Not long ago, when I got a PlayStation 3, the recommendations started rolling in: play this, play that, play my favorite game.
But a bunch of people said, with a sort of excited urgency — particularly people who know me — "Play Journey."
Journey is a PS3 exclusive from a game company called, yes, Thatgamecompany. It's won a bunch of awards from a bunch of different places — its music was even nominated for a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, where it competed with the scores of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Adventures Of Tintin, The Artist, The Dark Knight Rises, and Hugo.
Here's how the company describes it: "Journey is an interactive parable, an anonymous online adventure to experience a person's life passage and their intersections with others." As beautiful as the game is, that is not a description that excels in the area of specificity.
The basics are these: You appear on the screen in the form of a hooded and caped figure (I'd be lying if I denied that there was something nice about appearing in the form of what looked to me like a woman), alone in the desert. There's a mountain in the distance. That's where you're going. If you follow your nose, you wind up with a scarf that flaps behind you that can be charged up to give you flight.
And you just start traveling. Those dunes, those dunes ... you can walk on the sand, but when you're going downhill, you slide like a skier, leaving a little trail, making a ffffffft noise with your feet, flapping your cape. You skim the ground, you float, you leap. You trudge up a dune and peek over, then push past and slide again, steering between rock formations, ffffffffft, ffffffft, for long stretches. It is as close to understanding what being physically graceful would feel like as a not-so-graceful person is likely to get. (I ... well, I hypothesize.)
You look tiny sometimes. You feel tiny.
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