journey game lore

Deciphering the Journey

Posted in Features

Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more

It doesn’t take much longer than an hour to reach the end of Journey, thatgamecompany’s recent indie jaunt across the desert. On the surface, it’s also a relatively lean game, stripped of all but the most basic interaction methods and never overtly thrusting a story in your face. In its seas of colour and its wordless narrative, it’s a fabulous exercise in minimalism. At least, that’s how it first appears.

In Journey, you walk, jump and play. You interact with the world by leaping or by singing at it, and you solve the game’s few puzzles via experimentation, learning the rules of this land as you exist within it. There are no dramatic characters intoning long, expository dialogue sequences, and you won’t find any diary entries bafflingly ripped out in chronological order. You uncover Journey’s mystery simply by experiencing it.

An hour isn’t long to unfurl the tale of an entire world, especially when much of that time is spent experimenting with its systems, sliding down sand dunes and singing to the co-op buddies who sometimes quietly drop into your game. And yet, Journey is infused with more character, more ideas and more meaning than any other recent release that springs to mind.

So: what does it all mean?

There are lots of theories, of course. It’s that way by design. Journey’s like a silent movie without any captions, and one in which the action on-screen is always faintly abstract, otherworldly and expressive. Or perhaps it’s like a ballet, an aural and kinetic display of ideas, but one where you’re not familiar with the source material. You come away with a thousand possible answers, but nothing to confirm your suspicions. You just know it was a hell of a show.

I’ve heard quite a few of these theories now. They range from the sensible to the surreal, from religious to scientific. I even had a discussion with a friend recently who was absolutely certain that Journey is a game about the nine months between conception and birth: he thought the ducking and diving fabric creatures represented sperm cells, the occasional enemies were threats of miscarriage, and the mountain – with that gaping opening at its peak – was the game’s enormous vagina.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Journey is a game about sperm and vaginas, but I do think it’s a game about life. In fact, I think it’s a game about quite a lot of things. I spent a couple of days after finishing Journey thinking about what it could all mean. Each time I came up with a theory, or heard someone else’s, it seemed eminently plausible but still didn’t quite seem to fit. That lightbulb moment, the one where it all clicks into place, stubbornly refused to arrive.

And then it did, and I settled on the theory I’ve stuck with. So here goes: Journey is a game about everything .

I do distinctly mean ‘everything’ rather than ‘anything’, too. While Journey was clearly intended to have its intricacies discussed and debated, I don’t view it as a story without a specific meaning. The reason none of those individual interpretations seemed quite right on their own is because they function as part of a much larger picture – a microcosm of an entire universe, its past, its present and its future.

The most obvious of Journey’s strands is the story of a civilisation, one that was built up from nothing but ultimately collapsed, leaving the starkly ruined landscape you see before you. This story is the one told in the abstractly animated cutscenes that bookend each chapter – the beautiful mural that scratches and paints itself as you watch, its symbols slowly growing into something more recognisable.

Why did this civilisation grow so huge, and why did it ultimately fail? These answers prove more elusive. We see what appears to be electricity flowing through a city’s veins, and it seems to be brought to its knees by explosive blasts. There are hints at scientific advancement, and of war, which would make perfect sense given the content explored in the rest of the game.

There are very obvious religious overtones. At times the symbolism is enormous, with spiritual apparitions, Middle Eastern architecture and, in the game’s closing moments, a joyous take on the rapture that sees you rise from your body, through the snow-filled clouds and into the beautiful blue skies above. After lingering on your dying moments for an uncomfortable length of time, Journey shakes things up, and the game turns out not to end with your death, but with your incredible reincarnation.

But while Journey is a game about religion, it’s also a game about science. One of its other major themes is evolution: it’s about species adapting to their environment, growing and changing, gaining new abilities as they fight for survival. This is the case with your own character – you begin the game without the ability to jump, and the distance you may do so develops over time, allowing you to rise to Journey’s challenges. By the end, you find yourself in a place where the conditions are radically different – a blizzard-filled mountainous region, instead of a baking desert – and natural selection ostensibly writes you out of the story.

There are other visual cues to evolution, too. It might sound strange, but it’s the fabric that’s key. It begins as floating particles whose only ability is to increase the length of your own scarf. By the end they’ve become enormous floating dragons that transport you around the world, or coral-like formations that boost you skywards, allowing you access to areas you’d otherwise be unable to reach.

Journey is a game that operates on a macro and micro level simultaneously. So, while it’s a game about evolution, it’s also a game about simply growing up. You don’t understand Journey’s world when you first arrive in it. You learn by experimenting, by playing, and with the gentle guidance of others whom you don’t always fully understand.

As you progress, you begin to understand them better. You meet more people. They all have slightly different ways of communicating – always through sound and movement, but in idiosyncratic styles – and you learn to recognise patterns. Meet someone late on in the game and you’ll likely find yourself communicating effortlessly, guiding new players around the world or being tempted towards hidden secrets by more experienced journeyers. You’ve learnt the communication systems of this world. It’s a game about language acquisition.

And it’s a game, perhaps most significantly, about the inevitability that life will follow its own path. Of course Journey’s society fell: it was inhabited by living, sentient beings, with all the flaws that come with such an existence. But along the way it birthed culture, and belief, and wonderful technology, the remnants of which you can see scattered around the retrospective showcase you experience as you jump, slide and glide your way through the game.

I might be wrong, naturally, but I hope I’m not – because I haven’t played many games that tackle such a range of huge topics with this majestic confidence. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen many films, or read many novels, for which I could say that either.

For something so starkly minimalist in its presentation, and a game without any dialogue, Journey is an extraordinary achievement: a game about life and death, and a tale that’s both personal and vast in its scope. It’s the story of existence, the enormous number of ways we interpret our lives, and the ways in which we react to those beliefs. Not bad for an hour-long game in which all you do is walk, jump and play.

Why Journey is one of the greatest games ever made

Redefining movement

Here's what you need to know about Thatgamecompany's Journey: It's short. It's got kind of an exploration-heavy puzzle-platformer vibe, with splashes of adventure game. What else? It's pretty, it sounds good. Oh, and it understands human emotion on such a basic, fundamental level that it knows how players will react to any given situation, and respond accordingly. Every developer, irrespective of their discipline, can learn from it, and every person is better off for having played. It signifies a watershed moment for the game industry; it is our Citizen Kane . All of this is to say, Journey's easily one of the greatest games ever made.

Editor's note: Journey is best experienced with little to no prior knowledge of it. If you haven't yet played this game, may we suggest bidding adieu to GamesRadar, booting up your PS3, and we'll see you again in a couple of hours? Great.

One of Journey's greatest achievements is the way in which it redefines movement, that basic and original tenet of games. In many ways, Journey is a game about movement--a palpable traversal of environments to elicit emotion--and this is evident from the get-go. Journey's opening sequence drops the player at the foot of a sand dune. A hill must be climbed, and as you ascend, a toil sets in for each step taken.

When you reach the summit, two things happen. First, you see an intimidating expanse situated between you and a majestic mountain, the climbing of which puts your current accomplishment to shame. The second thing you notice is that your movement is unencumbered, a feeling made all the more delightful as you speedily zip down the other side of the hill. So just to review, there's feelings of hardship, accomplishment, satisfaction, awe, foreboding, delight, and curiosity, all from just walking up one side of a hill and sliding down the other.

Journey's also an aesthetic masterpiece, from a purely technical perspective. However, calling out the quality of its textures or music is to miss the genius--the way sight and sound couple with movement to further heighten and convey emotion.

There is the above example, yes, but take for instance a sequence early in the game, where you find yourself sliding down a hill at an increasingly alarming rate, unable to slow or stop. Around you fly ethereal beings, eagerly urging you along in your descent. You hit a tunnel, and the camera flips to a side-scrolling angle. The color palette transitions to darker, lusty reds, and your mountain goal appears, closer, illuminated like a beacon by the sun. You feel swept away, excited, joyous, and also a bit fearful over the loss of control. You think of the first time you fell in love.

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

Current page: Page 1

Roblox Brookhaven codes for music tracks and memes

How to find Bones Callers in Sea of Thieves

Slick action RPG Black Myth: Wukong is Steam's most-wishlisted game after roguelike gem sequel Hades 2 stealth launches into Early Access

How Journey only truly made sense when almost everything had been cut

"Most PlayStation usernames aren't very inspiring..."

Jenova Chen, the co-founder of Thatgamecompany and creative director of Journey, played a lot of World of Warcraft during grad school. And he always knew that he wanted to make an MMO one day - a form of games that are synonymous, rightly or wrongly, with scope and scale.

And yet when Chen started to make games, the games his studio turned out tended to be small - or at least they seemed small, before you got properly into them. In Flow, you are a tiny amoeba or some such, swimming about in the watery deep. In Flower, you are a handful of petals riding the winds. These games are beautiful, but, they remain compact - nothing like the sprawl of a Warcraft.

Scale is only one aspect of an MMO, though. "What we were taught in school is to push the boundary," says Chen. "Everyone was saying that the future was social games, but the games weren't really social." Chen had seen a few Zynga money-spinners, for example, but while he grasped the game part, the social aspect of something like Farmville didn't seem to move beyond the purely mechanical. You go to your friend's farm to click something, but so what?

And what about Journey? How was a game so sparse - and yet somehow so luxurious - born from a desire to make an MMO in the first place? How did its simple narrative of a desert crossing - enlivened, if you are lucky, by the random players who join your game for one section or another - emerge from the busy factions and cities and battle-plains of Azeroth?

"I wanted to show the world that it's possible to have a game where you are truly emotionally engaged and connected to another person," explains Chen. "That's the beginning. Can we do a Thatgamecompany spin - change the emotional feel - of a multiplayer game? That's how we started."

So how do you get people to engage emotionally with other players in a multiplayer game? This would be the defining question for Journey, from the prototype through to the final release. And the answer, surprisingly, has more to do with what you take out than what you put in.

The first prototypes came very early. "When I went to visit [the studio], people were working on a top-down 2D version of a little game which four people could play at once," remembers Robin Hunicke, who would soon join the team as a producer. The prototype she saw was fairly basic, but playtests were already on the way. And they were already revealing interesting things about the ways that multiplayer games work.

"There were just a lot of dynamics with four [players]," explains Kellee Santiago, co-founder of Thatgamecompany and the studio head during the production of Journey. "It seems obvious that the more people you have, the number of interactions you can have as a group increases." Interactions between players sound like just the kind of things that multiplayer game designers are interested in, but with Journey it was never so simple. Were they the right kind of interactions for the kind of game Thatgamecompany was seeking to make? "It was not leading to that feeling of connection ," Santiago says. "Connection and also giving the player space to experience what they were going through with the game."

