I often say that complexity doesn't equate high quality, and Journey stands as a testament to that.

When I first started playing, traversing big open spaces that seem to extend endlessly into the horizon, I thought to myself: "I wish Sonic games had progressed in this direction." Journey is a distillation of everything a movement-based platformer should be. Just subtle, elegant visual hints at the destination, but the player is the agent of progress. The world moves with you, adapts to you and creates a symbiosis with you. All very organically, through simple mechanics.

Then, as I was sliding down numerous dunes, through ruins of a dead civilization, with creatures floating around me, diving into the sand and emerging out of it, I saw echoes of Panzer Dragoon. It's funny, but Panzer Dragoon is probably the first game I can remember that actually made me feel like I was on a journey. All these years later, Journey seems almost as an homage and a modernist reexamination of that experience. One of the things I remember most strongly about Panzer Dragoon is the horizon. The feeling that the ocean extends endlessly, and this game literally starts with focusing your attention on the horizon, yet this time there's a visible sign of destination there.

The reexamination angle seems validated by how this escapist fantasy and the ecstatic sense of movement is roughly broken up by a stealth section where parts of the world around you come to life as the kind of serpentine skeletal watchdogs of enormous size, making you for the first time feel small and insignificant and fear for your life. The theme of death comes into focus. Dead civilizations, gravestones, pieces of cloth scattered around, the same kind of cloth you're wearing - all these signs suddenly start converging into a narrative.

To pat myself on the back, the next section seems to be directly inspired by a level from Sonic Adventure. You raise the water level and ride a snake that's circling around. My comparison to Sonic games feels justified.

It's hard to talk about the last level of the game and its ending without spoiling the main twist (although I've kinda hinted at it already). I will say that it's very uncomfortable and hard, but it feels purposeful. As a Gnostic, I find a strong Gnostic message in the ending.

I think Journey is an absolute masterpiece of game design, art-direction and music. I think it's one of those games that shows the potential of video games as an art form and could only exist as a game. Brilliant minimalist narrative revealed to the player through interaction, the one aspect every other art form lacks. Also, as a love-letter to the very concept of journey/adventure as it exists in collective subconscious as an escapist desire and manifests in video games as the only medium to bridge the gap between the subconscious and the physical, tangible reality.