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Journey, From The Creators Of flOw and Flower, Explained

flOw and Flower developer thatgamecompany is making something new, Journey , a game that's about singing, sand, hiking, cloth, surfing, astronauts and feeling small. And, in a radical departure for the team, it uses two whole buttons.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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Journey | The pilgrimage of a lifetime

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Born as the last title of a contract with Sony Computer Entertainment , the development of Journey required far longer than expected, taking over three years to complete. A troubled project during the making of which the studio Thatgamecompany faced delays, tensions and almost risked bankruptcy.

However, the result was a title that would forever change the idea of what a video game can be. Released for Playstation3 in 2012, Journey set a higher standard for interactive entertainment, and its emotional resonance made it unforgettable to all those who played it.

A beginning shrouded in mystery

Golden dunes shimmer under the blinding rays of dawn, dancing in the heat haze. A shooting star cuts across the sky and over the desert, where a lone figure sits among the sand, shrouded in a red cloak. Journey is the tale of a mysterious protagonist, as it travels to the beacon that is the mountain at the horizon. During this adventure the player will uncover the secrets of a long-lost civilization, as well as meet other travellers on the path toward the glowing peak.

The art of Journey’s game design

Today hyper-realistic graphics and stunning aesthetics have almost become a requisite of modern video games, regardless of genre. From Assassin’s Creed to Cyberpunk 2077 , visuals play a big role in the popularity of a title. And yet, many still struggle in conveying a unique message through it, discarded in favor of the entertainment factor. As a result, often the story serves as a frame to provide context, but is otherwise disconnected from the gameplay. This is where Journey stands out.

While the idea of exploring ancient ruins is far from new, the concept of the title is: a journey through life , expressed in a way that only video games can. Without dialogue nor writing, but through pure game design . A stylistic choice later used by other indie videogames, such as INSIDE and RiME . Paired with phenomenal visuals and incredible use of score , it makes for a gaming experience unlike any other.

In Journey there are no fights to face, and no choices to make. The mechanics themselves are few and immediate: walking, jumping and singing . Despite this seeming simplicity, the story of Journey holds a depth that has to be experienced. It manages to create a complete immersion during its short duration, without any inconsistencies to disrupt the narration flow. A good use of its limited mechanics as well as of the strengths of its medium, without overstretching itself. Instead, its brief but moving story is best enjoyed in one go .

Companions on a shared path

As the player moves their first steps in the game, they come to discover the magic of the cloth. By finding magical glyphs, the scarf of the protagonist will grow in length, the power imbued in it allowing to soar for long periods of time. However, another unexpected aid will come to the help of the protagonist.

From the second level on, the game connects randomly with other players, and a second cloaked figure will appear. An unknown ally with whom the player can choose to travel or not. A kind of cooperation whose limitations make the shared bond all the more meaningful. Because if musical notes are the only mean of communication, the flawless game design makes it essential and functional.

With this unique multiplayer function , a stranger soon becomes a companion whose presence enriches the game experience . One wishes to play tunes with them, share discoveries, and stick together through all the ups and downs. And while it is not guaranteed to play with the same person all the way to the end, it still heightens the emotional impact of the title. A journey that is started alone, but whose fulfillment is reached together.

An unforgettable emotional tale

In the end, this video game does represent a journey in itself, one that leaves its meaning open to personal interpretation. It offers something that few titles do: an emotional reward , not unlike Chihiro’s own journey in Spirited Away . The intent of Thatgamecompany to create video games that speak on an emotional level culminated with Journey , which created an in-game world where feelings resonate . And as the scenery evolves from scorching deserts to freezing peaks, so do the emotions evoked.

Even music plays a fundamental part, contributing to the beauty of the experience. The notes sung by the protagonist merge with the score, mirroring the actions in-game. Moreover, the soundtrack becomes more and more orchestral as the story proceeds, and when accompanied by another traveler new instruments join in . A clever use of sound design , also present in Gris .

And as credits roll, the track “I was born for this” plays; the only one featuring lyrics, five literature excerpts sang in five languages. From Beowulf to the Iliad , it is no coincidence for them to be all examples of the hero’s journey. The score thus ends as it started with the soft notes of a cello tune, a hint to the cyclic nature of the videogame . Praised worldwide for its emotional storytelling, Journey won several awards, including “Game of the Year” at the 2012 D.I.C.E. Awards . Inspired by the success and mechanics of this title, Thatgamecompany is working on a new mobile videogame: Sky – Children of the Light , soon available for Playstation as well.

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Deciphering the Journey

Posted in Features

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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.

Journey as Philosophy: Meaning, Connection, and the Sublime

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Journey is a game famous for its visuals and sound design, along with the emotional experience of playing. While the game eschews standard practices in video games, like having strategy, complex gameplay mechanics, or dialogue, it is nonetheless able to leave a deep impression on its players. This impression is due to a number of factors, but some of the big ones are the interplay between meaning, connection, and the sublime. In Journey, you play with other players who you can’t talk to as you wander around a desolate, yet beautiful, landscape. There is a massive mountain in the distance that you’re wandering towards, and so you and the other players that you encounter have a shared experience of the sublime. This experience creates connections with other players, despite your inability to talk to them or message them in any way. The game’s narrative is rather straightforward, but the storytelling, world-building, and overall game design are done in such a way that you cannot help but consider the problem of meaning. Your journey to the top of the mountain accomplishes nothing, yet you are compelled to do it over and over. By playing with these different themes, and weaving them into each other, Journey creates an unforgettable experience.

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Burke, Edmund. 2005. A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful with an introductory discourse concerning taste, and several other additions . Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043-h/15043-h.htm#A_PHILOSOPHICAL_INQUIRY .

Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays . Trans. J. O'Brien. Vintage Books. New York.

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Chen, Jeonva. 2013. “Emotion oriented interactive entertainment - inspirations and theories behind journey.” Youtube. D.I.C.E. Summit, 15 June 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=S684RQHzmGA .

Kant, Immanuel. 2010. Critique of judgment . Trans. W.S. Pluhar. Hackett. Indianapolis, Indiana.

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Hamer, R. (2020). Journey as Philosophy: Meaning, Connection, and the Sublime. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97134-6_36-1

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10 Years On: 8 Things You Didn't Know About Journey

Journey is a beloved indie title to this day, and here are just a few things you might not have known about its making.

Journey is certainly one of the most famous indie games that's ever been made, and easily one of the most successful. Its legacy still manages to draw in new fans to this day, and said fans are still awed by its environments, its soundtrack, and how it manages to tell a story with zero dialogue.

Related: Best Games To Play On iPad

However, even ten years after its release , there are still new things left to discover about Journey. It may be easy to assume things were plain sailing for developers thatgamecompany, but game development can often be a strange and stressful process, even for games that are deliberately simple to play.