Competition, or at least playing at cross-purposes, was an immediately obvious problem, "That [early] playtest informed us of the fact that having four people play at once introduces a lot of dynamics, like three-against-one or two-against-two," says Hunicke. Incompatibility came to the surface quickly. "[One of our playtesters] said she felt like she was a slow player and she wanted to explore, and other people she was playing with were achievers and they had wanted to pester her into moving forward a lot faster than she felt comfortable with. And she was like, 'I hope you don't make a game that makes me feel like a slowpoke.'"

Strange as it sounds, maybe there were simply too many players for the game to be truly social? "As a player, you might be experiencing what you are going through, but then you are also experiencing the ways in which you are interacting or not interacting with the group," says Santiago. Something had to give - and a reduction from four players to just two was an obvious starting point.

But once Thatgamecompany started cutting things, it was hard to stop. Hearing the team talk about it, it seems that Journey only started to truly emerge once things were being lopped off all over the place.

Take communication: a necessity for a social game, surely? "We want people to trust, befriend, fall in love and rely on each other in this game," says Chen, transformed briefly, by the act of remembering, back into the pitchman with the PowerPoint deck. "When we first started, our gamer instinct kicked in - we supported chat, we supported thumbs up/thumbs down. We supported all the conventional multiplayer game stuff.

"When we played it, we saw that people started to use thumbs down more often than thumbs up," he continues. "It started to get toxic. When we tried four players, people started to create situations where three player were heading out and leaving the other players behind. That player felt socially left alone. There was a lot of disturbing experiences coming from the playtest so we knew that this wasn't the emotion we were going after. We were trimming off the weed that went away from our goal."

So how about text communication? "The biggest problem about text chat was that consoles don't have a keyboard and to use a controller to type 'Hi, how are you doing?' takes a long time," says Chen. "Voice chat? People hated to hear a teenage boy cursing at them and blaming them for not doing well. Those are the things that were in our way of connecting players."

The solution was an abstraction - something that stood in for communication while allowing none of the difficult anxiety that the online space often creates. "Instead of [all that other stuff], we just turned communication into a ping," says Chen. "When you ping very quickly, you come across as quite urgent. When you ping large, it seems like you are calling. In prototyping and playtesting we found that was kind of ambiguous. People might know you are mad, but they don't hear you cursing at them."

If anything, this ambiguity actually fed into the fun - with a ping, Journey became a game about actively interpreting the player you had been thrown in with rather than simply following orders or giving up and muting them.

"Immediately after the very first playtest, [one of our testers] was saying to other players, 'Were you the blue player? Because you seemed this way,'" says Hunicke. "Like she had opinions of how people had been playing just from watching them move around and call to each other. So we knew that, okay, this happens if you remove all the communication and it's just a kind of puppeteering experience. People do develop ideas about the other person and they feel feelings about this cube that's moving around on screen. Once we get a real character in there, they'll definitely have feelings and thoughts."

With progress visible, the trimming of weeds continued, moving from the realm of communication to interaction. Journey's early prototypes seem to have included a lot of classic co-op material - doors that only open if another player pulls a lever, say. But guess what?

"It wasn't getting to the feeling of really being connected with another person," says Santiago. "So, that certainly led to stripping out the things to do with the other player." What the team ended up with, in fact, was a single-player game that you can simply experience with another player when they drop in alongside you. And that was enough. "It just feels different ," says Santiago. "Even when you take away nearly every game mechanic you can to validate having another person there. It still feels different to have another person there."

And it wasn't just co-op puzzles. Journey's movement is glorious stuff, whether you're sliding down dunes and threading between archways or lifting yourself through the sky on magical winds. It always feels great, and it's never particularly tricky. And this was an entirely conscious decision.

"Making the traversal itself the reward was because we didn't want to put a lot of points in or external modifiers that'd make you feel like, 'Yeah, I'm doing great', like a score or whatever," says Hunicke. "We wanted it to be the movement itself that felt delicious and juicy."

But the desire to make game-like puzzles was hard to step away from. While the team was initially working on making traversal accessible and fun, it was also blocking out levels that had a certain Zelda-ish vibe to them. "It was like, 'Okay, climb this thing and jump over this gap and grab onto this piece of cloth and use it as an elevator and it'll pull you up'", says Hunicke. "It ended up feeling very platformy.

"So we had a lot of platforming mechanics that were kind of difficulty based and a lot of it involved having to rotate the camera and move the character at the same time," she sighs. "And the more we progressed in the game and the more we playtested the game with new players and people who weren't necessarily hardcore gamers, the more we saw that kind of platforming was destroying the relaxed and introspective vibe that the rest of the game was trying to build up."

As ever, if it got in the way of connection, it had to go. "Jenova in particular had some really kind of interesting puzzle ideas," Hunicke remembers. "Maybe you're walking along and you come up to a shelter and there's a person in there and then there's only room for one more person. So you and the third person approach the shelter, do you let yourself stand out and be swept away by a sandstorm or do you push the other person out? That kind of stuff.

"But again, as we started kind of thinking about implementing those ideas, it started to feel really kind of pedantic and a little bit too much," she says. "Like they were trying to tell you how to feel. Like the game designer was putting you in a situation where you wouldn't really have a real choice, like it was a false choice. And so we ended up cutting out a lot of that stuff too because it just felt like, well, if we're building a straightforward platformer and we wanted you to feel smart, then we'd build these really hard puzzles and if we're building a narrative game that was really about communicating a really specific story, then we would put these false gates in and you just move in without feeling challenged.

"But we wanted to actually feel connected to the player which meant needing them without having to need them, right?" Hunicke continues. "Wanting them to be near you, but being able to succeed without them. Wanting them to see what you could see from a high vantage point, but not needing them to turn a switch... It really makes it about you wanting that other player there as opposed to needing them there." She pauses. "And I think that's a very, very difficult thing to design from the outset, but it's something we discovered over time."

And of course, if you don't need to talk to the other player of give them the occasional boost up over the classic co-op game ledge, do they need to even have a name?

"I play a lot of World of Warcraft and the problem is that people have very wacky names," says Chen. "If you run into someone with a weird name in the middle of the desert, where you have been travelling alone for two minutes and you finally find a person who is like you, most of the time people are so excited to see another player. And if the first thing they see is 'Ilovehitler' it immediately takes you out of the world and you don't really think about this person as a fellow traveller, you think about them as some very naive young person who doesn't care about other people's feelings.

"We had to trim all the weeds," Chen continues. "Most PlayStation usernames aren't very inspiring. So we told Sony we needed to hide all the PlayStation names and they were like: 'No, all multiplayer games sell better if you can invite your friends. You need to be able to put your friends name on your HUD'." A pause. "Eventually, they played the game, they saw why we didn't want the names."

The more you look for it, the more you see that this creation-by-omission ethos is everywhere in Journey. It's even visible in the main character, clad in brown robes, riding the breezes and slowly becoming a perfect vehicle for the player's changing emotions: stoical, fearful, weary. "There was a period where we had this very heavy kind of almost humanoid character with arms and legs," says Hunicke. "And then we removed the arms because we didn't really want to support arm-based climbing. So then it was just legs and a body, but then we added all this stuff to show you experience and we removed it and went back and forth. And the final design, which is so simple and elegant in my opinion, is a combination of all these factors we wanted to capture.

"This smooth movement of the character being something that you wanted to see when you engaged with the game," she explains. "Wanting to see the character move gracefully and do this kind of air ballet is a huge motivator for wanting to press the stick forward. Like seeing how the character reacts to different surfaces and the way it animates through space by itself. And [when you get two players] they could be with one another, almost like a pair of butterflies or kites in the sky."

On the path to its eventual release, there were many challenges. Thatgamecompany was working with Sony Santa Monica, and dealing with a bigger budget that it was used to - and the attendant pressures that come with a bigger budget. PSN was hacked during development and then there's the fact that Journey was simply hard to describe to people. It was a game about a feeling more than anything. You had to play it to understand it - and to understand, crucially, why it needed a handful of things that seemed like pretty basic elements of the multiplayer experience removed.

Yet when you do play it, when you load it up even now, with most of its players long gone and only the slightest of chances that a fellow pilgrim with drop in with you on your travels, Journey still feels special. In some almost indefinable way, you will find yourself reacting to the empty space of the game, the embrace of the things that are left after everything else was removed. Peaceful as it may seem, Journey is brisk and without filler. It's a game that wants to zip you along to its climax, carried forward not by puzzle mechanics or cutscenes or QTEs, not by boss battles or new skills, not even necessarily by the strangers you might fall in with along the way, but by the soaring score, the bright sands stretching into the distance, and that mountain.

"We really wanted Journey to feel like a place," concludes Hunicke, who admits that one of the team's stated reasons for people replaying the game would be: because it is gorgeous. "Like a place you visit, a relic, like a ruin. Like if you go see the Parthenon or something like that, we wanted it to feel like that. Like there was ghosts in there and there was a sense of respect and wonder and mystery about just being there."

Read this next

Journey, Skyrim and Spider-Man developers announce new studio Gardens
Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Journey free on PS4 later this week
Serene platformer Journey makes a surprise debut on iOS

View history

This wiki has been largely inactive and provides limited information. There are two newer wikis that aim to provide a broader scope of information, including information on the PC and iOS versions, advanced techniques, glitches, and out-of-bounds areas.

The Gamepedia wiki has been around longer and has more information. The ShoutWiki is newer and has fewer features but has more focus on organization, and is on track to catch up with the Gamepedia version.

It's recommended to try out one or both of these newer wikis. Feel free to use whichever one you prefer.

Embark on the mysterious Journey

Discover all the secrets

Find all the glyphs, symbols, creatures, and collectables

Glowing symbols

Find all 21 hidden symbols in Journey

PlayStation 3 Trophies

Want the White Robe? Find out which trophy you need!

Game Makers

Jenova Chen
Kellee Santiago
Thatgamecompany

Original Soundtrack

Austin Wintory

Image gallery

GDC 2013: Designing Journey with Jenova Chen

After sweeping the Game Choice Awards last night, thatgamecompany's Jenov Chen discusses the design of the endlessly lauded Journey at the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Check out the highlights and insight below!

Games are like emotional nourishment. While film is mature and diverse, early video …

Journey at GDC 2013

Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) is the world’s largest and longest-running gaming professionals industry event. The conference contains 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-table discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. GDC 2013 …

Journey - It's Meaning & Why

I've seen posts of users discussing what the story of Journey actually means, what the conflict of the story is and why the Traveler is attempting to reach the mountain. I personally think that's looking at it the wrong way. I originally attempted to understand the story in that manner and all the …

Journey's Story-what does it mean?

So if you've played Journey, you've probably had to sit through all those mysterious cutscenes-but what exactly do they mean?

