Journey Critic Reviews

It's one of the few games you'll genuinely reflect on after completion, and an object lesson in how less can be more when it comes to crafting narrative and eliciting investment. This is a game about which I would change nothing, and I can't remember having said that too many times before.

The fact that Journey has so effectively condensed the experience into a two-hour interactive poem is an astonishing achievement. It is the evolution of Jason Rohrer's art game Passage, bringing an unmatched humanity to the experience through its multiplayer.

Experiences like Journey don't come around very often in any form of media. thatgamecompany's crafted an interactive tour de force that's triumphant in its ability to cycle through human emotions. It's a game that demands your involvement on a spiritual level, rather than a purely mechanical one, and while it's never preachy in its philosophical intentions, it's hard not to get wrapped up in the divine nature of Journey's tale.

Journey isn't a game - it's an experience. The few hours that this complete gem contains are completely breathtaking, and cement Thatgamecompany's status as visionaries.

I don't want to be misconstrued as generic or uninspired when I say that Journey is an awesome game. In the most classical, archaic sense of the word, Journey is a beautiful, evocative and unequivocally transcendental experience.

From the first spec of sand to the last flake of snow, developers thatgamecompany have managed to get more emotion and more life into a video game than anything else in recent memory; and the striking confidence that the game exudes drags you along for the ride without once letting you go, until the credits roll by two or three hours later.

Journey is something that purely relates to who we are and what we are, an experience that will give you as much as you give to it, that needs to be absorbed and processed.

Journey is a different game that everyone will love. If you like videogames you must play Journey. It is a very special experience you will never get enough of.

When games take it to the next step and become art!

Journey is the surprise of the year. It is also a must-have title for everyone thinking that virtual worlds are meant to be more than just a playground where they would while a couple of mindless hours away.

Miss out on Journey, and you'll deny yourself one of the greatest gaming experiences on any platform to date.

Journey stands head and shoulders above all other artistic games. It's truly avant-garde and pushes the boundaries of what a video game can mean to its audience.

After playing Journey, I couldn't get it out of my head for days. Journey goes left, where every other game goes right; the game is a crafted experience that has been built with such care and attention that it easily transcends the label of "game" and expands into a broad, delightful experience.

Games that summon up emotions from a cold son of a bitch like me are incredibly rare... Journey had me grabbing the box of tissues by the time it was over.

Journey's visual and sound design sets new standards for interactive entertainment. This alone makes it an extraordinary work, but it's the way that these aesthetic elements come together with beautifully subtle direction and storytelling to create a lasting emotional effect that elevates this to one of the very best games of our time.

Certainly a game that offers up aesthetic beauty, both in its visuals and score. But where it truly shines is in the experience of playing it. In Journey, the mere acts of jumping, running, and sliding around a painstakingly crafted world are enough to invoke strong emotional responses from the player. Every element, every mechanic, every single little thing works in seemingly effortless concert to deliver a game that is experientially beautiful from surface to core.

I haven't been more captivated by a video gaming in years. There were moments in Journey that I stopped pushing the directional stick because I was too busy taking in my character's surroundings. Should you play Journey? Yes. You should play Journey. Right now.

Journey is a marvel, a hallucination of gameplay that feels as deep and immersive as the borderless desert where it begins.

There is nothing to keep you coming back for more besides the absolutely exquisite environments, the very-clean interface, solid controls, and Triple-A camera cutscenes.

Journey is incredibly short - you'll finish in about two hours - and it's not really all that challenging in the traditional gameplay sense. But it will be meaningful to you in a way that a bigger, louder, flashier game won't.