8 It Was Created By No More Than 18 People

Over the three-year development period, thatgamecompany went from just seven employees to a maximum of 18 . The team had also been given only a year by Sony to complete it, but thatgamecompany knew there was no way they'd be able to finish Journey in such a short amount of time with so few people.

Related: The Best Games Made By Just One Person

Looking back, it seems pretty outlandish to have expected a fully completed game in just one year from only seven people, indie or otherwise.

7 The Traveller Actually Dies During The Finale

When the protagonist (known as the traveller) collapses in the snow near the summit, you may think that you've simply fallen unconscious, and the other travellers are using their energy to help you reawaken and reach the mountain's summit.

However, according to the game's lead director , Jenova Chen, the traveller does die at that point. The finale is more of a spiritual journey because the physical one has now come to an end. It's still a happier scene, but this knowledge makes the overall ending feel sadder .

6 The Game Had A Very Strained Development Cycle

Whilst Journey may be the ideal chill-out game , the development process was anything but. On top of the constant worries about time pressures, reducing overtime, and trying to avoid tension between team members during stressful periods, Jenova Chen revealed at a DICE talk in 2013 that thatgamecompany also had to file for bankruptcy as development finally came to a close.

It was so bad that some of the developers went unpaid for a few months near the end. They even had to use their own money to fund the game.

5 One Playtester Experienced A Much Sadder Ending

According to Austin Wintory (the composer for Journey) , he brought in a friend to experience the game during development. When said friend exited the room, they remarked to Austin Wintory and Jenova Chen about how moved they were by the ending, without realizing there was still more of the game to play.

This is because the game had crashed after fading to white during the snowfield section. This actually caused Jenova and the other devlopers to change the finale to better reflect this moment.

4 The Game Had Two Prototypes

The first concept for Journey was a 2D game called "Roping," and it involved two players helping each other climb up some platforms via ropes. The second concept was called "Dragon," and it involved players trying to lead others away from a large monster.

Both of these concepts were scrapped because the team felt that they went against Journey's core point: it's a co-operative experience that can also be completed solo if the player wishes, and if they do meet someone, there won't be any ill feelings towards them.

3 It's Designed To Feel As Universal As Possible

Journey is designed in such a way that it can be approached by anyone, and this applies to every aspect of the game. For example, the traveller is purposefully blank so anyone can project themselves onto them, and the architecture is purposefully designed to belong in Journey's world, rather than act as a reflection of our own.

Related: Indie Games Made With Unity

This even extends to the multiplayer. You can be playing with anyone in the world and whilst you have no idea who they are, you both know why you're here.

2 The Hardcover Artbook Can Be Viewed In AR

A few months after Journey was released, an official artbook was released which compiled some unseen concept art along with art from fans who had enjoyed Journey. To make it a bit more special, thatgamecompany worked with AR company Daqri (now defunct).

This means that readers have the opportunity to look at 3D models of the artwork on phones or tablets. Unfortunately, it's much harder to get a copy of the book nowadays because it was never digitized, and resale copies of the book sell for astronomical prices.

1 The Soundtrack's Release Was Purposefully Delayed By A Few Weeks

Journey's OST is one of the best-selling in gaming. However, it wasn't actually released on the same day the game came out (as is often the norm for video game releases). Instead, Jenova Chen decided to release the OST about a month later.

This is because the soundtrack basically tells the entire story of Journey, and Jenova didn't want people who hadn't yet played the game to be spoiled by listening to the OST first . This strategy also boosted the sales of the OST when it finally did release.

Next: Modern But Minimal: Best Minimalist Games On Current Consoles

Journey (PS4) Review

First Released Mar 13, 2012 released

The light by which my spirit's born.

By Kevin VanOrd on July 23, 2015 at 10:41AM PDT

This review contains spoilers. For a spoiler-free review of Journey, you can read our original review here .

It was my eighth playthrough and the tears still streamed, almost inexplicably; Journey is a song without words, reliant on its rapturous presentation and liberating movement to stir your mind and move your heart. With many games, I have wished that I could play them again for the first time--to experience that buzz that inevitably diminishes with each return visit. I will never need to waste this wish on Journey, however: each pilgrimage is as bittersweet as the last. How appropriate, given the game's theme of death and rebirth, that it feels so sorrowful, so joyous, and so true , each and every time.

"Journey would be just as effective as a movie," a friend once told me, but I must contradict her. Not that I can argue against the game's sumptuous environments and its sublime musical score, which earned masterpiece status the moment Journey was initially released on the PlayStation 3 in 2012. Certain landscapes have rightfully gained iconic stature, becoming the very definition of video game beauty. One shot depicts the cloaked figure you control standing atop a sand drift and gazing at the mountain you must reach, which rises above the desert and pierces the clouds. The view is a master class in simplicity and color story; the peach-orange tones of the sand give way to a sea-green sky--hushed hues for a hushed visual revelation. Another seminal sight: you skate across the sand from right to left, illuminated by a godly beam of sunlight while watching the remnants of a lost culture rush past. The screen is awash with shades of amber, and the warm sand glimmers as if mixed with golden crystals. Yes, even as a work of cinema, Journey would instill wonder.

A white-hooded companion joins me, and we continue toward the light.

But Journey is not a film, and its power is not gained by pretty pictures alone, but by your presence in its world. That side-scrolling glide would not choke me up if I couldn't feel the sand beneath my feet, and couldn't hit a ramp in just the right way to propel myself into the air. I wouldn't feel so beat down by the wind if I didn't feel it pushing against me as I trudged forward, and I wouldn't be so euphoric if I didn't personally experience the joy of skimming the ground. You see, you hear, and, vitally, you do . You surf the sand, you ride the wind, you seek shelter from danger, you make a friend. Seeing is believing, but it takes interaction to understand and know.

Describing Journey means describing these moments and these emotions. The mechanical basics are almost secondary, and quickly explainable. As a mysterious robed figure, you cross sand and other terrain en route to a far-off mountain. You make use of only two buttons. By pressing X, you leap into the air and soar, an ability that is limited by the length of the scarf that trails behind you. By pressing circle, you cry out to whatever or whomever might heed your call. Journey is desolate, but you are not alone. You call to flocks of ribbons that hover about like restless robins, and they provide energy to your scarf. You meet cloth creatures that become travel guides and provide magic-carpet rides to higher ground. And presuming you play while connected to the Internet, you may encounter another lone individual in your travels--an individual you can ignore, or one you can accompany, chirping to her when you locate secret hieroglyphs, or when a fearsome ribbon-dragon appears and you don't want to continue alone.

The mechanics are simple, but they establish a direct connection to the heart. Consider that flowing scarf, which trails behind you as you surf and soar, growing larger whenever you locate and touch a glowing flower. On a mundane level, it functions as a power bar that you fill up by making contact with cloth, and deplete by leaping. In context, the scarf is your life force, governing your ability to joyfully drift through the air. Gliding is Journey's most exuberant act, and by limiting its use, the game makes joy itself a currency.

