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... )
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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... )