In particular, the ones involving the Ancient Glyphs are incredibly fascinating, because the player is merely shown the images. There is no dialogue, no words, nothing of any…

Interview with Robin Hunicke at Gamasutra

Gamasutra has interviewed thatgamecompany's Robin Hunicke about the company's approach to development, including Journey . Here's an interesting snippet:

1 White Robe
2 Glowing symbols
3 The Traveler

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Filed under:

Video Games

Ten Years Ago, ‘Journey’ Made a Convincing Case That Video Games Could Be Art

Creative director Jenova Chen conceived ‘Journey’ as an act of rebellion against commercial games. The decidedly emotional titles it inspired forgo violence and point scoring for matters closer to the heart.

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Ten Years Ago, ‘Journey’ Made a Convincing Case That Video Games Could Be Art

To borrow internet parlance for a moment, Journey is a video game designed to hit you right in the feels. You play as an androgynous character dressed in a sweeping red robe, dwarfed by stark landscapes of sand and snow. Pushing the PlayStation controller’s left analog stick, you move forward, slowly at first, and then, later in the game, with exuberant speed, as if you’re surfing. Most of the time you’re alone, but if you’re lucky, you’ll come across another figure, its silhouette fluttering in the distance. You might travel together for a few minutes and then part ways, or perhaps you’ll reach the end of the game in one another’s company. Regardless, this time will feel almost miraculous—a chance encounter at the very edge of the world.

The game’s setting gleams with flecks of Gustav Klimt gold while a single towering mountain dominates the horizon. The game is called Journey for a reason, and its deliberately allegorical story curves toward tragedy, as if this is the fate awaiting us all. Unlike most games, you die only once. Rather than a cheap metaphor for failure, it’s something heavier—a crescendo, an act of self-annihilation.

Now, it’s widely accepted that games can move us in ways similar to novels, movies, or music, but in March 2012, when Journey came out on PS3, this simply wasn’t the case. Sure, there were the works of Fumito Ueda, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus —stark, artful games of the aughts from Japan that tugged more on the heartstrings than the itchy trigger finger. So too had the rise of independent games from 2008 onward given birth to a slew of newly personal titles such as Braid . Journey , however, felt different—a video game with levels, an avatar, and enemies, but that, mechanically, eschewed almost all else to focus entirely on movement. The game had cutscenes, but these were reserved for establishing shots of glinting sand rather than moments of genuine dramatic thrust. What Journey achieved—which few, if any, video games had before—was giving you a lump in your throat while you actually interacted with it. This was a big deal.

In this way, Journey helped crystallize the idea that video games could and should be more. In 2007 and 2010, respectively, Bioshock and Red Dead Redemption , games with knotty philosophical questions at their violent cores, had pushed the blockbuster shooter and open-world adventure into newly grown-up territory. But these were also time-consuming experiences that asked you to sink tens of hours into them to get to their narrative payoffs. Journey , by comparison, could be finished in 90 minutes, the length of a film. Certain kids, myself included, grew up convinced of video games’ artistic merit but lacked a work to express this conviction succinctly. Journey was the perfect title to convert churlish nonbelievers—our parents, for example.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Gregorios Kythreotis, the lead designer of 2021 indie breakout hit Sable , remembers it like this, too. Kythreotis, who was 19 in 2012, had just started studying architecture, a discipline perfectly suited to the thoroughly spatial medium of 3D games. He was struck by Journey ’s confidence: It was the rare minimalist game whose carefully chosen elements had been executed exactingly. The “biggest thing” he recalls, though, was the fact that he felt he could show it to people who didn’t play video games. “They would play it and often be wowed,” he says over Zoom. “It was a lot friendlier and [more] accessible in this regard.”

Alx Preston, the creator of critically acclaimed 2016 action game Hyper Light Drifter and the recent open-world adventure Solar Ash , tells me over a video call that it was Journey ’s singular style that caught his attention. “There weren’t a ton of games out there that had this type of look,” he explains. “This type of vibe, these types of color palettes, that wasn’t focused on violence or goofy, silly cartoony things. It was carving out its own niche.”

Clayton Purdom, who was then writing at Kill Screen , one of the era’s hip new video game publications, echoes this point. (Disclosure: I wrote for Kill Screen while Purdom was editorial creative director.) “I remember interviewing someone who talked about it as a ‘dinner party game,’” he tells me over a video call. “I’m never gonna have a dinner party where we all sit around and play Journey , but it makes sense. The game’s this really digestible, concrete, audiovisual narrative experience that’s fundamentally interactive.” In 2013, a month before the game’s release, Kill Screen ran the headline : “Is Journey creator Jenova Chen the videogame world’s Terrence Malick?” The comparison doesn’t really land beyond a shared fondness for stirring panoramic landscapes, but the question speaks to a time when many were attempting to frame video games as worthy of serious cultural discussion—as if you’d talk about them with your friends in the same breath as the latest Sundance hit.

Chen, the creative director of Journey , was held up as the poster boy of this movement, and so he was first in line for criticism. In 2010, film critic Roger Ebert wrote a gamer-baiting piece titled “ Video games can never be art .” At the behest of a reader, Ebert was encouraged to check out a TED talk by Kellee Santiago, a cofounder of the studio behind Journey , thatgamecompany. Santiago made an argument to the contrary, referencing, among other games, the studio’s previous title, Flower , in which you play as the wind carrying an assembly of petals. Flower was heralded as a game changer when it was released in 2009, an emotional, nonviolent title that even a novice could play by virtue of its simple controls. (The player tilts the PlayStation 3 controller to change the wind’s direction.) In 2013, it was added to the Smithsonian’s permanent collection and described as “an important moment in the development of interactivity and art.” Ebert, however, took a different view, batting the game away with a typically terse one-liner in which he compared its aesthetic sensibility, not entirely unfairly, to that of a “greeting card.”

When I speak to Chen over Zoom, he doesn’t mention Ebert by name but references the wider discourse. It was a “sense of rebellion” that drove him to make Journey , the idea that games should appeal to an audience beyond the young men who were interested in fist-pumping shooters like Call of Duty . (These games “weren’t actually mainstream,” he says, “they just had billboards on the street.”) Linked to this was the perception of video games in his home country of China as “virtual drugs” that caused people to drop out of college and neglect their relationships.

During the early years of his pursuit of a computer science degree at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Chen snuck into art classes. A few years later, he studied digital art and design as part of a cross-university collaboration with Donghua University. At the time, he and a friend would make video games in their college dorms, Chen art directing and his friend programming. There was little information on video game software available in China, so Chen’s partner learned about game-making from books sent over by a cousin in the U.S. Still, even while Chen was making games as a hobby, he didn’t consider it a viable career path. He intended to become an animation director like those at Pixar. “I felt like that was an industry respected by society,” he says. “I could tell my parents that I wanted to be an artist in this field and they couldn’t say it wasn’t honorable.”

Art as a career was an ongoing point of contention between Chen and his parents. He was born in Shanghai in 1981, five years after the end of the cultural revolution that sought to purge China of its pre-communist art and culture. Despite being an avid drawer, he characterizes his childhood as one devoid of art. Of these early years, he remembers that the sky was always gray except when it had just rained. The dust from the construction sites of the rapidly expanding city would lift and he’d be able to “smell the soil in the air”—for a brief time, “the sky was blue.” In an effort to steer Chen toward “respectable” employment in the modernizing country, his parents enrolled him in a coding class at the age of 10. “In China there was no plan from the government to take care of the elderly. Your kid was your retirement insurance,” he says. Despite initial misgivings about the coding classes, Chen quickly came to look forward to them thanks to the video games his classmates played before lessons.

Chris Bell, a designer on Journey who joined thatgamecompany halfway through the game’s production, says Chen possesses the complete package of skills needed to make video games. “He’s an artist, a programmer, and an engineer,” Bell tells me over a call. Having excelled in programming, Chen rekindled his childhood artistic impulse as a teenager when Shanghai began to open its door to international artists in the 1990s. On the way back from school, he’d stop off at the art galleries in People’s Square. “I would check literally every single show,” says Chen, who savored these “windows to the outside.” When it came to contemporary art, the teenager would ask a central, probing question: “Why does it deserve to be on the wall?”

Fast-forward to 2009. Chen, who had moved to the States six years earlier to study interactive media at the University of Southern California, was wrapping up production of Flower , the second of three thatgamecompany games published by Sony. (The first was a life simulator called Flow .) He was vibing off how people were responding to the game, particularly the finale of its movielike three-act structure, and he was ready to take the lessons learned at USC to the next level. But Zynga had just exploded onto the scene with its interpretation of social gaming, the hit Facebook game FarmVille . Chen remembers watching the company’s CFO give a talk at an industry conference. Having proclaimed the future of gaming as social, the CFO urged indie developers to quit their passion projects and join the company. “Everybody was pissed,” he recalls. “I felt their anger, too. I was like, ‘Who are you? How can you say that you define social games?’” For Chen, social meant an emotional connection between people, not just “trading vegetables with someone on FarmVille .”

This became the seed from which the rest of Journey grew. Chen wanted to show the world a game in which you truly emotionally engaged and connected to another person. It was another “act of rebellion,” against both Zynga’s transactional idea of connection and traditional multiplayer games filled with “foul-mouthed, teabagging” kids. When Matt Nava, the art director on Journey , interviewed to join thatgamecompany in 2008, the first question Chen asked was how he’d approach the social world of Journey : What would it look like, where would it take place, what would happen? Nava, “sweating bullets,” replied, “When you see another player in the game, through the visuals and the setting, you should immediately want to go to them. You want them to be the respite in the environment.”

Nava’s art, both elegantly minimalist and capable of summoning a deep, mythical history, is central to the success of Journey . In the same interview with Chen, Nava suggested brightly colored characters inhabiting a barren desert setting. This would become the game’s defining image. These creatures are humanoid but not identifiably human; they have bright eyes but no other facial features. The world they inhabit is filled with ruinous temples, tombstones, and sand that glints and glitters as if its very surface is dancing. When your character moves over these particles, their pointed legs deform it as if the grains have a physical presence, not just a flat, lifeless texture. Your character’s scarf, flapping in the wind like a ribbon, has a tangible quality, too, another component that tricks you into thinking this is less a computer program than an actual place of elemental forces.

You’re also swept along by Austin Wintory’s rousing soundtrack, which (in lieu of any text or dialogue) functions much like a narrator. “The music is very much a guide for the player,” says Wintory, who admits he felt a huge amount of pressure as a result of the soundtrack’s prominence in the experience. The composer was keen to avoid dictating emotions to players; rather, he wanted to create a musical environment in which they could bring their own “emotional projection into the equation.” Wintory refers to a feeling of “camaraderie” between himself and Nava; the pair would “riff a lot,” almost as if they were in a “feedback loop” with one another.

