The simplicity of Journey
Journey is unarguably the most remarkable game released in 2012 and its impact on the video game industry is still present these days. It is very impressive for Jenova Chen to move away from the typical defeat/kill/win mentality of most video games and instead focus on creating an emotional connection between players which is what I would like to achieve in my career as a game designer as well. I believe a good game design must be able to carry on emotions and thoughts to the player.
One big reason for Journey to successfully deliver emotional connection is the simplicity of the gameplay. After finalizing their gameplay with several prototypes, they then developed a concept trailer trying to determine the visual tone of Journey. The trailer shows off the landscape which ends up becoming the starting point of the game. As Chen said he once interviewed an astronaut about how the moon makes people different. The astronaut told him that it was because there was nothing on the moon, no air, no water, and no sound. The loneliness came into your heart from nowhere and you would understand why Earth is such a great planet. (https://gamerboom.com/archives/81509) In this case, a lorn desert landscape is a brilliant idea of eliminating all the unnecessary distractions which brings the player's attention to the character itself. Once the player feels how small and lonely they are in this game world, they would feel more graceful when they find another player. Even though players couldn’t communicate with each other, the simple actions and sound they made in the game caused a bigger emotional impact than any words and language.
Chen said, “Visual is the gameplay”. Visual has a huge impact on player experience, in this case, will impact gameplay. The stylized and simple toon-style environment surely worked well with the core idea of Journey, but it brought challenges too. For example, the continuous similar terrain without any reference substance could easily bore players, like Chen said “There was a long time that everyone in the studio felt Journey is such a boring game”. However, Journey overcomes it by adding continuous sand dunes, sun shadows, and reflections. With the shadow and reflection from the sand dune, the player would be able to tell how further they had gone. Climbing up and one sand dune and surfing down from the other side created feedback along with time, which made the walking more interesting than ever. The player will expect to see more on the other side of the hill and would be self-driven to climb up. This is a fascinating fact that there is no intentional gameplay design, just pure feedback from the visual aspect.
There are a lot of aspects of why Journey became such a successful game, but one of the most important things is that the visual is the gameplay in Journey, not a servant for the gameplay in many other games. Visual means more than decorating the game world and making the game “look cooler”, visual is a part of gameplay that a game designer needs to consider in the gameplay as well.
