The Sands of Time: Journey is Ten Years Old

The journey in Journey begins and ends with sand. This is a good strategy, if you want to bind your game to the passage of time. Think of the hero in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, who had the ability to cross the dunes of chronology in reverse, upending the hourglass and making good his mistakes. Or of Nathan Drake, who, in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, found himself plane-wrecked in a desert, on the trail of T.E. Lawrence, as though the past were something that glimmered and shimmered like an oasis. No such maroonings or reversals await the lonely figure at the heart of Journey, who, like Drake, is also after a lost civilisation, but whose adventure is free of words and sparse of mechanics. It is engulfingly epic but runs for the length of a brisk movie. It came out ten years ago, but it could just as easily be released this afternoon. It is, in short, timeless.

Indeed, the best way to ring in this tin anniversary is simply by firing the game up and committing only to ten minutes of play. That way, when you find yourself, an hour and a half later, deposited softly back onto the banks of reality, you are more richly equipped to survey its powers of transportation. That is exactly what I did last night. Hearing that Journey was ten years old, I downloaded it, hoping merely to dip a toe, but something in the sand refused so quick a visit, and I sank helplessly under its thrall.

The developer is Thatgamecompany, whose previous works were Flow and Flower. The former is set in a primordial pool, as you assume the role of a serpentine creature that glows like X-rayed bones. The latter begins in a meadow that recalls the wallpaper for Windows XP and has you playing as the wind—a crucial cog in nature’s operating system—whose job it is to flurry petals hither and thither in the name of pollination. Both games are directed by Jenova Chen, and in both you catch a developer homing in on his enduring motifs: life, untethered to the baggage of its corporeal trappings; movement, the fundamental act from which the medium stems; and, of course, decline, without which no story can hope to bloom. You could hardly accuse Chen of shirking the big issues, perhaps to a fault; Journey may mark the culmination of his themes, but I can’t help wishing that it was itself marked by something more tangible than metaphor.

Whenever I play Journey, I come away with the conviction that I’ve been moved by something expressly designed for that purpose; all those murals we find, adorning the walls of doom-racked temples, tell of cataclysm and fall, but they don’t bear the scratches of anything specific or personal. The game never leaves me with anything close to tears, as does something like Ico—which shares with Journey a penchant for monolithic architecture, and for small people who are harried by the furies of an unjust world, and swept into the indifferent tides of fate. 

Why should this be the case? “I think that the most important thing to move people’s hearts is to make them feel that the world really exists.” Such are the words of Fumito Ueda, the creator of Ico, who shared a long conversation with Chen on the subject of each other’s games. At the end of Ueada’s masterwork, the castle through which you had hastened, curtained in mist, begins to crumble. Chen, moved by the moment, probed the source of its potency: “I don’t think that just ‘collapse’ has the power to make people cry, so I think there is something that touches my heart other than just collapse.” Could it be that what so touches Chen—and me—is a world that feels touchable? My memories of Ico are tuned to the clomp and slap of its hero’s sandals, and washed in the white noise of its gusts and breaking waves. Journey, for all its emotional texture, could do with some of the physical variety.

In fairness, we do get sand. And not just the sort that blazes, like molten gold, under a late sun; we also get the surreal kind, prawn-pink and chalked by hazy light, and, weirder still, the type that doubles as a seabed, paling and bluing until we scarcely question the creatures that brood in the air above us. The game’s art director is Matt Nava, and it’s not surprising that Nava went on to found Giant Squid Studio and to make Abzû, which, set in the corridors of the ocean, made inundation feel weightless. (That your character’s jump, in Journey, should feel as marine as it does—your descent slow and billowing, as if tugged by lazy currents—is a pleasing irony.) No wonder that the protagonist of Journey, despite being impassively shrouded in cloth, should seem tinged with desperation; you can sense Nava itching to break free of dry land, and even Chen, who had a hand in the game’s art, admitted to Ueda that he was stranded. “Originally I wanted to create beautiful scenery such as mountains and forests, but there were only two design artists, so I didn’t have time to draw trees and ended up in a desert.”

Ueda, who has a more exalted relationship with constraint than any other maker of games, graciously pointed out that Chen’s shortage of hours had “produced something like a sharpened ‘functional beauty.’” You will find no finer elucidation of Journey—more alive to its faults, as well as its formal finesse—than that. Its beauty is functional and sharp, but it honours a world that has dulled and broken beyond all function. So, why does the game exert, even now, such a pull? Why, when I have always found something smooth and synthetic in its ruins, is it still so difficult to rip myself away before the thing is done?

In part, this is down to the score, which was composed by Austin Wintory. For my money, it isn’t Wintory’s best work (that would be Abzû, for which, following the flow of Nava’s visuals, he conjured strings that lapped and crashed in awe of their subject), but it spirits you along, fighting shy of insistence. It has to do, as well, with the game’s length. It is meant for a single sitting, and you feel churlish stopping to put the kettle on. In fact, Chen barely equips us with a pause menu. I played the PlayStation 4 version, and the button one would normally associate with pausing makes the protagonist adopt a cross-legged pose, as if in peaceful protest at your will to halt. A jab of the touchpad, meanwhile, turns the game into a screensaver, as the camera describes a thoughtful curve through your surroundings. There is also the small matter of its mythic status. Journey deals with affairs of biblical heft: deserts, mountains, lights in the sky, death, redemption. You sense in its design the ironing-out of complication; it makes an effort to be effortless. “When I’m making it, the most conscious thing is the feeling, ‘Please don’t forget this work.’” So said Ueda, of his creative toils, and even if Chen’s game has that same urging writ a little too consciously across its landscape, ten years has done little to blunt its functional beauty.