Nava, whose father is also an artist (the creator of a series of grand tapestries that hang in a cathedral in downtown Los Angeles), says he was obsessed with creating an “iconic” art style . He did so while working within the technical limitations of the PlayStation 3 and, more importantly, what he and the small team could physically produce in the allotted schedule. In the late aughts, out-of-the-box game-making software such as Unity and Unreal (now industry standards) weren’t yet widely used, so thatgamecompany had to build their own set of custom tools. In the early phase of development, Nava and graphics programmer John Edwards went back and forth constantly about what was and wasn’t possible. Ultimately, it was a case of “if you don’t need it, you don’t make it,” so they homed in on the fundamentals of the world: characters, architecture, sand, and fabric.

Despite a strong central idea and a mass of raw talent at thatgamecompany, the production of Journey was challenging. Executive producer Robin Hunicke, speaking five months after the game’s release at Game Developers Conference Europe, referred to a nearly catastrophic level of miscommunication within the team. Bell, who was hired initially as a producer and who later transitioned to a game designer role, took it upon himself to act as a mediator. Some relationships became so fraught that Hunicke described them as breaking down into “personal grudges.” At one stage, Nava arrived at work to find there was already a full-blown argument happening. He quit on the spot, only for Santiago to chase him down the sidewalk and coax him back into the building.

As time wore on, one deadline with Sony passed, and then another. The company’s finances were in such dire straits that Chen and the founding members of thatgamecompany all dropped to half salaries for the final six months of development. Nava says the team fell into the same trap as so many creators who believe that “in order to make great art, it was worth the suffering.”

During a period of acute creative drift, an exasperated Nava took it upon himself to design a level, much to Chen’s annoyance (as lead artist, this was categorically not Nava’s remit). From his perspective, there were a handful of mechanics but nothing was really sticking, so he focused instead on creating a series of “atmospheres” that the player would progress through. Nava thought back to specific “moments” he had in mind when he was painting the concept art, and then fed them back into the levels. The most famous of these sees you hurtling through a stone tunnel while a sumptuous orange sun sets to your right. “Thinking about it as moments was the real trick,” says Nava. “That’s what people remember the game for.”

The gambit paid off. When it was released on March 13, 2012, Journey received rave reviews from outlets such as The Guardian (“the best video game I have ever played”), Eurogamer (“a “sand-blown chunk of spiritual eye candy”), and IGN (“one of gaming’s most beautiful, most touching achievements”). Nava is right to point to the “moments,” which Kythreotis remembers as “a really special aesthetic experience,” as key to its creative success. But the multiplayer is integral, too—arguably an overlooked aspect of the game that to this day breathes an improvisatory life into it. Humans behave differently from AI characters; they move erratically and compulsively, both too slowly and too quickly, and this discord, which takes place against the game’s pristinely melancholic world, is vital to its balance.

Still, the production took its toll on the team. Bell and Nava both exited soon after, citing difficulties relating to the company culture. As Nava explains, they weren’t the only ones: “I don’t think many people fully understand what happened,” he says, “but [thatgamecompany] shut down basically. Everyone left.”

The studio was later revived for the production of 2019 iOS title Sky: Children of the Light , another multiplayer exploration game albeit set amid billowing clouds. In 2017, Bell returned as a designer, noting a broadly positive change in work culture. Chen was now decidedly in charge, whereas before there had been wrangling over decisions between him and his thatgamecompany cofounders. With a bucketload of VC funding rather than a Sony publishing deal, the company had more time and money to explore different ideas. Since then, thatgamecompany has continued to grow. A few days after my conversation with Chen, his company announced a $160 million investment deal alongside the recruitment of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, who will serve as principal adviser on creative culture and strategic growth. I suspect a younger Chen would be pleased at this development: a titan of Hollywood animation joining his artistically committed video game studio.

How should one assess Journey ’s influence? It’s not Grand Theft Auto III , a blockbuster behemoth that inspired a deluge of imitators (mostly hyper-violent open-world crime games such as Saints Row ). If you look at the following decade of games, few bear the explicit influence of thatgamecompany’s flagship title. Oceanic explorer ABZÛ and open-world puzzler The Pathless are exceptions, but these were both made by Giant Squid, the studio Nava cofounded in 2013 following his departure from thatgamecompany. Importantly, Journey showed Nava both what games could be and how not to make them, a lesson he carried into his new studio, one built on making “artistic games” in a culture that is “sustainable and happy.”

In a wider sense, Journey helped engender what we’d now call a vibe shift. Put simply, if video games mostly traded in the various emotions related to killing shit, point scoring, or problem solving, Journey was part of a new wave that broadened their dramatic texture. Purdom threads a line between Journey and small-scale interactive works such as Florence , If Found … , and, most recently, puzzle game Unpacking , each of which tells decidedly personal stories. “I think, in some ways, it did help break ground on the whole ‘games are emotional’ angle,” he says. Some titles arguably leaned into sentimentality too hard—2016’s Unravel , for example, an almost unbearably cute platformer starring a yarn of wool. Despite a slew of games Purdom refers to as “feelings porn,” Journey also led to experiences that were, for lack of a better word, more “honest.”

Purdom, however, is rightly wary of ascribing too much importance to Journey . It came out the same year as Gone Home , a first-person exploration game that centers on a queer relationship, and 13 months after Dear Esther , a macabre, William Burroughs–inspired adventure set on a blustery Scottish island. Each was influential in its own way, but the legacy of these games resides more in how they collectively pushed a different emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic agenda to the mainstream. ( Kentucky Route Zero , Cart Life , and Papers, Please are a few of my favorites from the time.) Still, these were all games you had to play on your PC with a keyboard and mouse. Journey , published by Sony for the PS3, “helped kick open the door in a more popular way,” says Purdom. “You could throw that game on and play it on the couch.”

Journey immediately became the fastest-selling game on the PlayStation Network at a time when most titles were still bought in brick-and-mortar stores. For Nick Suttner, who was working as a senior product evaluator in Sony’s third party department, the game was “perfect ammunition.” He and a small team were responsible for getting games onto the PlayStation Store in an era when resources for such titles were highly contested. “We had to fight for everything,” he tells me over Zoom. “Indies just weren’t part of the ecosystem.” The success of Journey fed into what Suttner calls a “holistic push” at Sony, which had also included a three-year, $20 million publishing fund for indie games that was announced in 2011. A year after Journey ’s release, explosive blockbusters Killzone: Shadow Fall , Destiny , and Watch Dogs dominated the PlayStation 4’s glitzy announcement, but amid all the gunfire was The Witness , a serene, first-person puzzle game. It felt like part of a sea change in priorities at Sony that Journey was partly responsible for.

However, Sony’s support for indies wouldn’t last. A few years later, when it became clear that the PlayStation 4 was trouncing the Xbox One, the company’s focus shifted back to blockbuster game development. Sony poured resources into the next generation of megahits, such as The Last of Us Part II , Marvel’s Spider-Man , and Ghost of Tsushima . Along the way, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio, which was both the developer of the God of War series and an incubator and publisher for indie developers, had a game canceled. This meant layoffs on the development side and a deprioritizing of the publishing division that had launched Journey a few years earlier.

On December 1, 2016, the indie-oriented publisher Annapurna Interactive announced its formation, led by Nathan Gary, the creative director of Sony Santa Monica’s indie development efforts. Chen, who has been variously described as a “scout” and “spiritual adviser” to the company, refers to himself as “more of a cofounder.” Having sourced investment for Journey ’s follow-up, Sky: Children of the Light , Chen was perfectly placed to introduce Gary to potential funders. After securing a deal with Annapurna, itself a film production company behind a string of auterist hits including The Master , Zero Dark Thirty , and Her , attention turned toward signing games. If there was a guiding principle, says Chen, it’s that he and Gary were looking for game makers who were ready to put an aspect of their personal life into the game. Chen describes this as an “innately artistic” approach; the creators are “honest,” saying something that is “truthful to their own lives.” Crucially, these works are more likely to resonate because, as Chen sees it, “our lives are all intertwined.” In other words, we see ourselves in these games.

Chen says Annapurna was also looking for emotional tones underrepresented in games. He mentions 2017’s What Remains of Edith Finch , a game he characterizes by its “dark humor,” and one that his former colleague Bell took a lead role in designing. Maquette , released in 2021, fits the bill, too, a decidedly Hollywood-feeling romantic drama wrapped around a mind-bending puzzle mechanic. In fact, almost the entirety of Annapurna Interactive’s roster is a reflection of the central thesis that has steered Chen’s career, namely that gaming must look beyond the 15-to-35 male demographic if it’s ever going to evolve, let alone be taken seriously.

When I ask Chen about Journey ’s influence on the wider gaming landscape, he doesn’t mention specific titles or trends, but pulls focus back onto the work itself with, to my surprise, an extended music metaphor. “If you want an orchestra to move people, then every instrument has to perform the same piece of music. Every element contributes to the storytelling,” he says. “And what we learned is that the interactivity is the soloist. It’s the lead of the orchestra in gaming. A lot of games in the past have told emotional stories— Final Fantasy , for example—but they relied on traditional media. I love it, but the moving part, the part where you cry, is when you watch the cutscenes. At that moment, what really touched you is cinema, not games.”

In a way, it’s surprising how few blockbuster games have internalized this lesson. The recently released Horizon Forbidden West is a good example. When I play that game, it moves me, but mostly because of the sense of awe I feel at its shimmering, windy world . It’s the same for Ghost of Tsushima and the Uncharted games. That’s not to deny the validity of these experiences, but their moments of personal drama are delivered without the player’s input. Journey , in its own very specific way, figured out how to make drama interactive. Purdom refers to Signs of the Sojourner , an indie card game about friendships and conversation, as a “next step” in this regard. “It’s a mechanically complex game entirely in service of inspiring these kinds of emotional experiences,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I’m feeling regret because I hurt a friend’s feelings thanks to the way these cards played out.” My own mind is drawn to Hideo Kojima’s postapocalyptic hiking simulator, Death Stranding , and the grueling slogs my character endured through snowy mountains. These interactive journeys mirrored the protagonist’s emotional arc, and each landed with greater heft as a result.

This is the magic of Journey . At the start, you move tentatively but curiously. In the mid-game, you’re cascading down dunes at extreme speed. And during the very lowest moments, you’re barely making a step at a time. Then, when you have nothing left to give, you stop moving entirely, however hard you push forward on the controller. “What Journey did really well,” says Chen, “was to make interactivity the climax—the memorable moment.”

Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including The Verge , Wired , and Vulture .

The 2004 Video Game Draft

‘knuckles’ and ‘stellar blade’ reactions, ‘fallout’ season 1 reactions.