Journey uses this ecstasy-based economy to craft an emotional arc across its entirety, as well as to emphasize individual moments. Your scarf grows longer and longer, but a frightful encounter with that terrible ribbon-monster turns your rippling shawl into a mere stub. You cannot fight--you can only hide. Being discovered is devastating because the scarf is where the cheer and comfort of flight are stored. You were offered a heartwarming gift, only to have it yanked from your hands. Journey also uses this moment to connect you with your wordless cooperative companion. By this stage, you understand the meaning the scarf carries with it. Seeing your sidekick succumb like this forges empathy: you know that the monster has abolished his joy.

This give-and-take is how the final levels gain their potency. Your ability to glide is diminished, then revoked. You no longer drift through sand, but brace yourself against an exhaustive wind. Then, the moment comes when all hope seems lost. You hold your breath and assume the worst. And then, the controller rumbles--just once, like a single heartbeat. And all that was taken away is restored, then multiplied, and multiplied again.

This is the source of those tears. It is not the sadness of the loss, but the bliss of being honored for your perseverance. These are tears of elevation, so perfectly described by Roger Ebert in 2009 . I have heard people describe this final climb in terms of an afterlife, and that's a reasonable interpretation of the scene, in which you float higher and higher towards the mountain's zenith. But even in the moment, whether or not you make this conscious religious association, you might feel weepy in spite of yourself. The gift was given, and it was taken away. And then, you were liberally showered with gifts, and so you ascended, higher and higher, towards your next journey.

It is possible that Journey will not move you. In such a case, it is simply a beautiful game with a glorious soundtrack, grounded by a wistful cello melody later threaded through a warm quilt of winds and strings. The chance you might be swept away, however, makes it worth plunging your feet into the warm sand. If you are returning to Journey, a higher resolution and a higher frame rate are your ostensible rewards for returning--a return that doesn't cost you anything if you already own the game on the PlayStation 3. But Journey's real rewards aren't so pedestrian. Journey offers you comfort. It gives you companionship in a lovely but forsaken world. It gives you reason to dream even when facing loss.

Leave Blank
Sumptuous visuals
One of the best game soundtracks written to date
Simple mechanics that elicit powerful emotions
Instills empathy between cooperative partners
Iconic moments that stay with you for years

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Kevin VanOrd

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GameFAQs Q&A

Will you be able to play Journey offline instead of just only online? General 7 Answers
How do you quickly sit down? Tech Support 2 Answers
About how many hours is this game? General 5 Answers
Can you play with a friend or only anonymous? General 4 Answers
Can you die / get a game over? *Spoilers, but probably not* General 4 Answers

PS Plus required for online play
Supports up to 2 online players with PS Plus
Online play optional
Remote Play supported
PS4 Version DUALSHOCK 4 vibration

The critically-acclaimed title makes its debut on the PS4™ system. 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.

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De-stress, unwind and escape to new worlds with a rundown of some of PlayStation’s best games to soothe your mind and body.

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Journey (2012)

Journey is an adventure game developed by thatgamecompany exclusively for the PlayStation 3 and which is distributed on the PlayStation Network . The game features the player as a robed figure in a vast desert, journeying toward a mountain in the distance. Along the way the player can meet other players on the same journey; the two players can assist each other, but cannot communicate via speech or text and are not shown each others' names until after completion. The game was released on March 7, 2012 for PlayStation Plus subscribers, and was fully released on March 13. The game was rereleased on PlayStation 4 on July 21, 2015 . It has been met with significant critical acclaim. Journey is the last game made under a three game contract between thatgamecompany and Sony, the first two being Flow and Flower .

1 Getting started
2 Introduction
3 The broken bridge
4 The pink desert
5 The sunken city
6 The underground passage
7 The tower
8 The snow fields
9 The flight to the peaks
10 Trophies

Getting started [ edit ]

Journey is a simple game where you make your way across a desert toward a distant mountain. Along the way you will discover a strange form of life and may encounter other people playing the game, one person at a time. Connection to the internet is required for co-op play with others, and signing out of PlayStation Network will allow you to journey alone. Others will join you if your instance of the game matches theirs, meaning that as you change things in the environment, only others whose environment is in the same state can join you. To increase the odds of running into another journeyer, wait at the beginning of chapters before doing anything.

The controls are simple, as are the puzzles, and the camera can be controlled by moving the Sixaxis controller instead of using normal thumbstick input. The game is played mainly on sand, so walking across flat sand is relatively slow, going uphill is slower and going downhill is fast, especially if it is steep enough to slide. In the start menu you can go into options to invert the camera.

The game is split into distinct, unnamed chapters and between each will be a cutscene. Your goal in any chapter is to get to the end where you can activate the spirit markers to receive your vision. Along the way you will have to solve puzzles and interact with the ubiquitous red cloths. Once you have completed your journey, you can go to chapter select from the options in the start menu, and you will be transported back to the end of the introduction level, losing all saved progress. Chapters you can go directly to will be found in the buildings around the main platform.

As you journey, you can collect glowing symbols to increase the length of your scarf. You scarf grants you the power to fly, but using it drains its power. You can see the amount of flight you have left by how many symbols are on your scarf. As you fly, the symbols will disappear and you will need to replenish your scarf power by touching red cloths or having your partner shout next to you.

In addition to the glowing symbols, there may be other objects hidden around the area, such as glyphs and easter eggs associated with trophies . Glowing symbols and glyphs are tracked in the chapter select area. In the chapter buildings, the glyphs that you have found will light up, showing you in which chapters you are missing them, except for one in the introductory chapter. The glowing symbols are tracked in total off to the side of the buildings, but you will need to reach the end of a chapter to see how many you've collected out of the total for that chapter by the number of lit up symbols in front of the altar where you receive your vision. Once you have collected all the glowing symbols, you will have access to the white robes in the chapter select area, which allows you to replenish your scarf power while touching the ground.

Introduction [ edit ]

Instead of heading toward the mountain, you can find your first glyph by going to the structure off to the right. Go past the sunken piece of wall with the cloth pieces and inside the building you come to will be the glyph wall with two sets of spirit markers on each side. You can activate them by touching them or shouting. When you do, the blank wall will fill up with a picture, showing you've activated it. Head out of the building and down into the nearby valley. Here you will see a short tower in the middle, surrounded by broken buildings. When you have completed the game, you can access chapters in these building around the tower. There is a glowing symbol on a small platform on the side of the tower and one on the side of the tower itself that you can get to by going over the edge from the top or flying.

The broken bridge [ edit ]

This is the first chapter where you can meet another player. The goal here is to activate large cloth pieces to reform the bridge, allowing you to get up to the next altar. As you enter the area, the first large cloth is directly in front and below you, the cloths for the middle section are on a hill on the right and the cloths for the last two sections are on a hill on the left. Simply move over to them and either run up them or shout to restore them, and they will be sucked into the machines they are on top of and split into smaller cloths that will span the missing bridge sections. When you've rebuilt the bridge, you can cross it and activate the spirit markers to get your next vision.

