Having played through Journey now, the experience was wonderful.\u00a0 Rarely has a game been so compelling, and with so little dialogue to build its narrative.\u00a0 One of the ways that Journey does this so well is through the use of dynamic lighting and music to influence your mood as you progress through the different stages of the game.\u00a0 When you start off, the land is bright, enjoying the pleasantly filtered (afternoon?) sunshine as you experience the game’s world for the first time.\u00a0 Later, as you explore the ancient ruins before you, the lighting changes to a beautiful sunset-like shade of gold and orange, lulling you and creating a sense of peace as you descend into the ruins.\u00a0 Deep inside the ruins, you find that the world is not as peaceful as it appears at the surface, with giant machines that seek to eliminate all of the scarf you’ve been working so hard to collect up to this point.\u00a0 The music takes a dramatic shift, and the atmosphere becomes much darker with eerie green and blue accents instead of the comforting gold and orange of the previous stage.\u00a0 These shifts occur to inform the player that there is danger, something that these changes seem to subconsciously alert us to.\u00a0 This method of moving forward a narrative creates an experience that feels less forced, although the game is still “on rails” in many ways.<\/p>\n
One of the other aspects of the game that helps develop a sense of context are the murals hidden throughout the game.\u00a0 Upon arriving at a blank wall with a few gravestones framing it, you can activate your chime and trigger a reveal of a mural on the wall, which details some aspect of the story hidden behind the world of Journey.\u00a0 Without these murals in the game, I don’t think I could have begun to understand the series of events leading up to the present state of the world.\u00a0 What ThatGameCompany did with Journey is a masterpiece.\u00a0 They hid the story just within reach, but asked the player to decide whether they wanted to know more or not.\u00a0 This allows the player even more agency, and helps develop a sense of immersion with the world should they choose to seek out all of the murals and hidden items throughout the game.<\/p>\n
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