, and a way to tangibly interact with it. Truthfully this is the goal of all stories, 
to be a conduit to move you, to change you, to give you new perspectives and ideas. It’s 
simply that, like everything else in Journey, it does away with any need to pretend. The 
directness of this game, through game design   to story to philosophy, all serves to connect 
with you more than any game to come before or after. The names of these songs are as much about 
each individual section of the world as they are mission statements, detailing the emotions that 
each song wants to evoke in you and you alone. While the world you travel through is digital, 
the journey you take within yourself is real.   Each moment of connection, each detail of this 
world lives within you, a projection of emotions and friends and beauty casting into the inside 
of your mind, becoming real for those fleeting   moments where everything else seems to fall 
away. The music swells and you soar in flight, the world darkens and you shrink yourself. You 
embody this vessel, these living clothes for your soul to wear if only for a moment, one moment 
bridging your life before and your life beyond. You are the being that has existed long before 
this story, in a universe that came into existence   an inconceivable amount of time before you 
did. Journey is merely the special world, one that you transport into for exactly 
as long as you control the traveler. Once   you’ve found the ultimate boon, you return back to 
yourself, having changed, if only in a small way. It is hard to imagine, even today, that this 
game was the success it was. I’ve spoken of so many weird, fascinating, life changing 
artsy video games in my time on this channel,   but absolutely none have had the universality 
and popularity that Journey did. As said before, it was not quite an indie game itself, at 
least not in the way we think about it today,   but its origins were unique and 
rooted in indie game design. You could attribute its success to its 
uniqueness at the time, its budget,   its support from Sony, but that simply doesn’t 
tell the full story. 2012 was a year much like any other. The same companies produced 
the same monumentally popular AAA titles,   series tried and tested and proven to sell 
year after year after year. And yet, in the same breath as the titans of Black Ops, Far Cry, 
Halo, and Mass Effect is Journey. This single, wordless game made by a small group of people 
that shied away from every single known aspect   of what a successful game could be: 
this is the thing that broke records. No, in my opinion, what made this game successful 
is the very foundation of why it was made. Every game is inherently exclusionary in some way. 
Even for the most popular games out there,   run through board meetings and playtesting and 
studies to be as widely appealing as possible, an invisible wall surrounds every game 
in existence, as well as video games as   a whole. Be it difficulty or learning 
curves or just price, there is more to get into and way more to learn before you 
can even begin to enjoy gaming as a whole. Journey is a game that doesn’t even last 2 hours. 
The controls are painfully simple, the puzzles are easy, the gameplay is borderline nonexistent, and 
the story is entirely wordless. Yet in this game, in this world is the connection point of all of 
humanity. A net cast out across space and time, the invisible patterns that have existed 
within us since we as a whole have existed.   A story constructed of and built on a cycle that 
builds bridges between every single one of us. Journey was developed, like many 
of the most interesting games,   by people with experience in other 
art fields, multi-media developers and creative visionaries that simply crossed 
paths with video games rather than a life lived   within them. Each walk of life brought 
differences, uniqueness in experience, but in the process of creating Journey, 
they focused on what makes them similar. Journey is a wordless playground, walking 
and flying through the cosmic structure that binds us all, and through that universality, 
through that connection to the souls of everyone   to touch this barren desert, it achieved 
what no video game quite had before. It broke through. It became the source for artsy, 
story-centric indie games to sprout out from, a place for each cycle to begin anew, 
with genuine hopes that these artists   might actually see a reward for their efforts. 
Journey, in a way, has become a protomyth. A lineage of unique, weird, scrappy excellence 
can be traced both to and beyond the game of Journey. Just as it was fed into by 
thousands of years of storytelling,   it has continued the path to many of 
the most beloved games of all time… It’s my belief that most progress humanity 
finds, in both the biggest and smallest ways,   is eventually inevitable. If it weren’t Journey, 
there was a chance that another game would have followed that did more or less the same thing: 
open up the consumer market for games that reject   the need to just be toys and to blend gameplay 
directly into the message. It’s not like Journey was the first to try it, or thatgamecompany would 
be the only group of people to do it. However,   with that different timeline would come 
different games. If it would have taken another year, many of the chains of 
influences would be entirely broken,   so many art products only being possible 
in the briefest of times and circumstances. To me, no video game narrative can or should 
be a movie or a book. You do interact with these worlds, even if through tiny button 
prompts or just walking the way the map   guides you. The fact that you do the inputs, 
you guide the camera, you control the pace, it makes you a conduit. There is a connection 
that forms between yourself and this universe that no other medium we have ever made can quite 
capture the same way. Journey could be nothing but a video game, and it understands 
that fact. That means something to me. In its simplicity, we’ve come to fill in 
the details. In playing as the protagonist,   we’ve come to fill that internal 
world. In taking this Journey, we’ve come to change ourselves by the end. 
Inside our minds are inscribed patterns, tropes and beats and moments that bind 
all of us together; myths all borrowing   the millenia of earth and winds and water that 
carved out the narrative worlds we all travel through. They manifest in different forms, 
but their core is what draws all of us in. In truth, nearly every story is about climbing 
a mountain. They struggle in different ways,   face different trials, may have their journey be 
shifted and changed and layered through all sorts of complexity. They might make it, or the very 
well may die along the way. You as the character are birthed from life, and upon completing your 
journey, you’re awarded with returning to it,   no longer existing, your purpose, your fate 
as the protagonist, successfully fulfilled. Your fate was scribed onto digital screens 
with modern glyphs, your fate sealed by   proofreading and deadlines, a being controlled 
by the creator or creators of your universe. Those stars interlinking between us create 
the constellations in Journey’s sky,   the millions of dunes formed from bits of 
dialogue from every character to ever exist, crushed and repurposed and reimagined in the 
minds of the people, the gods, the mountain,   who modeled it. Each atom in the world of 
Journey has been dissipated and reassembled in every story you’ve ever read, stretching back 
to the first human and forward to the eventual last. The Hero’s Journey is now something you 
don’t just see, but do. We have all taken this Journey before through someone else, but now 
we can do it ourselves. We can set foot in   this place like we never have before. The 
question is… Would you like to do it again?

