Journey

Journey is a game without any spoken or written language. Players awaken as a hooded figure in a desert and try to find their way around ancient ruins. They occasionally come across scarves, which seem to be sentient, and are often trapped behind screens. The player slowly comes to understand what has happened to the beings who built these ruins by finding hieroglyphs and images. Meanwhile, they meander their way toward a tall mountain in the distance.

There is no fighting in Journey. The primary mechanic is the character’s ability to fly about—really more like extended floating—by using up its scarf powers. Freeing scarves and finding glyphs adds length to the character’s scarf, which is then used up while jumping from platform to platform.
The enemies are giant mechanical snakes with headlights whose main intentions appear to be hunting journeyers. Getting caught by a snake does not result in any lasting damage, however—players simply lose what scarf powers they’ve collected and are deposited back at the place they were caught.

The game’s themes are environmental in nature. [Spoilers ahead.] It is strongly insinuated that the beings who built the city went too far in their expansion—they lost sight of the stars and forced the scarf creatures into labor in order to power their engines. It is revealed that the strange posts littering the desert are really gravestones.

Journey is sad and nostalgic and extremely beautiful.

Journey is very short (only about 4 hours long in total) but players can save at any time.

Journey is very easy to play.

Journey can be played with another randomly selected player, but that player will be nameless and voiceless, as there is no chat option. Furthermore, the journeyer might encounter several different other players as they traverse the land, but never more than one at a time. Players can only communicate with chirping noises, but many find ways to work together all the same.

• Do you think the beings who built the city were bad people?
• What are some similarities between the story you uncover in the game and the histories of real-life civilizations?
• If you played with another player, what did you think of them? Was it hard to communicate, or easy?
• Does taking away identity (such as names, voices, gender etc.) make it harder or easier to identify with another player?