{"id":4600,"date":"2014-07-05T18:55:51","date_gmt":"2014-07-06T00:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=4600"},"modified":"2015-02-25T23:06:06","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T05:06:06","slug":"journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=4600","title":{"rendered":"Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"journey-game-screenshot-1-b\"<\/a>I am returned, triumphant, from my long sojourn of, er, not writing the last two reviews I have owed. And if that doesn’t really sound like all that much of a Journey<\/a>, it’s because I’m trying to create a parallel with my unfortunate experience playing a short indie game of the same name.<\/p>\n

As you can see, last weekend was heavy with the light & easy games set, which… it did not convince me that small games that last a couple of hours is the way to go, but it certainly highlighted how much easier<\/em> they are. I mean, yes to play, because you can’t write\u00a0a particularly\u00a0hard game that will only last 90 minutes, but especially I mean easy to find time for the playing of. Which is important! I can say anything I want about how much more I enjoy Dragon Age, but if I keep not turning on the XBox to play it, that claim rings pretty hollowly.<\/p>\n

The irony is that Journey would otherwise be the perfect game to draw\u00a0that comparison with. See, I finished it in about 20 minutes. You start out as a Jawa-looking dude[1] in the desert, climbing up a hill. Eventually, you see in the distance what look like places to go, and then you go to them, because you’ve ever played a videogame before. After doing some things in the desert which may or may not have any particular long-term relevance or unlock insightful cutscenes, you go through a portal to a snowy mountainscape. Or at least I did. After some additional snow-doings that may also<\/em> have some kind of relevance or unlock some other set of cutscenes, a finale occurs. I can only speculate about all these things[2] because what happened to me<\/em> was as follows: I collected a couple of glowing things in the desert, tried to take them back to a platform that looked like it might have been missing some glowing things but instead accidentally fell through a portal onto the mountain (was there a way back? I’m told yes, but it didn’t look like it) where I climbed for a while, turned right, dodged a (let’s say) dragon, climbed some more (briefly the climbing involved a Shaolin temple), and then after some brief spoilers[3], the game ended.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure I did something wrong? You would think, in a game whose title explicitly alludes to the destination not mattering, it would not be so easy to perform a speed run, much less without intending\u00a0to. Oh well. Perhaps I’ll play it again someday, when the memories have faded.<\/p>\n

[1] Or possibly lady! If you’ve seen a Jawa before, you know I’m impressing my own opinion without any particular evidence.
\n[2] Well, not only<\/em> speculate. I have hints from my incredulous host to go by\u00a0as well.
\n[3] I’m taking it on faith that there were spoilers to be had. It was, from my perspective, merely an inexplicable happenstance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am returned, triumphant, from my long sojourn of, er, not writing the last two reviews I have owed. And if that doesn’t really sound like all that much of a Journey, it’s because I’m trying to create a parallel with my unfortunate experience playing a short indie game of the same name. As you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[436,1283,1284],"class_list":["post-4600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-adventure","tag-ps4","tag-third-person"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4697,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600\/revisions\/4697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}