Get the Newsletter

Please support Game Informer. Print magazine subscriptions are less than $2 per issue

What Is The Mystery Behind Journey?

The team behind Flow and Flower is moving on to a third project that was revealed to a small group of journalists during the final hour of this year's E3. The remarkable new game, entitled Journey, is just as thoughtful and artful as thatgamecompany's previous projects, but understanding it is a whole other matter. The inspiration for Journey arose from several sources. Chen described a lunch meeting many months ago he had with a real life NASA shuttle pilot. The pilot explained that he had never set foot on the moon (he was piloting), but he had traveled with others who had. Without exception, he said, these people came back changed, with a new spiritual and emotional perspective on life brought on by the sense of isolation and vastness they felt standing upon the lunar surface. Chen was fascinated by this phenomenon, and decided to explore the concept in his upcoming game. Chen also spoke about how the nature of many modern video games was about the fantasy of power, and he was interested in creating a game that evoked the opposite sensibility -- a sense of powerlessness brought on by being alone and isolated. Such a game character would crave contact with others, in the same way people in real life seek out connections and meaning through relationships. In addition, Chen noted a personal fascination with the comparative mythology writings of Joseph Campbell, the same author George Lucas often cites as an inspiration to Star Wars. Campbell's concept of the hero's journey is central to many narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. From this stew of ideas, Journey began to take shape. The game begins as the player/character wakes on a vast open desert filled with sweeping sand dunes and blowing wind. A beautiful, lonely cello melody picks up in the soundtrack. The main character is an unusual figure in a long red cloak. He can walk with the left stick, pan the camera with the six-axis tilt, jump, and let out a keening song with another button.These are the only controls. Climbing to the peak of a nearby dune, the player can see a distant mountain that exudes a pillar of light into the sky. With nowhere else to go, the strange mountain becomes the definitive destination for the game that follows. As the red-cloaked hero runs along the dunes, the ground responds like real sand, tumbling down around his footfalls, and letting him slide down steep surfaces. The sand has an almost magical quality; it rolls and rises like sea waves that break against the dunes. The hero can catch these waves, and surf along them as if they were water. He passes strange waist-high rocks that chime as he passes, but there's no immediate explanation for their behavior. Later, he reaches a cliff and leaps off, and glides down hundreds of feet along the wind. In the stone-strewn sandy plain beyond, he finds scraps of cloth that look just like his cloak. By singing, the cloth is gathered to him. Then, by expending the scraps, he is able to fly for brief stretches. Strange mysteries abound in the vast desert, like waterfall-like sand rivers that hide dark caves behind them. Elsewhere, huge billowing pieces of cloth can be mounted to use as a sort of platform to reach high areas, somehow magically supporting the character's weight. As the hero continues to explore and uncover elements of the desert, some of the cloth he finds begins to form a bridge between massive pillars of rock. Crossing the bridge, he encounters a strange stone monolith that comes to life and bestows a ring of symbols upon the hero's cloak. There are no words spoken, and the meaning of the symbols is unclear. Turning away, the hero heads back into more deep desert. Then, as the demo is about to close, another figure is seen in the distance, runniing across a dune. It is another player, just like the hero. With this reveal, the demo fades to black.

Thanks for reading.

I’d like to ask you to support Game Informer ’s continued coverage of games with a subscription. For less than two dollars per issue , we mail you a full year of 10 print magazines, each with cover stories and preview features filled with exclusive details about the most exciting upcoming games. We profile and interview game creators. We look back on the rich history of gaming, and we celebrate what’s next.

Here on the website, we offer much of our content for free, including game reviews, daily news, videos, event coverage, and more – all with minimal ads.

We do so with a small editorial team, alongside contributing paid writers from around the world – over 65 individuals from 9 countries around the world, just in the last couple of years.

It’s not possible without support.

In a time when game makers and games coverage have faced hard struggles and layoffs, the future of this 30+ year magazine and community is at risk. Our new standalone magazine subscription is the number one way you can keep us alive – and we believe you’ll get a pretty fantastic gaming magazine in your mailbox every few weeks for your trouble.

Here Are The Nintendo Switch's Top 10 Best Selling Games

Star Wars [UPDATED]

PlayStation Walks Back Helldivers 2 Changes, PSN Account Linking No Longer Required

Xbox Is Shutting Down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, And More

Cover Reveal – The Making Of Hades II

Star Wars Outlaws Cover Story – Forging A Strong Reputation

CDPR's Witcher 3 Mod Editor Hits PC For Free Later This Month

A Brief Hades II Spoiler-Free Starter Guide

Remedy Has Canceled Codename Kestrel, Its Cooperative Multiplayer Game

Nintendo Says It Will Reveal Switch Successor By March 2025, But Not At The Direct Next Month

View the discussion thread.

Show Spoilers
Night Vision
Sticky Header
Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Journey2012

Video Game / Journey (2012)

Edit locked.

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/journey_tvtropes_1983.jpg

Journey is a video game for the PlayStation 3 created by thatgamecompany . You play as a nameless robed figure who is crossing the desert to reach a mountain in the distance. As the game progresses, you pass through several unique environments and ruins, uncovering more of the game's story as you go. It's something of an Adventure Game with light Platform Game elements.

Your character has only two real abilities. The first is singing, which radiates a sound wave proportional to how long you hold down the button — this is used to activate or attract various objects. The second is jumping, which allows you to go sailing through the air — this ability uses energy, which can be replenished by touching the floating bits of cloth you encounter throughout the game. The maximum amount of storable energy, indicated by the length of your character's trailing scarf, can be increased by collecting glowing symbols.

One of the game's main selling points is its unique form of multiplayer. During the game, you may encounter another player, whom you may travel with if you wish. However, unlike most multiplayer games, you can't see the other player's name or other information except for a unique icon that appears above their head when they sing, which is the only real way to communicate. There is no text or voice chat in the game, so you must rely entirely on your in-game abilities to work with your partner. However the game does list the handles of all the other players you encountered in the session during the credit, so you have a chance to send them a heartfelt “thank you” after the session.

Decidedly not related to the rock band of the same name , an arcade game based on the band released in 1983, a video game Journey released in 1989 on various home computers or several films named Journey .

Compare and contrast LostWinds , which is practically its WiiWare and iOS equivalent, Star Sky for Wii U and also on iOS , ABZÛ , which was developed by some of the same people who created Journey , and Sky: Children of the Light , the next game from thatgamecompany.

This game provides examples of:

11th-Hour Superpower : After the Ancestors revive you near the end of chapter 7, you regenerate a maxed out scarf/energy meter. You'll also periodically become bathed in golden light and gain the ability to truly fly during the Summit section.
Adventure Game : The game is all about how the player chooses to explore while heading towards the distant split peaked mountain.
After the End : The robed beings' civilization was destroyed in a civil war.
Alas, Poor Villain : The Guardian war machines were very likely engineered out of the big cloth whale creatures you meet in the Temple, programmed to hunt. And some, especially the one that hunts the player character in the snow field, sound positively mournful- probably because, with most of the creatures they hunt being dead, they're actually starving .
Alliterative Title : The second area of the game is called the Broken Bridge.
All the Worlds Are a Stage : Two levels near the end do this. One is a vertical ascent with each 'floor' making you use the different kinds of cloth creatures you met in each previous level, in the same order. The relevant part of the journey is depicted as a wall glyph on each floor. The entire series of glyphs is then displayed in narrative order as a flashback of your journey during the cutscene. The very final level does this again (adding a section for the previous example itself) and also imitates the environment of each level in succession, but subtly enough that it's not so obvious.
Androcles' Lion : Some of the cloth creatures, once you've freed them, will return the favor by helping you reach an otherwise inaccessible area (or an entirely new level).
Animate Inanimate Object : Banners and cloth you'll come across largely resemble marine life, with rays, jellyfish, kelp and so on moving like the air was an ocean.
Ambiguous Gender : The robed beings really don't have any identifiable sexual characteristics.
The first four times you complete the game, a new line of embroidery is added to the embellishments on your cloak .
Collecting all the symbols unlocks a white cloak, which starts out with a longer scarf that recharges automatically when you're on the ground .
Anti-Frustration Features : All sections of the game are playable regardless of the length of your scarf, since you can miss certain opportunities to grow it, can lose pieces of it in certain encounters, or simply hop to that chapter from the Hub Level .
April Fools' Day : thatgamecompany put up a teaser for a "Rocket Death Match" DLC, which of course goes against the entire point of the game.