For the Threshold trophy, you'll need to get across the bridge without restoring all sections. By yourself you can do that by completing the last and middle sections of the bridge, then flying to the top of the first large cloth without activating it, which will let you reach the first bridge piece. With a partner, you can use infinite flying where you fly and shout at the same time, symbiotically replenishing each other's scarves while flying. If you have collected all glowing symbols and have the white robes that let you regain scarf power while on the ground, you don't have to rebuild any part of the bridge, you can just fly from the tops of the bridge arches to the next pieces.

There are three glowing symbols and a hidden glyph in this chapter. From the entrance, you can see the first one glowing off to the left. The other two are on the far end of the area. You can barely see them both from where you start, one behind some falling sand on the left side, approachable from the ground, and one above some falling sand on the right, which can be accessed by flight from a nearby cloth machine. The glyph is hidden behind the falling sand below the third glowing symbol.

The pink desert [ edit ]

In this chapter you just have to cross the desert heading toward the mountain until you reach the dark blowing sand with the towers. There are numerous cloth creatures to find in the desert, as well as a reference to the developer's second PlayStation game, Flower . Finding all the creatures and the flower will give you both the trophies for this chapter. From where you start, slide down and climb the next dune to see the first cloth machine. When you activate it, a cloth creature will come out and try to lead you on to the towers. Head directly to the right instead, parallel to the mountain, until you come to some broken pillars with a glowing symbol on top.

After freeing the cloth creature and getting the symbol, go along this right edge of the desert in the direction of the mountain. At the top of a large dune you should see some ruins off to your left. Instead of heading directly there, look down to your left into the little valley between dunes to spot the elusive desert flower. Give it a full shout to get the trophy, then head on towards to the ruins you saw. On the back side of the ruins is a hidden glyph you can activate before continuing on toward the mountain. A couple dunes later will show you the last ruins on the right side of the desert, where a shooting star from the mountain will come down and turn into a glowing symbol at the top. Use a full shout in the middle of the cloth pieces below to get up to it.

At the top of the high dune behind these ruins, you'll get your first look at the towers and stormy area, but there are still ruins on the left side of the desert. Traverse to the other side along the top of the dune until you come to a large, standalone tower on your left. Here you can free the cloth creature on the side, then use the cloth pieces on the broken ramp to get to the top of the broken stairs on the tower. On the backside of the tower is another group of cloth pieces that will take you to the top of the tower where a glowing symbol awaits. From the top of the tower, fly back away from the mountain and after the big dune you'll find the last trapped cloth creature and the last hidden glyph. You are now ready to head toward the mountain and take on the towers at the end.

Down in the stormy area, you can use the broken stairs at the bottom of one of the towers to start your ascent. A cloth creature will help you up past the broken steps, and at the top, shout at the trapped cloth creature to free it and get a ride to the top of the lower tower. Take the bridge across to the other tower and either go around it counterclockwise, or just fly to the end of the walkway from the bridge, where another helpful cloth creature will take you to the top. Instead of heading directly up the stairs, go around the left side to pick up the last glowing symbol. Activate the spirit markers at the top to receive your vision, then head back down the stairs and ride a cloth creature to the next chapter.

The sunken city [ edit ]

This quick chapter involves surfing down an incredibly long mountain of sand through the ruins of a large city. As you slide down, watch for the arches littered around the slope; sliding through 15 of these gates gets you the trophy, combining the gates you go through in the first and second slide. When you first start sliding you'll see a big tower in the middle of the slope that you have to go around. Behind it is a length of walkway you can slide down to get the first glowing symbol. At the bottom of the hill, you'll go through a tunnel and come bursting out through a sheet of falling sand. If you start pressing to the right before you go through, you can float/fly over to the second glowing symbol, which is atop a protruding metal pipe. It's hard to get up to it from below without a maxed scarf, but you can try using the cloth pieces after activating the machines below to get back up there if you miss it. Down in the courtyard are four cloth machines you can activate, which will free some cloth creatures to use the machinery in the center.

This will release a group of cloth pieces that will allow you to get up to the next ledge and continue your journey. Before you go, there is also a group of cloth pieces in a corner of the courtyard that will take you up to the hidden glyph in this level. When you're done, use the cloth pieces to fly up to the ledge and continue your sand surfing to the very bottom. If you stay to the left around the first part, you can cut across to the right and use a rock ramp to jump up to a crevice running through the cliffs for the last glowing symbol. You should get six gates in the first slide and the rest in the second, although you might need to do a gate-only slide for the trophy later if you tried to combine the symbols and gates and didn't go through enough of them. At the bottom you'll land in a dark area below the city. Head over to the left to activate the second hidden glyph, then make your way to the end altar and receive your vision before heading through the gate beyond.

The underground passage [ edit ]

This dark, mysterious area consists of a series of long rooms full of new creatures. The first area is quiet and simple, just follow the broken pipes down until you get to the end where there are two parallel pipes next to each other. In the left one that breaks up out of the sand you'll find the first glowing symbol. In the area beyond you'll find some cloth plants growing around more pipes. When you're touching cloth, you will float in place, so use this to your advantage to climb up to the tops of them, refilling your scarf power and letting you fly to the next plant. In a pipe on the right side is another glowing symbol you can collect on your way out of this room. The next area is also full of plants you can use to get to the top of the other side. At the highest jellyfish-looking plant you'll find the next glowing symbol. Keep going through the opening at the top of the other end and drop down through the broken floor to the next area.

In the following rooms you'll hear ancient machinery and see mysterious snake-like stone statues around. As you make your way down through the first of these rooms, one of the stone guardians will awaken and burst up through the sand to fly off. Continue through the hallway at the end and in the next room, you'll see the guardian again, this time patrolling. It shines a white light on the ground, and when it encounters any living thing, the light will turn red and the guardian will attack, ripping the cloth to shreds. As you continue, avoid the white spotlights by sticking to the sides of the main path. If you can get through to the end without being attacked, you'll earn the Trials trophy. After watching the guardian attack the group of cloth pieces, head back to where you entered the room, and on the wall on one side is a hidden glyph. Get through the next opening and quickly get off to the side when the guardian comes through. In this room a second guardian will be activated and you'll have two to avoid in the next area. Stay to the left and you'll be rewarded with the last glowing symbol behind a pillared wall. Through the next opening is the last area, where you'll see both guardians patrolling the slope. Don't worry about being spotted, just keep sliding down to the end where you'll be protected by a flash of light down where the altar is. Once they're gone, activate the spirit markers and receive your vision to open the doors to the next chapter.

