Hands-On: Beginning a Mysterious, Enticing Journey
- By Chris Kohler
- June 3, 2011 |
- 1:04 pm |
- Categories: Console Games
If you chance to play Sony’s Journey at E3 Expo next week, the PlayStation 3 game will likely be a breath of fresh air in a show packed with me-too shooters and bombastic explosions.
“Journey is about making you feel small in relationship to the world around you,” says Kellee Santiago, co-founder of the game’s developer thatgamecompany. Like previous games fl0w and Flower, Journey is trying first and foremost to bring you into a more relaxed mental state, not pump you full of adrenaline.
Thatgamecompany is all about “how a game makes you feel: the opposite of what the mainstream is focusing on,” says co-founder Jenova Chen.
So what’s Journey all about? All Santiago and Chen will say is that you’re walking through a desert, on your way to a mountain. The game has an integrated multiplayer feature: As you progress through the various stages of your journey, you may encounter another player, and you’ll be wandering together. You can stay together if you want, or drift apart. You can’t chat or text. You’ll never know the other’s name, not even the player’s PlayStation Network ID. “These things would distract you,” says Chen.
With all this in mind, I sit down for a preview of the game’s E3 demo.
The first thing I see is me, a wandering traveler who, in brown robes and surrounded by a desert, looks like a tall Jawa. A translucent image of a PlayStation controller appears on screen, showing me that I can move the game’s camera by tilting my controller.
I see only one thing around me: some broken monuments on a hill. I run to them.
The sand billows away from me as my robes swish over them. It is gorgeous.
I hit the Start button to pause the game, because I want to control the camera in some other way than using the motion controls. I can’t. There is no pause menu as such. It just shows me a series of scenes, probably of other places I’ll go during the game.
I unpause. My character has been sitting in the sand, resting. He gets up. I reach the summit of a hill and I see the mountain that I am journeying to. A crack of light splits the summit in two and the word “Journey” appears: It’s the title screen.
I slide down the hill on my feet, in a manner reminiscent of a Mario game. Seeing another destroyed structure in front of me, I climb up. I can’t jump, but my character climbs it automatically.
Some kind of glowing thing is beckoning me, a strip of paper or cloth winding around itself in an endless loop. I touch it. It bathes me in light.
Hold X, says a prompt on screen. I can jump, my robes flapping. I can glide a little ways. But I can only jump once. I find that after I touch some shreds of paper that are blowing around in the wind like Flower’s petals I can jump again.
Atop a cylindrical pedestal is another glowing ribbon. Collecting it seems to have boosted my total jumping height.
I’ve lost my way. In what direction was I going? I swivel the camera around until I see the mountain looming in the distance, then keep running towards it. I climb up another building. On top are dessicated cloth flags. I can turn them back into brand new by singing at them, pressing the circle button. When all four are restored, more strips of paper fly out and surround me.
I jump to an altar. This looks like the end of this level, but I see other ribbons I want to collect first.
With everything in hand, I go back to the altar. As I run by a line of small statues, they light up and play musical notes. Once everything is activated, a tall, glowing goddess (I think) appears. She shows me a scene woven on a tapestry, showing many people like me on a journey.
I walk into the long hallway she has opened for me. I catch a glimpse of someone else running ahead of me, but that person is gone in an instant. Fade out, and I’m onto the next area.
There are long columns rising out of the ground, and more of those tattered banners. Touching each one causes a piece of a cloth bridge to span two of the columns. I run all around the ground, singing flags back to life, collecting ribbons that let me jump higher and further. When I jump now, my character does extra twirls and twists in the air, graceful.
Running around is its own reward. I run slowly but I’m just watching the sand shift around me, listening to flute music.
Another goddess, another tapestry: This one clearly shows me crossing the bridge, so perhaps these end-of-level interludes are a vision of what you’ve just done.
As the third segment begins, the color scheme has changed. I’m standing in salmon sand under a teal sky. The next banner I find activates a kite, which beckons me. I follow after it, looking up at the sky at the stylized clouds, which look like daubs of off-white paint.
Four smaller kites emerge. One swoops me up. The kites lead me to more jumping power-ups. I’m captivated by this point, filled with a sense of wanting to see what’s over the next hill, and the next and the next. Over one of them is a giant building: How am I to get up here, I wonder.
The sky turns gray. The flutes are replaced with ominous drums. The gentle wind starts to howl. I stare up at the structure, as the world fades to black.
Images courtesy of thatgamecompany
Chris Kohler is the founder and editor of Wired.com's Game|Life, and the author of Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life. He will talk your ear off about Japanese curry rice.Follow @kobunheat and @GameLife on Twitter.
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