…and what that nothing can mean for us.

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Thumbnail by the ever-talented artist, streamer, gamer extraordinare RigorMarcy:
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Music Used: https://pastebin.com/5fxgpBzc

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:59 What is Journey?
5:32 Nascence
6:54 The Bridge
11:36 The Desert
15:07 The Dunes
21:20 The Ruins
27:17 The Tower
30:02 The Mountain
40:10 Analysis
53:48 Conclusion
58:59 Ending
1:00:18 Support

37 Comments

  1. If you enjoyed this essay (I put my whole soul into it), consider subscribing to my patreon. It means more than you could ever possibly know.
    https://www.patreon.com/user?u=74033438

    JOIN THE DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Nt6BhKKee7

    Free high quality download of the thumbnail (and variations) for desktop backgrounds (be sure to send Marcy a thanks): https://www.patreon.com/posts/130857423/

    Secret video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUn69JuyUrM

    and while im at it, i'm allowed to recommend all of you a song as a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpgwDyD3V2I

  2. Love this game so much I grabbed someone's fan made shirt of it. And I basically never buy game merch (official or otherwise)

  3. I was just a teen, playing the most famous games, the ones everyone knows about. Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, GTA, Need for Speed, Skyrim… Then came Journey. It was the first time, probably, that I really saw video games as more than entertainment. Instead of fighting enemies or chasing thrills, I was just there taking my time, contemplating my environment, letting the music sink in, making my own interpretation of the silent story…
    The game is so short, it has little to no replayability, yet I kept coming back to it. My brother didn't understand, after all, it's just a game about climbing a mountain and you can't do a lot of different stuff in it. Yet there it was, my first step into the world of artsy games. Journey motivated me to look beyond the big AAA blockbuster releases, to find the niche but moving tales often told by smaller teams, and for that I'll ever be thankful.