The tower [ edit ]

The tower is a large structure in the center of the area that you'll need to ascend by activating glyphs. Each time you do, it will release glowing water that you can swim in indefinitely and recharge your scarf power. The first glyph is at the back end of the area when you first come in, at ground level. After activating it, swim up to the first platform on the left and you should see the first glowing symbol on a ledge on the tower. Continue taking the platforms up in a circle around the tower to the next glyph and activate it. The next level of water adds some jellyfish plants you can use to get into the center of the tower and cross to the other side. From there you should see the next glyph straight ahead above you, but before you go to it, look to your right to find the next glowing symbol behind a screen down near the water. Depending on your scarf power, you may need to head back into the water and climb back up through the tower again to get to the next glyph.

As another level of water fills the area, if you watch off to the right, you'll see a large cloth whale come out of an opening on the side of the room. Swim over to the opening and through it you'll find a hidden glyph. All around the room with the hidden glyph are alcoves covered by cloths; you'll find another glowing symbol behind the cloths near the entrance. Back out in the main area, the last glowing symbol is inside the tower, then you can ride the cloth whale up to the next glyph you need to activate. Above you will be a series of hanging platforms connected by cloth bridges. Take the bridges around the tower to the last glyph and you'll be able to get to the top of the tower. Before you go up and activate the table, you can swim all the way to the bottom of the tower and inside it you'll find a creature from flOw that you can give a full shout to for the trophy. When you activate the altar at the top of the tower you'll get another vision and can move on to the next chapter.

The snow fields [ edit ]

In the snow you will lose scarf power if you're not touching cloth, unless you've obtained the white robes, and you can't stay aloft for long anyway. Due to this limitation, you'll spend most of your time on the ground rather than flying. Although there are no more glowing symbols from here on out, the last two hidden glyphs are in this chapter. Start out by heading straight ahead until you get to some large metal poles sticking out of the ground. Here the wind will blow you back, so make your way from pole to pole, hiding behind them to block the wind. Eventually you'll reach the mouth of the canyon, which you can proceed through into the next area. Follow the markers up the slope to a path that leads up the cliff to your left. If you go over the edge, you'll end up down below where you started and you'll have to climb back up. Head up the cliffside path to a small room built into the cliff face to find the first hidden glyph. Light up the spirit markers inside and the lantern will glow and cloth pieces will descend. Use the cloths to fly up above where you'll find the hidden glyph in a alcove.

Back outside you can continue along the path and shout at the cloth at the broken bridge to lower it so you can cross. Up the steps and through the opening in the wall takes you to the next area where stone guardians are flying above. Head up the slope and get inside the first cover you come to, which is an empty metal box. Once the guardian's searchlight has passed, you can proceed through the next boxes and up the hill. Instead of continuing on toward the boxes ahead, go uphill to the large pole on the left. Beyond it you'll come to a cave with the last hidden glyph inside. Keep going through the cave and out the other side you'll come to another large pole in the snow. Head to the boxes to the left of it and quickly get inside the first one before the guardian comes. Whenever the searchlight passes over the box you're in, run out to the next one. Continue this tactic all the way to the other side where you'll pass through an opening in the wall.

The flight to the peaks [ edit ]

In this simple chapter, all you have to do is fly up to the top of the mountain you've been journeying toward the whole game. If you run out of scarf power, you'll fall back down into the mist or water below where it will recharge, so don't be afraid to explore. There are cloth creatures along the way and large red gates to guide you along. At the last red gate you'll enter a shaft of light that will take you up to the top of the mountain where you can walk between the dual peaks.

Trophies [ edit ]

PlayStation 3
PlayStation 4
Guides at completion stage 4
Thatgamecompany
Sony Computer Entertainment
Single player
PlayStation 3 trophies

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."

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!

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Symbols are a visual representation of the in-game civilization's language as well as its written form used by the in-game species. They are one of the key elements of the game's art style and design.

1 Alternative Names
2 Basic information
3 Collectible symbols
4 Primary and Secondary alphabets
5 Other alphabets
6 Player symbols
7 Glitches with symbols
8.1 About the symbol "alphabet"
8.2 Development Symbols
8.3 Game Textures
8.4 More trivia
10 See also
11 References

Alternative Names [ ]

Shinies, Shiny Things

Some players refer to symbols as glyphs; such use is discouraged on this Wiki to avoid confusion with Ancient Glyphs (visual elements that reveal parts of the story line, also commonly called "glyphs").

Basic information [ ]

Symbols appear everywhere in the game:

On the chest of the Wayfarer , and in their chirp
Collectible symbols and ancient glyphs to be found during the course of the game
Particles in the air and in the magic goo/mist (Tower and Paradise levels)
Small particles floating around the wayfarer when glowing with a companion or another cloth creature
Glowing on certain tombstones when the wayfarer approaches them
On your Scarf
Written on various pieces of architecture, glowing and otherwise

In some cases, for example on certain gravestones, symbols look worn off and barely recognizable (they still follow the familiar square pattern, but individual symbols cannot be picked out).

Some stones have clean square placeholders but no symbols on them; this is most prominent in the Tower around various shrines. Further details can be found in the Tombstone article.

Collectible symbols [ ]

Little brightly glowing symbols are hidden in various parts of the game. Those can be picked up by touching them or flying by close enough.

They will extend your scarf , therefore granting the ability to fly (first symbol) or extending the flying range.
Symbols with a shiny circle around them mean that you didn't find that symbol in previous journeys.
For every new Journey, you need to pick them up "again" to extend your scarf, if you want a long scarf.
There are guides on how to find all of them for the Trophies .
The locations of each symbol are also described here , and in each level-article (shown on each of the level maps).
Symbols you have collected will light up on a small display beneath the statue at the end of each level, as well as on a larger display in the chapter select area.
While the symbol is being collected, small glowing particles fly from it into the Wayfarer, recharging the scarf. This extends flying ability for a brief period of time (this feature is often exploited by speedrunners).

A collectible symbol in-game

Primary and Secondary alphabets [ ]

There are several alphabets in the game, which can be found on buildings, scarves , cloth creatures , etc.

A subset of the full alphabet, dubbed the "primary" alphabet, is used only for players, graves, and the wardrobe , implying these symbols are names or proper nouns. Whereas the rest of the alphabet is seemingly random, these 21 symbols are designed with a good amount of symmetry, making their nametags easier to identify after the credits .

Symbols used for wayfarers, gravestones, and the collection wall

Symbols used in various environment textures

Symbols used for various particle effects

Symbols used for the various cloth creatures and bridges throughout the game

The unique symbol on the player's scarf

Other alphabets [ ]

In addition to the primary and secondary alphabets, a third alphabet appears on one ancient glyph in the graveyard , as well as a few other murals throughout the game.

This alphabet is completely different from the first two; its symbols are more random and complex and have no defined "quadrants". A similar alphabet appears in glowing runes on the level-end statues , though it is not known whether they are intended to be part of the same alphabet.

This ancient glyph features both the standard alphabet and a different, otherwise unknown alphabet.

