WHAT A JOURNEY!

I've heard a lot about this game since it came out in 2012, and practically everything said and written about it has been positive. I got intrigued, but I wasn't into playing video games back then; there wasn't time for that between the macrophotography and various ordinary chores. Now, fourteen years later, I'm finally ready for the Journey.

Visually, it's a unique and beautiful experience. Its stylized art is a nice change after so many games that are trying to be photorealistic. Of course, the stylization wouldn't mean anything good if the art in Journey wasn't inspired and interesting.

The emptyness that feels like a boring lack of ideas in many other games set in the desert ...

... in Yourney looks fresh and majestic.

The game starts very slowly, even shockingly so, and when I say slow, I'm referring to the speed of the character I'm playing, not the pace of the story and stuff like that. It was a bit off-putting at first. I'm a fairly slow and meditative guy in real life, but in video games, I'm accustomed to a different pace, becouse most good games aren't slow at all.

Journey somehow menages to be slow and exciting at the same time. It starts very slowly, it never gets particularly fast, but ...

... but it regularly gives you uplifting moments when you feel like flying into the core of the cosmic consciousness or some simillar mysterious place that may or may not exist outside our imagination.

The gameplay, however, unlike the visuals, isn't stellar, but it is more than fine for what the game wants you to experience. Yourney is a walking simulator, or more precisely, it is a movement simulator, at its core, so there aren't many things you can do in the game, but what's there is very elegantly implemented.

The world you are traveling through in Journey is enygmatic and beautiful. The environments somehow feel realistic and abstract at the same time.

Things that look like clothes, rugs, or banners behave like plants or animals that inhabit the remains of a mysterious civilization ... or a metaphysical place where invisible gods still live.

Some places look like inexplicable shrines ...

... or road signs written for someone else, not you, the player who can't really understand this strange, poetic world.

From time to time, in places that would function as ordinary checkpoints in more ordinary, action-oriented games ...

... Journey shows you a slow cut-scene, made of a partially animated series of pictograms, that look artistically interesting, quite mysterious, and definitely confusing at first sight. It took me quite some time, and quite a few of those cutscenes, to realize that the game foreshadows what's coming in the next segment of your journey in a highly stylized and immersive way.

There is no talking, no reading in Journey; everything has to be deciphered through relaxed observation or intuition.

From time to time, in the cutscenes, you'll encounter these tall white entities. What are they? Ghosts? Divinities? Aliens? Spiritual beings from the DMT labyrinths? Who knows.
On the Internet, you can read that: "They are ancient, ethereal, white-robed figures that represent the long-lost civilization of the world."
Yeah, sure. That's just another opinion - not a definitive explanation.

That vagueness helps make your journey in the game a very unique experience. With so much left open to interpretation, most likely, every player will come up with at least a slightly different outlook on what he/she went through.

If you, like me, prefer science fiction over anything else, you'll have more than enough elements here to convince you that you are exploring a distant planet and the remains of its mysterious, advanced civilization that made science look like magic.

If spirituality is your thing, you'll find a perfect spiritual journey simulator here.

If you are into high fantasy, this could be yet another fantasy realm.

If psychology is that thing that intrigues you, you can see Journey as a metaphor for some inner workings of the human mind. For example, you can try to interpret it through symbols and archetypes established by Carl Gustav Jung.

You can also see it as a dream you wished you had at least once in your lifetime.

As you probably noticed, there is a lot of sand in this game. It looks like a sea of sand at times. For a game with that much sand, it's imperative that the sand looks good.

It not only looks great, and the light changes its appearance, sometimes dramatically, as you progress through the game, but it also behaves in interesting, sometimes surprising ways.

You can see it swirling around me in this screenshot.

Here you can see me pushing against the strong wind while climbing a dune.

In this picture, I'm effortlessly flying low above the sea of sand.

At some point, during a sand storm in some ruins, I fell into a hole ...

... to end up in this darker, blue place ...

... that looked like an underwater environment at times.

The fabric-creatures near the center of this screenshot look like jellyfish.

These elongated banners swaying in the breeze resemble the posidonia seagrass.

Here you can see me confidently flying above the scenery.

I mean, in most of these blue screenshots, I'm flying around.

I felt almost like I was really there.

As you probably already noticed, the user interface elements aren't present in these screenshots.

That's becouse there aren't any in this game.

However, that's not a problem, becouse a game like this doesn't need them. There's no health, no mana, no stamina, or inventory to monitor.

The gameplay is thin, but the atmosphere and immersion are extremely deep. There are no distractions to spoil the magic of your journey.

I don't know how much I have to travel to the end of the Journey. Can't tell you where exactly in the game I currently am ...

... or what surprises lie ahead ...

... but I'm pretty sure I'll write about them in one of the future posts.

And that's all for today. Hope you enjoyed the journey. The post ends here - THE END.

This is my entry for the Gaming Photography Weekly Contest - Theme: Gaming Photographs. Here's the link to the contest announcement post by gamingphoto
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