Ascended Glitch : During a phase in which thatgamecompany had trouble getting the ending levels to properly resonate with playtesters, one test ended prematurely when a glitch caused the game to seem like it was over right after you die in the snowstorm . The playtester found this false ending so profoundly moving it brought him to tears; this inspired tgc to put in significant extra effort to turn the actual ending into something equally moving.
Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence : Your character in the ending, and apparently what happened to the robed beings who survived the civil war and made the journey.
Beautiful Void : And how. Even the mere sand itself is a thing of beauty.
Benevolent Architecture : The levels were designed with this in mind: just head toward the most prominent object in the area and you're probably going in the right direction.
Big Door : Most levels end with a huge gate opening, leading to a long straight corridor.
Book Ends : The last shot of the credits montage is actually the start-of-game screen, complete with "Press Start to begin a new Journey".
Border Patrol : On the open levels, if you try to stray off the map, wind blows you back.
Breather Episode : The temple level offers a much needed break between the stressful underground and the harrowing mountain.
Broken Bridge : This is the name of the second area of the game, which, appropriately, centers on a long stone bridge which has fallen except for a few remaining sections. Progressing requires freeing scarf creatures, which will repair the bridge using magic fabric. Though there is a trophy for finishing the level without filling in all the bridge sections.
Civil War : The cutscene murals reveal that the precursor civilization you're exploring the remnants of, fell due to a massive whitecloak-versus-whitecloak war over scarce resources.
Compilation Re-release : The Journey Collector's Edition , released August 28, 2012, includes Journey , flOw , and Flower , as well as three unreleased mini-games, videos, commentaries, and other fun extras.
Cultural Chop Suey : The majority of the buildings have Mughal (that is, mixed Hindu/Islamic) designs, while the cloth dragons and the ending level have strong east Asian influences.
Crossing the Desert : The beginning chapters consist of a desert landscape—one that simply places the player in the middle of nowhere, pointed toward a distant mountain split by a crevice full of light. Your objective, whole and entire, is to reach the mountain. The player characters are completely swathed in robes and don't seem to need supplies, fortunately.
Darkest Hour : At the end of the penultimate chapter, your character is left without a scarf, the mountain is more distant than it was at the start of the chapter, and it slowly fades away from view as the whiteout intensifies.
Death Mountain : The seventh chapter sees you climbing the frozen mountain you've been making your way toward. It's by far the most difficult and harrowing level, with new threats like the freezing cold and fierce winds and old ones like the Guardian returning even deadlier.
Desert Punk : More magic than Sci-fi, but the ruins you come across make the setting feel like this sometimes, especially after finding working War Machines and learning that the deserted lands you have been traveling across are of the After the End variety.
Determinator : The player character, who relentlessly approaches the distant mountain. Taken to an extreme in chapter 7, when you keep on walking toward the summit even though you're slowly freezing to death.
Deus ex Machina : The Traveler and any accompanying companion would have frozen to death in the snowstorm, if not for the timely intervention of the six spirits of the Ancestors who give them enough energy to reach the Summit. Before that point, there is no indication that the Ancestors can interact with the Travelers beyond merely showing them images.
Developer's Foresight : If you play through the game without a companion and then one joins you later, the mural that you see at the end of chapter six will only show one red-cloaked person until it pans to the level where your friend joined, then two will show from there until the endgame. The reverse is also true—if you lose your partner in the Temple (for instance, they go back down for bonuses and you don't), the mural will show you partnered for the sections where you were together... and facing the winds alone at the end. If one or both players is wearing a White Cloak, the mural will depict them wearing white instead of the default red .
Diegetic Interface : While you're never in any danger of dying, your scarf serves as an indicator of your overall energy, determining both how long you're able to glide and your health; It decreases in length when you suffer through the blizzard (which ultimately kills you) and whenever you're mauled by the guardians .
For most of the game the peak of the High Mountain looks a bit like an upside down camel toe. The theme of rebirth and walking through the peak at the end of the game reinforce the yonic imagery.
On a less sexual note, the ancient civilization's dependency on the red cloth mirroring modern society's dependency on petroleum. Doesn't help that you're in a desert.
Dramatic Thunder : This can be heard near the end of the penultimate chapter.
Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer : Sometimes you might not even realize that someone else is around until you see your screen glow because of their singing, and it can be easy to leave another player's game by accident. Even if both players exit a level together, that isn't a total guarantee that you'll be with the same person on the other side.
Dying Dream : A possible interpretation of the events that occur at the end of the game.
Earn Your Happy Ending : While there is no particular fail state to this game, keeping your companion with you to the end is a task worth pursuing.
Easter Egg : There's a very special flower hidden in the pink desert in the third stage of the game, and a creature from flOw in the Temple level. Finding them nets you trophies.
Extremely Short Timespan : The entire journey seems to take place over about 24 hours. It's morning when you start walking toward the mountain, by the time you reach the slopes the moon is up, and when you finally reach the summit after dying and being resurrected , the sun has risen again. Or it could be considered as two days, counting the return trip of the "spirit" seen during the credits, which also takes a day and a night; so that when you're ready for the next journey, it's morning again.
Eye Lights Out : Your character's Glowing Eyes fade as they freeze to death.
Fade to Black : Happens at the end of the fourth and fifth chapters, as you're walking through whatever gate has just opened up before you.
Fade to White : Happens at the end of every chapter except the fourth and fifth ones.
Fatal Forced March : The penultimate level sends the protagonist on a desperate attempt to climb the mountain seen throughout the game: it's a long, brutal slog disrupted by strong gusts of wind and patrolled by hostile Magitek , and it's made all the more arduous by the fact that your usual gliding powers are disabled by the cold. Worse still, the final leg of the journey takes you through a blizzard, and with the storm surrounding you, your only choice is to continue walking. It ends with you freezing to death ... only to be brought back to life and allowed to continue the journey with your powers enhanced.
Five-Second Foreshadowing : Looking to the right as you enter the second part of the Underground Passage, you can see a huge, moving machine through a latticework. Something is still working down here. There are also some kind of steam vents working up above, adding to the sinister atmosphere. Then you come across a still-flickering War Machine head. A few hundred feet later, a Guardian jumps out of the sand at a ribbon creature.
You know those comets you can see periodically throughout the game? Those are other travelers who have reached the end of the game. All of the ones you see are scripted, but you see them at the same points where it shows a "player" during the end credits.
Similarly, the Ancestors that appear to you in the game's cutscenes are just telling you a story with pictures, until you get to the penultimate level. The cutscene is you looking at a panorama of all the places you've been so far—then the camera holds for a long, lingering shot of what looks like you (and your travel companion, if you have one) attempting to scale the mountain you've been walking towards... and failing. Oh, and speaking of things you see throughout the game, all those stone markers are probably graves .
Game-Breaking Bug : It's possible for the game to simply crash at certain points, and given the short nature of the game, you'll likely have to simply start over.
Glowing Eyes : Your character has these, as do the Ancestors, though yours are white and the white figures' are blue.
Go into the Light : The game ends with the player character(s) walking into a bright light, possibly to be reincarnated or join the afterlife.
Green Aesop : According to the historical murals you are shown, the precursor civilization exploited the natural resource available to them (the cloth), replacing some kind of bushes with cityscapes, until there was so little remaining that it caused a civil war which toppled their society, and the land turned to desert.
Gusty Glade : Much of the mountain area is crisscrossed with strong winds that will blow your character either back or to the side, depending on the level.
Hell Is That Noise : A Guardian on the hunt for you sounds like some mechanical hybrid of an attack sub, a 747, and an angry whale. The absolute worst thing is that you often can't see it, because you're busy hiding.
Here We Go Again! : Implied in the ending, when the ascended player character returns to the desert where the game began. Also Book Ends .
Heroic Mime : The characters are speechless , apart from their various chirps.
Highly Visible Landmark : Exaggerated. In the game's opening, you awaken in an endless desert landscape with nothing but a solitary mountain in the distance, which becomes your unstated goal to reach.
Hub Level : In the tutorial level, the six alcoves contain teleporters to the six chapters which will unlock once you've beaten the game once.
Interfaith Smoothie : The game utilises several religious symbols, some specific, such as a niqab or a Shinto shrine, some pantheistic, such as a holy mountain, to gently strum our Western religious sensibilities without tying them to a religion we would necessarily know anything about.
Invisible Wall : While later stages take place in confined areas, the beginning areas seem like a never-ending desert. Players are kept inside the boundaries by wind picking up the closer to the edge they get, first slowing them down, then blowing them back across the invisible boundary.
It's the Journey That Counts : Perhaps a main theme of the game, appropriate considering its title and implicit in the ending .
Jump Scare : Each of the two War Machines awakened in the Underground Passage suddenly roars to life when you get close. It's especially unexpected the first time, when its appearance shatters the subterranean calm of the preceding section. (For bonus points, the first one jumps out right in front of a frozen Guardian whose eyes are ominously flickering, which the player is probably expecting to move or attack them.)
Light Is Good : The mountain you're heading toward has a glowing peak, and the energy you use to fly sends off light .
Light Is Not Good : On the other hand, in the underground level it becomes essential to stay out of the War Machines' searchlights to keep them from spotting you.
Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair : The ruins and trapped cloth creatures you find throughout the game are the result of the fall of the advanced ancient White Cloak civilization after they wiped themselves out during a war over the red cloth they grew dependent on .
Lost Superweapon : The Guardians which destroyed the civilization. Some are still active.
Lost Technology : The harnessing of energy through the cloth creatures, which the precursors had mastered and which your character rediscovers throughout the game.
Minimalism : Part of what makes this game so beautiful and helps make finding anything (like easter eggs, cloth creatures, or another player to journey with) feel so rewarding.
Moment of Silence : The end of the penultimate chapter slowly turns silent as your own life fades away.
Mood Motif : Certain musical instruments heard in the game are associated with various events, with the cello mainly representing the player character. For an example, bass flute is for the white figure seen at the end of most chapters. Certain instruments play only when you are with a companion.
Mr. Exposition : When you activate the shrine at the end of each level, an Ancestor will show you a visual representation of historical events.
New Game Plus : Starting a new game with the White Robe .
No Antagonist : The only enemies you can find are the Guardians, and even they can't really qualify as antagonists.
Not Quite Flight : The character's scarf power (when charged) allows them to flap upward several times, after which they can glide.
Off-into-the-Distance Ending : The game ends with the player character (and any companions) walking slowly away from you until they disappear into a bright, blinding light .
One-Woman Wail : The credits music, provided by Lisbeth Scott.
One-Word Title : In keeping with the game's general minimalism .
Oppose What You Suffered : The various cloth creatures you encounter used to be used to power the machinery and engines of war of the Ancients. When you free some of these creatures from the machinery they are trapped in, they will insist on leading you to other entrapped cloth creatures so you can free them as well.
The Phoenix : A possible interpretation of the characters is that they are a reference to the mythical bird, considering the cycle of rebirth they seem to undergo every time you beat the game , not to mention that their clothes are red or white with yellow designs. This may be reinforced by the fact that red is the "coldest" color of natural fire while white is the "hottest", which fits with how White Robes have more energy than red robes.
Pilgrimage : The game has robed figures traveling toward a mountain in the distance which is implied to be some sort of holy site. Along the way, they stop at shrines where they are given further knowledge by the spirits of their ancient ancestors.
Platform Game : Has some elements of this. Gameplay often involves using your fleeting scarf powers and the fabric around you to progress steadily higher.
Player Data Sharing : Subverted. The glowing symbols that can be seen floating above the environments look like previous players' souls/symbols returning to the beginning from the top of the mountain, as happens to your own at the end of the game , especially since other players can actually accompany you if you play online, but careful observation reveals that those symbols are always the same and are essentially static features of the respective levels.
Power Glows : The energy used to fly seems to be made of light, as is the liquid version you fill the temple up with (which later reappears in pools and "waterfalls" at the summit) .
Precursors : The White Robes are implied to be this to the Red Robes, which according to the murals were created after the fall of the White Robes. They're named "Ancestors" by the art book.
Pride Before a Fall : The murals show the white robed ancestors mastering their scarf-based technology and rising to the top of the natural order... before the tragic fall of their civilization.
Progressive Instrumentation : The Temple level is a tower, which you ascend by activating light emitters at its core, one floor at a time. Each time you light up a floor, additional instruments join the background music, starting from complete silence at the start of the level and going to the full orchestra by the time you reach the top.
Ragnarök Proofing : Mostly averted. The vast majority of the buildings encountered in the game are in a visible state of disrepair. The still-active Guardians are the exception to this rule.
Recurring Riff : A certain motif is played throughout the game.
Red Eyes, Take Warning : How you can tell you're about to be viciously savaged by a Guardian. Their searchlight beams turn red (and inescapable) when they spot you .
Reincarnation : Implied. After you finish the game and fly back over all the areas you've explored while the credits roll, your star alights on the first hill you climbed, and you're given the option to start the game again. This could just be another wayfarer making their way to the mountain, but the extra line of embroidery adorning your cloak the second, third, and fourth times through suggests that you're still the same being.
Rewatch Bonus : When going from the First Confluence to the Bridge area, sharp-eyed players will spot the figure of another traveler in the tunnel, far ahead of them. The figure is always there, not an actual player but a hint of the possibility you will meet others on the road ahead.
Sand Is Water : Played around with. Sometimes, the sand acts like sand. At other times, you can surf across it like water as it glistens and ripples, and in the second and third levels it streams over cliffs exactly like waterfalls. The use of marine animal styles—schools of fish, dolphins, jellyfish, and whales—for the cloth creatures reinforces this, with the "dolphins" frequently jumping in and out of the sand like ocean waves. All this is particularly evident in the underground level, where greenish-blue lighting filters in from above, and dust motes float through the light like tiny bubbles. Your character's flight abilities look more like swimming in this environment.
Scare Chord : When you encounter the first Guardian that comes to life .
Scarf of Asskicking : No violence so not asskicking , but it can grow to roughly four times the length of the character and it lets you glide for massive amounts of space. This also depends on if you chose to begin your journey with a White Robe . At a certain point (just after you are revived by the Ancestors) , you are given the power to fly , and turn into pure light .
Scenery Porn : Massive desert with gorgeous ruins and realistic cloth, sand and lighting effects? Yes please. The cutscenes and pathways are carefully arranged to make sure you're treated to a variety of vistas.
Science Fantasy : Besides the beautiful sand that submerged the world, glyphs, magical cloth, and the impaired buildings, technology is uncommon at most. You glide using the energy bundled in your scarf, and singing near large pieces of cloth can release "cloth creatures" from the machines'/ Guardians' remnants. Glyphs and confluences teach you the history of a civilization started by your ancestors. The reason the game takes place after the apocalypse is the machines powered by energy from red cloth were used in a massive civil war .
Screw Destiny : If you haven't found a partner or lost them before the end of the 5th level the cutscene will show you braving the blizzard alone (again) , but you can still find a new partner in the next level.
Sentient Phlebotinum : The cloth creatures you use to progress through the game behave like animals.
If you have enough cloth power, there are a few sections you can bypass without dealing with the puzzles. Of particular note is the broken bridge early in the game, which normally requires releasing enough cloth creatures to form a bridge between the sections. If you have the white cape, you can simply fly between the sections. This gets you an achievement.
If you know the trick, it's actually possible to ascend out of the ceiling of the underground passage and walk along the top of the level. That's right, it has a roof. You can drop back through the roof at another point at the end of the level, without once encountering a single War Machine. The same is true of level seven, where you can climb over the top of the mountain range and bypass the level (and the Guardians) almost all the way to the beginning of the death march to the Mountain itself.
Shifting Sand Land : The first four levels all take place in a variation on this setting, albeit less generic than most examples, since it's the main setting for the game: a hot, vast desert full of dunes and ancient ruins.
Shadowed Face, Glowing Eyes : The main character wears red robes and has glowing white eyes underneath them.
Silence Is Golden : No spoken dialogue ever occurs. It just isn't needed. The only written words in the entire game are the options menu, the title screen, and the ending credits, while the only spoken words are part of the ending song "I Was Born for This", which is in multiple languages and hard to decipher or understand without knowing the lyrics and sources.
Slide Level : "The Descent" level sees you dropped onto a mountain slope to sand-surf to the bottom at high speed (with a short break in the middle). If you manage to find a flat surface, you'll discover that said speed is actually artificially boosted, as the devs surreptitiously apply constant forward force to your character's physics model so you keep sliding forward and downward.
Socialization Bonus : It is possible to complete the game on your own but the entire game is obviously designed to be played with an anonymous Companion over the net. Sticking together makes many stages easier, since you can endlessly replenish each other's energy , especially the final trek up the mountain, where your scarf gradually loses power in the cold without a companion to cuddle with.
Temple of Doom : Averted. The Temple level is a totally safe Breather Level between the dangerous Underground Passage and Mountain.
Terminally Dependent Society : The scarcity of red banners, which were used as an energy source, started the civilization-ending war.
Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack : The most of the songs in Journey have just one central motif.
The Tower : One of the murals shows an Ancestor atop a tall tower, representing the hubris of the white-robe civilization before their decline .
Unexpected Gameplay Change : Part of chapter 5 consists of a Stealth-Based Mission in which you have to sneak through a tunnel being patrolled by Guardians. You'll repeat this exercise in chapter 7, this time hiding in the husks of dead Guardians as live ones pass overhead. If one sees you, it'll grab and toss you a long ways and tear off part of your scarf, reducing your energy meter.
Unwanted Assistance : An interesting example, in that it's not only perpetrated by other players but is almost certainly done without malice: the second chapter features a bridge which, if crossed without repairing it completely, will reward a trophy. Unfortunately some nice person will often see you 'struggling' and take pity on you by fixing the bridge section you obviously didn't see, undermining the whole endeavour.
Variable Mix : A few musical instruments are added to some of the songs when playing with another player.
You can fill your partner's energy gauge by singing or by walking very close to them. In chapter 7, when the extreme cold constantly drains your energy, you can still replenish it by the latter method, like you're huddling together for warmth. How sweet!
At the end of the game, the usernames of your companions are listed, and it's become common for players to send messages of thanks to their companions after playing the game. Players on Steam even started a thread on the game's forums to do just that.
Some clever gamers have devised another method of communication besides singing. It involves tracing in the bit of snow just before the end of the journey . The most common symbol? A heart.
As in many MMOs, even without chat, players commonly jump up and down, run in circles and have their characters vocalize to indicate the presence of collectible items for others who may still be searching for them. It's also par to show off tricks used to get certain ultra-rare achievements.
War Is Hell : Played with . After a long and quite literal descent you're informed of your ancestors' apocalyptic conflict by the gloomy and oppressive subterranean level, which also contains the first appearance of the guardians , the game's only source of the scary.
World of Symbolism : Yes, you're allowed to interpret the story. Unfortunately, many interpretations are bleak, leading most gamers to think that the primary symbols allude to our own real-life Crapsack World, and our dependence on natural resources .
The World Is Just Awesome : Many areas in the game appear to exist solely to make you sit back in your chair with your mouth hanging open.

