There are no gaudy explosions, no zippy one-liners, no grandiose set-pieces. And it’s all over in around two hours. But Journey is one of the longest games we’ve played in quite a while. And t🍎hat’s a rare compliment.

Journey is long because it’s long-lasting. It’s a g𝄹am🍬e that we will remember for years to come – one whose themes and imagery have already embedded themselves deep in our psyche. We remember, more than anything, how we felt after completing each chapter, and we recall (with fondness, melancholy and joy) our sense of accomplishment at finishing this singular quest.

In short, Journey succeeds because it takes so many of the conventions of contemporary games and turns them on th﷽eir heads.

Journey’s story is deceptively simple:𝄹 It’s told with no dialogue (though we began to analyze its many symbols after we completed it). We begin as a robed humanoid creature in the middle of a rolling desert. Almost immediately 🐲we saw our objective: a shining beacon of light atop a mountain.

Thatgamecompany, Journey’s developer, is now we💟ll-known for producing titles that encourage a sense of awe and bliss through self-guided discovery. And just like Flow and Flower before it, Journey put us in the midst of wilderness and gave us just enough tools to poke and prod around it until we slowly formed an idea of how to navigate. We have a button that functions as a beacon. It takes little time to understand how useful the beacon is to unlocking the other crucial ability, that of jumping. These simple features beget even larger ones as we continued playing, since players can jump and glide only for a limited time.

By the time we navigated through Journey’s initial sections, we felt just familiar enough with its controls to play alongside another wanderer. And that’s when it happened to us: another wanderer (just one) appeared in the distance. The game’s approach to co-op gameplay is utterly unique. When another player appears – seemingly at random, and at different points in any playthrough – all we have to work with is the limited vocabulary of the game. We had no idea who that person is until we completed our Journey – there is no PSN ID indicator, nor any voice chat. Our only communication is via the beacon, or by jumping around, or however else we choose to try to reach out to our fellow wanderer. And if we choose, we can simply ignore each other and wander off in different directions. The best part: it’s a💫lmost impossible to grief your partner, because the game is designed so that the limited resources can’t be hogဣged or stolen from each other.