This level-end shrine features glowing symbols that are not used anywhere else in the game.

Player symbols [ ]

Your symbol, seen on your chest and when you chirp , will be one of the Primary symbols.

The symbol you see yourself using will not be the same on other players' screens.
During a Journey, a Companion's Symbol normally stays the same, even if you lose each other and meet later again. Though there are exceptions, see Chirp .

Most of the primary symbols have nicknames assigned to them by the community.

These names can be descriptions of their appearance, names of well-known players who used them, or simply inside jokes. Some of these names are listed below.

Some of these symbols, namely "Bucktoothed skull," "Fishing Hooks," and "Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde" are referred to by some as "red robe symbols" due to their simplicity, though any correlation between a player's symbol and robe is likely coincidence.

"Snowflake" or "Schneeflocke"

"Bucktoothed Skull"

"Collector's Item" - named for how it appears to be rare.

"Doppelganger" - named for how it appears twice at the collected symbols area in Chapter Select.

"New York, New York"

"belovedklowny" or "Klowny" - after the player Klowny

"Robot & Elf Feet"

"Scandinavia" or "Broken Symmetry"

"Stealth Fighters" or "Stealth Bombers"

"Morse Code"

"Morse Code 2"

"Monster Eyes"

"Unbroken Symmetry"

"Raised Fist"

"Fishing Hooks"

"Blinky, Pinky, Inky & Clyde" - after the Pac-Man Ghosts

"War Machines" or "Angel Wings"

"Speeding Thrones"

"Horned War Machine"

"The One That Got Away" - named for the fact that it doesn't seem to be in the game, despite being on the official playable symbols list

[1]

Glitches with symbols [ ]

Here is a video showing a glitch with the collectible symbol inside the Whale Room (Tower level):

About the symbol "alphabet" [ ]

The main alphabet in Journey features symbols assembled from 15 basic characters, each 3x3 pixels in size.
That's a whopping 13,845,841 possible symbols, though in practice only about 200 of these are found in the game's files.
If you would like to assemble your own symbols, a list of parts can be found here:

Development Symbols [ ]

Information about the Development of Journey. Once, Ancestors had Symbols on their chest.

Game Textures [ ]

used in gravestones? tower

used in tower history lesson?

snippet of the raw particle textures used in goo, comets?

Wayfarer specific used for chirp and chest

Altered version of the wayfarer symbols for improved visibility

More trivia [ ]

The symbols were first named by Klowny. Including the Klowny symbol.
It was changed after a German player said it would be offensive in certain countries.
Similarly, "Monster Eyes" was originally called "Four Eyes", which could be seen as offensive.
Developers referred to the collectible symbols simply as "Secrets".
While the collectibles displayed in the level select area use the 21 "Primary" symbols, the collectibles in-game simply cycle through random characters.
Going back and picking up this symbol "for real" will appear to give you the symbol, but will not give you any more scarf.
As the wayfarer usually faces away from the camera, this brief moment is not visible to the player, but with a good camera angle it's hard to miss; the symbol is more prominent on a red robe but can observed on a white robe as well.

References [ ]

↑ rebi 2020-04-14 About the "The one that got away-Symbol": In the game files it is Symbol #20, you cant get it normally.
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When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?

Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re “journeys.” The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.

An illustration of the word "journey" done in a three dimensional typeface. The word is repeated and gets smaller in pink and green. At the end of the repetition is a butterfly.

By Lisa Miller

Drew Barrymore has been talking with Gayle King about her perimenopause “journey ,” and the soccer phenom Carli Lloyd has just divulged her fertility “journey .” By sharing her breast cancer story, Olivia Munn has said she hopes she will “help others find comfort, inspiration, and support on their own journey.” A recent interview with Anne Hathaway has been posted on Instagram with a headline highlighting her “ sobriety journey ,” and Kelly Clarkson has opened up about what Women’s Health calls her “ weight loss journey .” On TikTok, a zillion influencer-guides lead pilgrims on journeys through such ephemeral realms as faith, healing, grief, friendship, mastectomy, and therapy — often selling courses, supplements or eating plans as if they were talismans to help safeguard their path.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“Journey” has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing — in the broadest possible way — an individual’s experience of travails over time.

It’s often related to physical or mental health, but it can really be about anything: “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational American English he and colleagues are building, Egbert could show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another, in Massachusetts, said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.”

Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”

But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”

In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”

So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as Americans started seeing good health as a desirable goal, achievable through their own actions and choices — and marketers encouraged these pursuits and commodified them — the words “journey” and “health” became inextricably linked. In 1898, C.W. Post wrote a pamphlet he called “The Road to Wellville,” which he attached to each box of his new product, Grape-Nuts. In 1926, the Postum Cereal Company republished the pamphlet as a small book , now with the subtitle, “A Personally Conducted Journey to the Land of Good Health by the Route of Right Living.”

The language (and business) of self-help so completely saturates culture, “it gets kind of hard to trace where a word started and where it came from,” said Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of “Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture.” Americans like to put an optimistic, brave spin on suffering, and “journey” seeped in because, Lamb-Shapiro speculated, it’s bland enough to “tackle really difficult things,” yet positive enough to “make them palatable and tolerable.”

“Journey” had fully entered medical speak by the 2010s. Many cancer patients recoiled from the “battle” language traditionally used by doctors, as well as by friends and relatives. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag had noted back in 1978 that “every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology.” But now, opposition to the notion of disease as an enemy combatant reached a crescendo. To reflexively call an experience of cancer a battle created “winners” and “losers,” where death or long suffering represented a failure — of will, strength, determination, diet, behavior, or outlook — on the part of the patient.

Many patients “detest” the military metaphor, Robert Miller conceded in Oncology Times in 2010. Knowing this, Miller, then a breast cancer oncologist affiliated with Johns Hopkins, said he struggled to find the right words in composing a condolence note to a patient’s spouse. “I welcome suggestions,” he wrote.

“Journey” seemed less judgmental, more neutral. In Britain, the National Health Service had started to almost exclusively use “journey” language in reference to cancer (treatments were “pathways”). Semino, the metaphor expert whose father had died of cancer at a time when patients’ diagnoses were hidden from them, wanted to examine how patients talked about it — and whether that language caused them harm. In a research paper Semino published with colleagues in 2015, she looked at how patients talked about their cancer on forums online and found that they still used “battle” as often as they did “journey,” and that “journey” could be disempowering, as well.

For some people, talking about cancer as a “journey” gave them a sense of control and camaraderie — buddies traveling the same path — but others used the term to convey their exhaustion. Having cancer “is like trying to drive a coach and horses uphill with no back wheels on the coach,” one man wrote. Patients used “journey” to describe just how passive they felt or how reluctant to bear the burden of their disease. Separately, patients have told Semino how much they hate the word “journey,” saying it trivializes their experience, that it’s clichéd.

