The Journey

What’s gone isn’t gone but radiates your negative space. The last little enclosure you’ve fortressed, the “scream” where “the silence and darkness vanish”, haunts the stranded your uninhabitable.

Our metaphor, then, a space station held at arms’ length from unreachable life, transcribes complex emotions with the swift immediacy of shorthand. The writing’s percussive simplicity carries the pulse to steady rhythm. “In this voyage through horizonless landscapes, / I reach out toward memories” imposes the central conundrum, you cannot escape what you cannot leave behind, in an efficiency which elicits the engineer’s expression of elegance. Tight designs demand minimum torque at each joint, a soft touch that trusts each piano echoes the awaiting of the room. The game achieves this simplicity at several points, softfocusing stars to snowflakes to scintillate the composing metaphor, spacestation to the hollows in the home, with a few fleet delights like a child’s wonder of astroneering clashing against the father’s architectural supersedence furnishing just enough justification to satisfy the sole puzzle.

Unfortunately, acceleration towards a climax tempts our author towards explanations. Initially, this merely flattens the affect, with the old man explaining everything we’ve intuited since scene one in prose that struggles to add anything by adding anything. Sadly, this frustration accelerates alike to the climax, with the grand revelation annihilating the accumulated artistry: “It’s a photo of a child — not me — with my father and a woman I don’t recognize. The child, whose features resemble those of the old man from the ship, is wearing a birthday hat. On the photo, there’s a date: February 12th, the second part of my father’s password. If the child is the old man, he ate this corpse and hid it in his secret room.” The first sentence hits the gas, and for a moment everything holds together, but the swerving of the second and third sentence, haphazardly hazarding what we could very well guess, crashes in the ridiculous fourth sentence to a fireball from which we may only hope to Romain Grosjean.

Like its spacestation, the purpose of The journey is to be suspended gracefully in negative space. We should resolve its central conundrum through affirmation of the tensions: “I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function.” The empty spaces have a function, Dad, not least that they must contain you.

For good or ill, we as a society appear to have move past the era of the mash-up – instead of “it’s X meets Y!” we now have “it’s X, but rebooted!” – but it’s still enough of my cultural DNA that I thought I had The journey (sic?) pegged within the first couple of moves. The game starts with you waking up from cryogenic suspension on a colony ship that’s been orbiting the earth, waiting for enough time to pass from an environmental catastrophe for the planet to become habitable again. Except the earth isn’t quite habitable yet, because you’ve been woken up early, apparently by a strange old man who ducks out of the room as soon as you come to. So yeah, that’s WALL-E meets that Passengers movie from a couple good lord, almost ten years ago, minus the romantic tension (I mean from the latter, though the WALL-E / EVE relationship is pretty cute). But little did I know how far off I was, because even though the game as a whole is only ten minutes, man does it go some places.

I’m going to pause for a minute to talk about the custom parser system that powers the game, before things go completely barmy. It’s fine! This is a web-native game that looks slicker than the average parser interpreter; there’s a starry background that helps set the stage, and functional windows that don’t draw too much attention to themselves but neatly separate output from input. The parser makes for a smooth experience, though the game is simple enough that there’s not really room for it to get itself in any trouble – the design is so minimal that there are no takeable objects, containers, items with duplicate names giving rise to disambiguation problems, characters with whom you can have a conversation… But I’d rather have something stripped-down that works than something fussily over-engineered and fragile.

The gameplay likewise accords with KISS principles. There’s one and a half puzzle – the half involves examining an obvious bit of scenery to find a password that you can type into a computer through the simple expedient of TYPE PASSWORD rather than having to actually memorize the digits. Then the main puzzle just involves following the instructions you find on the unlocked computer. It’s likewise fine! There’s also an interactive flashback, and it took me maybe thirty seconds to figure out how to move into this scene and then back into the main timeline, but that’s about it in terms of stuff for the player to do.

That just leaves the writing – the plot and the prose. The second of these, you will be shocked to learn, is also workmanlike. All the descriptions are very matter-of-fact, even those in the flashback where some emotionally intense stuff is happening. With that said, there few times when the laconic style is effective, like this bit from the flashback:

"It’s my drawing of a spaceship with different parts. Mom likes it, but Dad doesn’t. He really yelled at me. I had left empty spaces, and he says that every place in a spaceship must have a function."

The story is what bucks the trend. See, the flashback leads to two rapid-fire revelations about the present-day situation: not only did the old man wake you up for reasons more sinister than simple loneliness, he also has an unsuspected connection with the player character. And then something happens with the ship to bring the entire narrative to a climax. Each of these three things are entirely unrelated to the others, as far as I can tell, which feels like at least one coincidence too far, even leaving aside the lurid details behind that overview, which are really tipped me over into being completely nonplussed by the ending (Spoiler - click to show)(I feel like you could say “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers!” at a pitch meeting and get at least a few heads nodding; “it’s WALL-E meets Passengers meets survival cannibalism!” is going to get you escorted out by security). Sometimes, more is more – bouillabaisse, say, or family reunions – but journey is way too short to comfortably support all the ideas it’s bringing to the table. Not everything need to be straight reboot of something we’ve all seen a hundred times before, but there’s still something to be said for restraint and allowing the ingredients you’ve got time to blend.