Alternative Title(s): Journey

Outer Wilds
Creator/Annapurna Interactive
Telling Lies
INSIDE (2016)
Jupiter & Mars
Creator/thatgamecompany
Sky: Children of the Light
Platform/PlayStation Network
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle
Platform/PlayStation 3
Creator/Sony Interactive Entertainment
Jumping Flash!
Jill of the Jungle
American Video Games
Guilty Gear
Science Fantasy
Kingdom Hearts
Home (Rivers)
Adventure Game
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven
Platform/PlayStation 4
A Juggler's Tale
Video Games
ImageSource/Video Games (A to L)
Highly Visible Landmark
I Wanna Be the Guy: Gaiden
Video Games of 2010–2014

Important Links

Action Adventure
Commercials
Crime & Punishment
Professional Wrestling
Speculative Fiction
Sports Story
Animation (Western)
Music And Sound Effects
Print Media
Sequential Art
Tabletop Games
Applied Phlebotinum
Characterization
Characters As Device
Narrative Devices
British Telly
The Contributors
Creator Speak
Derivative Works
Laws And Formulas
Show Business
Split Personality
Truth And Lies
Truth In Television
Fate And Prophecy
Edit Reasons
Isolated Pages
Images List
Recent Videos
Crowner Activity
Un-typed Pages
Recent Page Type Changes
Trope Entry
Character Sheet
Playing With
Creating New Redirects
Cross Wicking
Tips for Editing
Text Formatting Rules
Handling Spoilers
Administrivia
Trope Repair Shop
Image Pickin'

Buy Journey

Buy annapurna interactive classics bundle ().

Includes 5 items: What Remains of Edith Finch , Gorogoa , Florence , Donut County , Journey

Buy Journey & Flower Bundle BUNDLE (?)

Includes 2 items: Flower , Journey

Buy Annapurna Interactive Collection BUNDLE (?)

Includes 30 items: Stray , Cocoon , Neon White , What Remains of Edith Finch , Outer Wilds , Journey , Storyteller , Sayonara Wild Hearts , Donut County , Mundaun , Solar Ash , Hohokum , The Pathless , Twelve Minutes , The Artful Escape , Last Stop , Gorogoa , A Memoir Blue , Maquette , Wattam , Ashen , Florence , I Am Dead , The Unfinished Swan , If Found , Telling Lies , Flower , Hindsight , Thirsty Suitors , Open Roads

“Journey stands as a prime example of the truly remarkable things that can be done via this medium.” 10/10 – Giant Bomb “The mechanics are simple, but they establish a direct connection to the heart.” 10/10 – Gamespot “Journey's visual and sound design sets new standards for interactive entertainment. This alone makes it an extraordinary work, but it's the way that these aesthetic elements come together with beautifully subtle direction and storytelling to create a lasting emotional effect that elevates this to one of the very best games of our time.” 10/10 – The Guardian

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1472930/Flock/

More From thatgamecompany

https://store.steampowered.com/app/966330/Flower/

About This Game

System requirements.

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i3-2120 | AMD FX-4350
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia GTS 450 | AMD Radeon HD 5750
Storage: 4 GB available space

© 2012-2020 Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC. Journey is a trademark of Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC. Developed by thatgamecompany. Conversion development by Inline Assembly Ltd. Published by Annapurna Interactive.

More from Annapurna Interactive

More like this, what curators say, customer reviews.

You can use this widget-maker to generate a bit of HTML that can be embedded in your website to easily allow customers to purchase this game on Steam.

Enter up to 375 characters to add a description to your widget:

Copy and paste the HTML below into your website to make the above widget appear

Popular user-defined tags for this product: (?)

Journey Wiki

Journey's 12th Anniversary Poster Winner! Congratulations Kbak! Join players around the world in celebration of Journey's 12th Anniversary fan event on March 13th!

View history

A wayfarer. Say hi!

Wayfarers are the creatures that travel through the world of Journey towards the ultimate goal, the Mountain.

2.1 First Run
2.2 Second and Third Runs
2.3 Full Embroidery
3.1 Red Robe
3.2 White Robe
3.3 Wayfarer Comparison
4 Common Abbreviations
9 References

Overview [ ]

The character you control in Journey is a Wayfarer. Companions you meet along the way or travel with are also Wayfarers.

Wayfarers are known by a variety of names, the most common ones being:

Rythulian (sometimes mistakenly considered the official name of the species, see Trivia section below)

When using the Chirp button, one can see their Symbol , and it is also visible on the Wayfarer's chest (when glowing).

Wayfarers (your character included) may wear a white or red robe with different embroideries (tiers) indicating the player's progress in the game as explained in the following sections.

