Journey: Minimalist Storytelling

This week I played Journey on my PlayStation 5 for the second time, although it’s been three or four years since my first playthrough. For that reason, the major set piece moments did not surprise me, but many smaller moments had either slipped my mind or I missed them my first time. Journey has a very simple premise of reaching the top of a mountain in the middle of a desert. There is a “plot” of sorts, but it is definitely meant to be a game that makes you feel emotion through its visuals and gameplay design over the story. The minimalist menus, controls, and even title screen all serve to make the game experience seamless. For example, there’s no jump, the PC just clambers onto obstacles in front of them automatically. As a result, no UI for a health bar, controls, a map, or anything else is necessary. The only “mechanic”, the amount of charge you have in your ribbon, is seamlessly integrated onto the player model, like the ammo count in Dead Space.

As a result, the premise of the game seems to be, “Can we make the player feel emotion exclusively through music, visuals, and level design?” And for what Journey is, the answer appears to be yes, at least for me. In the short runtime of just an hour and change, I find myself for the second time feeling like I experienced an emotional tale that would absolutely have been lessened if Journey was “more”. Combat, platforming, dialogue, all of that would have taken away from the focused experience crafted here.

What makes Journey feel truly special, however, is the multiplayer implementation. Without telling you it even has online capabilities, Journey allows you to travel alongside real-life players randomly. No friends list, no matchmaking, no chat box. Just a stranger. You can only communicate with little chirps by tapping a button. I find this to be an astoundingly perfect design. Every encounter you do have with another player is additionally memorable because of their infrequency. In this team's next game, Sky: Children of the Light, other players are seen constantly, and this cheapens their presence. In my first Journey playthrough, I met maybe four of five players. One of them I traveled with for a while, waiting for each other at checkpoints and chirping incessantly. At one point I lost track of them and was genuinely sad that my traveling partner had vanished. This playthrough, I saw exactly one person, and they were not interested in fraternizing. I think your enjoyment of a playthrough can be dramatically changed based on these experiences, which is another thing I am vastly impressed by here.

The only real issues I have with Journey is that it doesn’t go far enough in its minimalism. I find the cutscenes to frequently interrupt the flow of travel, when they could be seamlessly integrated into the world. Additionally, although this might not have been technically possible, I really wish this was one seamless world. The levels are so sprawling and immersive that I found myself feeling quite jarred whenever the screen faded to black after I entered a hallway.

I see this game as being similar to “walking simulators” like Gone Home in terms of their mechanical leanness, although this predates Gone Home by several years. Games like Gris and Abzu also come to mind, which seem to have taken significant direct inspiration from Journey. In that sense, it’s hard for me to say where the inspiration for this game may have come from. Perhaps 2D animation is more influential, but I can’t think of any titles that share this type of minimalist art style.

In Johas Huizinga’s essay “Nature and the Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon”, he claims that the reason “play” is so important is because it operates outside of the rules of normal society. “We are different and do things differently”, he says. Huizinga’s writing doesn’t exclusively refer to video games, but consider how Journey’s rules are so inherently embedded into gameplay that they don’t feel like rules. Compared to other games, Journey is able to immerse the player because of the lack of friction between controller and controlled. If we play to disconnect from reality as Huizinga claims, isn’t Journey the perfect example? For me, the controller left my mind, as did the room around me. The only moments this immersion broke are during the aforementioned cutscenes that break the illusion of perfect harmony with the screen.

Journey is different from other games and other “play” because of it’s simplicity. This is not a story that will surprise you with it’s writing, but you will doubtlessly connect with it emotionally if you allow it. Such a short game allows for zero bloat, which makes every second feel perfectly artistically crafted. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t benefit from embarking on this Journey.

What I Learned

• Don’t overdesign

• Cutscenes can hurt pacing

• A consistent art direction is essential for immersion

• Simple controls improve immersion

• Huizinga’s claim: We play because play is different from reality. That should be celebrated.