  4. A beautiful video, as always. (ps, please at some point look at OneShot and potentially Kenshi, they're both super interesting games in ther own ways!)

  5. I was going to say that Journey wasn't the first walking simulator, but it seems that Dear Esther's commercial release was around the same time (although, as a mod, it was earlier).

  6. I remember when me and my brother got this game back in the day, and I will never forget the way it made me feel.
    Journey had such an impact on the kind of storytelling that I love.

    Hyper Light Drifter almost feels like a combat, open world version of this game as it uses similar storytelling techniques.

  7. the monomyth isnt actually a thing,the author cherry picked alot while writing the book, see brandon sandersons(big fantasy author) thoughts on it if you want to learn more

  8. Hi! It's me, Freddy Fazbear! Hear to leave this comment under a video essay about a game! Har har har har har, har har har har haaaar. Har har har har! Har har har har!

  9. I got so super lucky in my first play through because I both had the same person with me the entire time AND they were streaming it, so I can go back and watch whenever I want

  10. The interpretation of the story as you recount it at the start of the Ruins chapter is very different from my own. I'm really curious now if yours is the outlier, or if I'm the minority.

    I never saw this as a battle with some hidden serpents from underground — it always very clearly read as a drought or shortage of the natural resource that was the cloth material, which led to conflict. As the fighting intensified, the ancient civilization constructed giant war machines; machines large enough to carry people (either as pilots or for deployment in the battlefield), culminating in the use of a giant superweapon that eradicated almost all life. … Am I crazy? Is this not how everyone knows the story??

  11. It is hardly a unique experience, and yet the simple way in which the style of Journey's multiplayer contributes to it's story – the way players interact with it – goes to create a unique experience for every player. The moments when you connect with someone randomly in a chapter. That moment of "wait I think I see someone" and the socialization that follows. Your collaboration with each other to move forward. The uncertainty when you lose track of each other, either to be reunited or the lingering of their absence. It in and of itself does not make the story, and yet I nearly lament for anyone who did not benefit from experiencing this game with someone at their side. It is not gamebreaking to play it alone, yet the silent comradery experienced with someone else sharing the journey with you enriches it in a profound way. Some of my core memories of Journey are BECAUSE of those moments. Even so far as my strongest memory being due to a misconception i held during the snowy ascent. I somehow believed we needed to "keep each other alive" by pulsing energy to each other, and my companion responded in kind. While i didnt believe either of us would die without it, I felt we needed to to ensure we made it through. It caused the moments where we got split up or one of us got spotted by the flying serpentine machines to feel that more dreadful, Because We Needed Each Other.

    There are too many things about this game to praise. Even just hearing someone talk about it is enough to brint me to tears.

  12. The game is a glorified screensaver where your primary interaction is holding up on the controller.
    I have no idea why people get really excited at the prospect of going on a commute in games.
    I have never played a game where the best part of it was travelling in a straight line for an extended period of time.
    I'm not even against the idea of a walking simulator style game in principle. So long as I'm actively engaged in looking for something in the environment, or having to navigate the environment in an interesting way that has consequences I think that even limited interactivity can elevate something that would otherwise be mundane, but I don't see any reason why this game is special outside of looking pretty.
    Maybe I just don't understand why someone would find the idea of seeing another player in an empty environment with no means to directly interact with them or influence the environment has merit.
    Seeing other people's experiences documented, all I can think of is that I'd never really be able to have a similar experience because I just wouldn't find it emotionally resonant.
    I feel similarly about Team Ico games, which just don't appeal to me because I find the art style and world building fairly bland. It's like they couldn't decide between photorealism and impressionism and decided to do both simultaneously, leading to everything looking really inconsistent when you can make out what you're even looking at behind the excessive bloom filters.

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