But it was too late: The metaphor already was everywhere. In 2014, Anna Wintour was asked which word she would like to banish from the fashion lexicon and she said, “journey.” The following year, Yolanda Foster, the mother of Gigi and Bella Hadid, told People magazine that while she was on her Lyme disease journey, two of her children were afflicted, too. Medical journals and government publications began describing insomnia , the effort to achieve health-care reform , diabetes , and the development of RSV vaccines as a journey. The term “healing journey,” in use since at least the mid-2010s, blew up around 2021. The phrase in news media referenced the experience of cancer , celebrity weight loss , trafficking of Indigenous children , Sean Combs’s creative process , spa vacations , amputation , and better sex .

On the Reddit channel Chronic Illness, one poster eloquently fumed that persistent sickness is not a journey. “It’s endless, pointless and repetitive. There’s no new ground to gain here.” The cultural insistence on illness as a journey, from which a traveler can learn useful, or even life-changing lessons, becomes something to “disassociate from, survive, endure.” It “causes social isolation.”

Although she concedes its downsides, Stephanie Swanson likes to think of herself as on a journey. Swanson, who is 37 and lives in Kansas City, was an engineer by training, with three young children, a career and a sideline as an aerialist, when she got long Covid in the summer of 2022. The things that had made her successful — her physical stamina, her ability to solve problems — evaporated. “I’ve had to give up my career, my hobbies, my physical abilities,” she said. “I’ve gained 30 pounds on my tiny dancer body. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

Swanson makes a distinction between “journey” and “trip”: The latter is circumscribed by a start, an end, and hotel and restaurant reservations along the way. She sees “journey” as a way to capture the arc of a whole life.

When she was running operations at a medical center at the University of Kansas, she always imagined slowing down to enjoy her kids more or to read a book, but “I felt like my head was going to explode.” Now Swanson has become a person who must rent a wheelchair for her upcoming trip to New York City, and she likes how “journey” accommodates all the challenging, unexpected circumstances she confronts. “To me, the word ‘journey’ resonates with choosing to be on a path of acceptance but not standing still,” she said. “I’m not giving up, but recognizing that this is the path I’m on.”

Ramani Durvasula uses “journey” advisedly. A clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who treats women in emotionally abusive relationships, she recognizes how “journey” has been “eye-rollingly cheapened” and has started to experiment with alternatives. She’s tried “process.” She’s tried “healing trajectory.” But she falls back on journey, because it, more than any other word, expresses the step-by-step, sometimes circular or backward nature of enduring something hard. “Arguably, a journey doesn’t have a destination,” she said. “Have you ever taken a hike in a loop? And you end up exactly where you parked your car?”

But Durvasula does object to the easy-breezy healing so many journey hashtags promote, what she calls the “post-sobriety, post-weight-loss, now-I’m-in-love-again-after-my-toxic-relationship” reels. Too many TikToks show the crying in the car then the cute party dress, skipping over the middle, when people feel ugly, angry, self-loathing, and hopeless. “I want to see the hell,” she said. “I want to see the nightmare.”

When in 2020 a Swedish linguist named Charlotte Hommerberg studied how advanced cancer patients describe their experience, she found they used “battle” and “journey,” like everyone else. But most also used a third metaphor that conveyed not progress, fight or hope. They said cancer was like “imprisonment,” a feeling of being stuck — like a “free bird in a cage,” one person wrote. Powerless and going nowhere.

Read by Lisa Miller

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

1 undrafted free agent who will make Buccaneers’ 2024 roster

J ust because a player did not get drafted does not mean that their football journey stops there. Every team finds undrafted gems out of nowhere that not only make the team but make an impact. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are no exception . A year ago, undrafted free agent Christian Izien started four games for Tampa and played in all 17. He alternated between playing safety and slot corner and helped the Bucs win the NFC South. Kentucky running back Ramon Jefferson is a candidate to follow in Izien’s shoes and make an impact on the team as an undrafted free agent in 2024 .

1 undrafted free agent who will make Buccaneers’ roster

Ramon Jefferson can wind up making the Bucs’ roster for a few reasons. For one, he proved during his interesting college career that he can play. He began at the University of Maine where he rattled off 1,037 yards and eight touchdowns as a freshman. Jefferson then transferred to Sam Houston State where he played for two seasons. In that span, he posted 1,907 yards and 20 touchdowns while averaging 6.4 yards per carry.

Jefferson dominated the FCS level, so he wanted to prove himself at a higher level. Jefferson went on to transfer yet again to the University of Kentucky in 2022. Unfortunately for him, he never quite to showcase his skillset in Lexington. Jefferson tore his ACL in his Kentucky debut in 2022 against Miami Ohio after carrying the ball only two times.

The Wildcats eased him back into action in 2023, especially after acquiring former Temple and Vanderbilt running back Ray Davis out of the transfer portal. Jefferson wound up toting the ball only 28 times last season, but did good work with the limited carries he got. He turned those opportunities into 184 yards and a 6.6 yards per carry. Jefferson averaged 6.14 yards per carry for his entire college career. That’s solid.

The Kentucky connection

Jefferson didn’t hear his name called during the 2024 NFL Draft, but he did get a minicamp tryout with the Bucs. He made a strong impression because he turned that into an NFL contract. Tampa wanting him around makes sense because he has familiarity with their coaching staff.

Liam Coen was hired as the Bucs’ offensive coordinator this offseason after Dave Canales left that post to become the head coach of the Carolina Panthers. Where was Coen before becoming Tampa’s offensive coordinator? That’s right: the University of Kentucky.

Coen knows Jefferson quite well and vice versa. Why wouldn’t the Bucs want someone in their building who already knows the playbook that Coen wants to install? It just makes a lot of sense and gives Jefferson a leg up on his competition for one of the final roster spots at the position.

Jefferson is not going to supplant Rachaad White as the starting running back for Tampa Bay. White’s yards per carry average from a year ago (3.6) doesn’t put to justice how good he was for them last season. However, it wouldn’t be crazy for Jefferson to work his way into being the number two back. Tampa did draft Oregon’s tackle-breaking machine Bucky Irving in the fourth round, but Jefferson graded out as a better athlete than Irving during the pre-draft process.

After Irving, the Bucs’ depth chart at running back consists of Chase Edmonds and Sean Tucker. Edmonds also averaged 3.6 yards per carry last season, but was nowhere near the receiving threat out of the backfield that White was. White averaged 8.58 yards per reception, while Edmonds was down at 5.76. Tucker was even worse in both categories.

It is hardly an arduous path for Jefferson to make this roster. His familiarity with Coen’s offense can only help him. He’s someone to keep an eye on in training camp and preseason.

The post 1 undrafted free agent who will make Buccaneers’ 2024 roster appeared first on ClutchPoints .

