During the conversation that I mentioned in my last entry, ravenworks also mentioned another, less mad, game - and I can say that Journey is extremely beautiful. It is also extremely short, which did make me question the $15 asking price a bit, but I've spent $15 on much worse than this (namely, Kamelot's first two albums). After playing through it - an activity that took about one and a half hours - I'm not even sure if it's a game so much as diazepam administered in digital form. You could say that it's a bit like Shadow of the Colossus without the action-packedness, and impossible as that premise sounds, I was just overwhelmed by its... incredible niceness.



There's not really much to say about it from a gameplay perspective, as the objective can be summarized with "go forwards and get to the mountain", with the side quest of "grow a big scarf" - but even though the obstacles that it puts you through are rather gentle and usually based on finding what to squeak at to lift you higher, the combination of the soundtrack and graphics create a really wonderful journey through different environments (what else can I say?). I really loved the way that it could guide you into reaching the crest of a dune and then suddenly reveal something behind it - and the game had the important feature of a very satisfying base movement, being able to ski down the sand dunes towards that next interesting thing (I was delighted to see the entire levels full of that later on). It never felt artificial - it gently kept you within the boundaries of the game by blowing you backwards in the wind if you went too far in the wrong direction.

This probably isn't something everyone experienced because it relied on me entering the game knowing absolutely nothing about its premise at all, but it managed to spring the greatest surprise that a game has sprung on me for a very long time - that being the stealth co-operative aspect. I had reached the second area of the game when I noticed movement in the distance, and moved towards it to see another robed thing jumping about the landscape. I assumed it was a part of the game, a computer-controlled player that showed you what to do, and we hopped about building some carpet bridges together. Then... all throughout the game, Whitney and I were wondering whether this was somebody we'd been paired with online - I couldn't quite see how it would work, and I felt that the focus of the game was too much around me for it to be multiplayer (I always felt that I was in control, and there were only a couple of places where my partner activated something instead of me). Later on in a snow-covered mountain, the partner took a stupid route into a dead end, and I wondered about that - then I thought that computers were more likely to do that than humans. Eventually the game ended and presented me with a list of "People you met", and my flabber had never been so gasted - without knowing it, I had helped other people get through the game, and they had helped me. Apart from the one who kept too far ahead for us to heal in each others' aura, the git.

Despite the simplicity in the robed things' communication, I really felt empathy for my character, especially towards the end of the game - cringing when I was caught by the headlight-dragons or in danger of freezing, and feeling rather heartbroken when I lost my scarf. There was a wonderful contrast between the game's unusually earthbound start (I can't remember the last game where I had to worry about jumping too much and using up my energy) and flying free up the mountain at the very end. And being able to communicate with an unknown partner by meeping at each other... it's all incredibly charming.

The strongest message I took away from this game was that Internet people are much more tolerable when their mode of speech is limited to the level of Sooty and Sweep. Having that expressed in art is alone worth the $15.