Robe Tiers [ ]

You start the game as a Red Robe (RR) with just a single yellow line on the bottom of your robe. This makes you a first run and people that understand how the pattern increases will recognise you as a newcomer.

With every completed Journey you will get more embroidery on your robe, up to your "fourth run" (Tier 4) .

The terms "run" and "tier" are both used and understood by the Journey community members.

Fourth Run, Full Embroidery

First Run [ ]

A Wayfarer playing the game for the first time. They cannot meet a White Robe except in iOS. [1]

Second and Third Runs [ ]

With every completed Journey , the embroidery will increase when starting a new Journey , until it reaches full embroidery (Tier 4).

You may start a Journey through Chapter Select (CS) portals but this will not grant an increased pattern at the start of your next Journey .

Full Embroidery [ ]

A fully embroidered robe, also known as a Full Tier or Full Run, distinguishes Wayfarers who went through Journey three or more times.

Tier 1 Robe is available with zero runs and each run adds a tier until maximum is reached.

Robe Colors [ ]

The terms "cloak" and "robe" are used and understood interchangeably by the Journey community members and mean the same thing.

Robes with low Tier could also be an experienced player who reset their game. See Companions .

Red Robe [ ]

Red Robe (also known as Red Cloak) is the default color that all Wayfarers wear.

With Red Robe, scarf power can be recharged using cloth creatures or Companions, but won't regenerate when simply walking on the ground alone. Thus, a Red Robe's movement is more limited compared to the White Robe.

White Robe [ ]

A Wayfarer who has found all the Symbols gains access to the White Robe.

Note: Your robe will not automatically switch colors when you pick up the last Symbol. You would need to switch to it at the Wardrobe in Chapter Select after completing that Journey.

A White Robe Journeyer would usually have a fully embroidered Robe, but it is possible to get a White Robe with lower tiers if you manage to collect all the Symbols within one Journey .

Wayfarer Comparison [ ]

Red Robe has no mouth-line.
White Robe shows a V-shaped yellow line below the eyes.
Thus, the White Robe is less dependent on cloth creatures or a Companion to fly.
"The white scarf stops growing before the tower" [2] if it has reached maximum length (you collected enough symbols and the scarf wasn't torn by the War Machines).
For more information about maximum Scarf length and comparison to red Scarf, see Maximum scarf length .

Common Abbreviations [ ]

The table below lists common abbreviations to identify different tiers of Wayfarers.

Gallery [ ]

A Wayfarer that hasn't finished the game aka "a first run", single ring robe.

A first and a second run RR.

Two 3rd runs.

A 4th and second tier RR.

A tier-four white cloak

Note that in this image you can see a first run White Robe pattern, which is not in the game code.

If a White Traveller game session starts a New Journey, they will be white. Normally, new journeys start as Red. (PS3 only)
Starting as White and not picking symbols will yield the same shortest scarf as Red starts with when going to a level.
Pressing Start Journey after just finishing a Journey skips the Opening by moving the camera to the player's Red Robe sitting position ready to stand up.
In early concept art and development versions for Journey, the protagonist looked like a ninja warrior as noted by the developers.
It gained prominence after the Collector's Edition release, but is not an official name of the species in Journey.
In early concepts, a Wayfarer would travel in a Red robe and turn White in Paradise. [3]
In developer versions, robe embroideries were given to the Wayfarer by Ancestors at each level's final cinematic, along with extra scarf length.

Funny community terms:

References [ ]

↑ DreamsOfFreedom: @rebi thats not true in iOS. On my first ios run [some guy] joined me as a white cloak. rebi : haha youre right youre right DreamsOfFreedom : he told me its the one big difference on ios Copytechman : That happened to me too as A first timer on ios
↑ CheekyD, 04-28-2020, Twitch chat
↑ Source: The Art of Journey, ISBN: 978-0985902216.
2 Wayfarers

PlayStation 3
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 5
Xbox Series
More Systems

PlayStation 3 iOS (iPhone/iPad) PC PlayStation 4

Game trailer, description.

The pioneers that brought you the award-winning PlayStation Network titles flOw & Flower are back with another title that challenges traditional gaming conventions. With Journey, thatgamecompany (TGC) continues its tradition of delivering simple gameplay and accessible controls in a rich interactive environment that invites players to explore and experience emotional chords that are still uncommon in video games. An exotic adventure with a more serious tone, Journey presents TGCs unique vision of an online adventure experience. Awakening in an unknown world, the player walks, glides, and flies through a vast and awe-inspiring landscape, while discovering the history of an ancient, mysterious civilization along the way. Journeys innovative approach to online play encourages players to explore this environment with strangers who cross their path from time to time. By traveling together, they can re-shape the experience creating authentic moments they will remember and discuss with others.

User Ratings

IMAGES

Journey annoncé sur PC et arrivera bientôt sur l'Epic Games Store
Journey
Journey Video Review
Los 16 primeros minutos de Journey funcionando en PC
Journey
Journey now available on Steam

VIDEO

ASMR Let's Play Journey #4 (PS3)
ASMR Let's Play #16
Skip Night City A Guide to Surviving #cyberpunk2077
Journey
Journey
The Journey || Game Time Series || Finding Objects

COMMENTS

Journey
Journey is an adventure game developed by ThatGameCompany and released by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2012 on PlayStation 3, as a Sony Exclusive title. Due to its ongoing success, it got ported to several platforms: See Release dates Since the very start, the game had a very strong community, people that fell in love with the game and playing it all over again. Over the years, they ...
Journey (2012 video game)
Journey is an indie adventure game developed by Thatgamecompany, published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and directed by Jenova Chen.It was released for the PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network in March 2012 and ported to PlayStation 4 in July 2015. It was later ported to Windows in June 2019 and iOS in August 2019.. In Journey, the player controls a robed figure in a vast desert, traveling ...
Deciphering the Journey
In Journey, you walk, jump and play. You interact with the world by leaping or by singing at it, and you solve the game's few puzzles via experimentation, learning the rules of this land as you ...
Why Journey is one of the greatest games ever made
One of Journey's greatest achievements is the way in which it redefines movement, that basic and original tenet of games. In many ways, Journey is a game about movement--a palpable traversal of ...
Journey
Journey is a PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 game by thatgamecompany, that is distributed over PSN and was released on March 13, 2012. The player plays as a robed person journeying towards a distant mountain through a sandy desert. The game has a multiplayer component, in which players can interact on their journey and assist each other. As of May 29th 2012, it has become the fastest-selling ...
How Journey only truly made sense when almost everything had been cut
These games are beautiful, but, they remain compact - nothing like the sprawl of a Warcraft. Scale is only one aspect of an MMO, though. "What we were taught in school is to push the boundary ...
Journey Wiki
There are two newer wikis that aim to provide a broader scope of information, including information on the PC and iOS versions, advanced techniques, glitches, and out-of-bounds areas. The Gamepedia wiki has been around longer and has more information. The ShoutWiki is newer and has fewer features but has more focus on organization, and is on ...
Journey
Hello and welcome to the game lore archives. Today we will be discussing the short but powerful Journey and the story behind the game.
Journey Review
Journey celebrates the poignancy of nature, it startles you with the unexpected, and empowers you in an exhilarating, unforgettable conclusion. The hours spent completing Journey will create ...
'Journey' Made a Convincing Case That Video Games Could Be Art
Ten Years Ago, 'Journey' Made a Convincing Case That Video Games Could Be Art. Creative director Jenova Chen conceived 'Journey' as an act of rebellion against commercial games. The ...
What Is The Mystery Behind Journey?
The game begins as the player/character wakes on a vast open desert filled with sweeping sand dunes and blowing wind. A beautiful, lonely cello melody picks up in the soundtrack. The main character is an unusual figure in a long red cloak. He can walk with the left stick, pan the camera with the six-axis tilt, jump, and let out a keening song ...
Journey
Enter the world of Journey, the third game from indie developers thatgamecompany (creators of "flOw" and "Flower"). Journey is an interactive parable, an anonymous online adventure to experience a person's life passage and their intersections with other's. You wake alone and surrounded by miles of burning, sprawling desert, and soon discover the looming mountaintop which is your goal.
Journey (2012) (Video Game)
Video Game /. Journey (2012) That identical figure to the left will probably be your new best friend by the end of the game. Journey is a video game for the PlayStation 3 created by thatgamecompany. You play as a nameless robed figure who is crossing the desert to reach a mountain in the distance. As the game progresses, you pass through ...
Journey Meaning : r/JourneyPS3
Journey is an award-winning indie game developed by thatgamecompany and available for PS3/4/5, PC and iOS. ... This is a place for fans and players of the game to make connections, discuss lore, formulate strategies, share ideas and generally just enjoy each other's company.
Journey
Journey is an aptly named game as the short time that it takes to complete the game is a wonderful sensory journey. The sound design, visual effects, character movement and multiplayer ...
Journey Guide
Multiplayer. Journey is the third PS3 game from acclaimed indie developer thatgamecompany. The ambitious project exudes atmosphere and emotion in a way that few games have ever accomplished. Use ...
Journey (2012 video game)
Journey is an indie adventure game developed by Thatgamecompany, published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and directed by Jenova Chen. It was released for the PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network in March 2012 and ported to PlayStation 4 in July 2015. It was later ported to Windows in June 2019 and iOS in August 2019.
Entities
Entities are creatures and people within the world of Journey. The various creature types have been listed below, with classes of creatures within each type. While these creatures may change appearance based on certain conditions, please note they are still the same creatures. Special examples that further individualize a class of creature are indented below the class. Except for the Wayfarer ...
Journey
Whoever I just finished playing Journey with at 10:45pm (CET) yesterday (01/10/2023) and spent the longest of time with in game, thank you. It was amazing going through this journey with you. I will not forget you. (Companions I met along the way: ElWekerer; QingofChina, W. Wiesel, Klaud. It's one of you 4.) Much love.
Journey on Steam
About This Game. Explore the ancient, mysterious world of Journey as you soar above ruins and glide across sands to discover its secrets. Play alone or in the company of a fellow traveler and explore its vast world together. Featuring stunning visuals and a Grammy-nominated musical score, Journey delivers a breathtaking experience like no other.
Wayfarers
Wayfarers are the creatures that travel through the world of Journey towards the ultimate goal, the Mountain. The character you control in Journey is a Wayfarer. Companions you meet along the way or travel with are also Wayfarers. Wayfarers are known by a variety of names, the most common ones being: Journeyer Wanderer Traveler Journeyman Rythulian (sometimes mistakenly considered the official ...
Journey for PlayStation 3
Description. The pioneers that brought you the award-winning PlayStation Network titles flOw & Flower are back with another title that challenges traditional gaming conventions. With Journey, thatgamecompany (TGC) continues its tradition of delivering simple gameplay and accessible controls in a rich interactive environment that invites players ...