A warrior flanked by allies and surrounded by hordes of monsters holds up a massive hammer in artwork for Diablo 4 Season 4 Loot Reborn

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Diablo 4 is finally great

It’s immediately apparent how much better the game is in season 4, Loot Reborn

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When a live-service game undergoes a massive systems overhaul, it’s often characterized as a reversal, a change of course, even a mea culpa — particularly if the game had been headed in a direction the community didn’t like. But a truly successful update of this type is one that enables a game to be more fully itself; to unlock something beautiful that was always present at its core, just tough to get to.

That’s what Blizzard did in 2014 with the “Loot 2.0” update for Diablo 3 , which rescued a game that had been floundering since a launch beset by technical issues, an unpopular in-game auction house, and a perceived softening of the tone of this fantasy horror series. But Loot 2.0 didn’t make Diablo 3 more like the fan favorite Diablo 2 . It made it more like itself — flamboyant, frenetic, and surreal in its randomization — while extravagantly upping the rewards for playing, and liberating the superb combat design that had always been nestled at the game’s heart.

With the season 4 update for Diablo 4 — called Loot Reborn, surely a nod to that celebrated Loot 2.0 patch — Blizzard has done it again. I wanted the patch to make the game more like Diablo 3 , because I’m a Diablo 3 fan, but it hasn’t. It’s done something better, unearthing an all-new item game within Diablo 4 that has its own unique flavor. After just a few hours’ play, it’s clear how much more fun the game is now.

A big worm demon thing erupts from the ground in Diablo 4.

Season 4 has also done more than revolutionize the way loot works to make it more rewarding and less of a head-scratching nightmare of admin. It’s brought Helltides, previously a late-game activity, right into the core of the game from the start. These massively multiplayer-style live events, which draw players to areas of the map that are being assaulted by demon armies for an hour at a time, have been redesigned to make them much more intense and engaging. Now, Helltides promote an aspect of Diablo 4 that has a distinct feel from its predecessors, with players pouring in from across the map to take on big bosses out in the open, rather than delving individually into dungeons.

Unlike in previous Diablo 4 seasons, you don’t need to start a new character to enjoy Loot Reborn. Most of the changes and new content in this patch are permanent, and can be found on the Eternal Realm (where characters live forever and share progress) as well as the Seasonal Realm (where you need to start from scratch in most, but not quite all, things). So you can jump in with any of your previous characters.

That said, I actually recommend rolling a new character (seasonal or otherwise) to make the most of the patch. I had a great time leveling a new Rogue, but when I switched to a higher-level character (in the mid-40s) that I played back at the game’s launch, I could immediately tell that she wasn’t balanced correctly for the way the game works now. All her equipment was marked as “legacy” items, and she felt puny and fragile, particularly lacking the healing bonuses that are a focus of the new itemization design. It probably wouldn’t take too long to kit her out properly with post-patch loot, but it felt like it might be a bit of a slog to get there.

some Iron Wolves mercenaries stand around in a pleasant tropical camp in Diablo 4

The better news is that the improvements to Diablo 4 are immediately apparent from level 1. There are new endgame systems here, like the Masterworking crafting system, which ties into a new endgame dungeon type, the Pit of Artificers. And the streamlining and liberating effects of the new loot system will probably be best appreciated by players who penetrate deep into Diablo 4 ’s meta. But they can be easily sensed almost as soon as you start playing.

The first thing you notice is that loot is exciting again. Slightly fewer items drop, and they have more potent affixes that are easier to understand. There are fewer arcane, situational damage bonuses, and more clearly legible boosts to your character’s power and survivability. You can more readily feel the effect of an item when you equip it, and it’s easier to understand how it fits into your character build (or doesn’t). So far, so Diablo 3 .

Where Loot Reborn departs from that template is in a new crafting system, Tempering, which allows you to collect recipes for powerful affixes and then use them to enhance your loot. This replaces the old item upgrade system with a much more bespoke form of customization that’s less of a resource grind, and that gives you a creative way to tailor your equipment to your build. A potentially even bigger deal than Tempering is the revamped Codex of Power, which now collects the build-defining Aspects from Legendary weapons when you salvage them, and automatically stores only the best roll of each Aspect, which can then be applied to other items indefinitely. It’s a hugely powerful resource that’s far simpler to use, and it finally realizes the developers’ dream of a database of powerful skills that grows with the player, and constantly expands the horizons of the character builds they create.

A lengthy item description of a powerful Legendary in Diablo 4

So, yes, the loot is simpler and better. But Tempering and the Codex of Power, between them, define Diablo 4 as a crafting game that gives the player an ever-growing, flexible set of tools to dial in a character build. Crucially, those tools are now easy and fun to use, fed by and feeding into a steady stream of interesting loot.

Diablo 4 can still be a fussy game. Players returning after a long absence might be overwhelmed by a map crowded with icons and the seemingly infinite number of currencies, resources, and progress bars. But the developers have rightly identified their revamped Helltides as something that can cut through all this noise. The loop is simple but deeply satisfying: Slaughter demons to collect Aberrant Cinders to trade in for Tortured Gifts (i.e., good loot). The longer you keep your run going, the higher your Threat builds and the hairier things get; die, and your Threat resets, but you also lose a bunch of Cinders. The steady escalation of the stakes is really effective, as is the way these events draw players together for a common cause, giving the game a lively, MMO-esque feel.

I’m only a few hours and 21 levels into Loot Reborn (if anything, leveling is a little too fast at the moment), but it has absolutely reignited my desire to delve into a game that only briefly grabbed me at launch. What’s really surprised me is how much more personality Diablo 4 has now. It feels like a game that has stepped out of the shadow of its illustrious predecessors and its makers’ live-service ambitions, and made a case for its own way of doing things. That’s a thrilling result.

Diablo 4 season 4, Loot Reborn, was released May 14 on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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Journey, From The Creators Of flOw and Flower, Explained

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

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The 2004 Video Game Draft

Don’t miss a thing

A beginning shrouded in mystery

The art of Journey’s game design

Companions on a shared path

An unforgettable emotional tale

Lovingly Related Records

Deciphering the Journey

Journey as Philosophy: Meaning, Connection, and the Sublime

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10 Years On: 8 Things You Didn't Know About Journey

8 It Was Created By No More Than 18 People

7 The Traveller Actually Dies During The Finale

6 The Game Had A Very Strained Development Cycle

5 One Playtester Experienced A Much Sadder Ending

4 The Game Had Two Prototypes

3 It's Designed To Feel As Universal As Possible

2 The Hardcover Artbook Can Be Viewed In AR

1 The Soundtrack's Release Was Purposefully Delayed By A Few Weeks

Journey (PS4) Review

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Getting started [ edit ]

Introduction [ edit ]

The broken bridge [ edit ]

The pink desert [ edit ]

The sunken city [ edit ]

The underground passage [ edit ]

The tower [ edit ]

The snow fields [ edit ]

The flight to the peaks [ edit ]

Trophies [ edit ]

Navigation menu

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

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Alternative Names [ ]

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