Journey, From the Creators of Flow and Flower, Explained
The same company that made flOw and Flower is now making a new game called Journey. It is about singing, sand, hiking, cloth, surfing, astronauts, and feeling small. And it uses two whole buttons, which is a big change for the team.
Jenova Chen, a game designer at thatgamecompany, said that Journey is a multiplayer online adventure game for the PlayStation 3 that tries to explore emotions in a way that other games don’t. He says that the feeling of power a player has, both in real life and in video games, gave him ideas. Technology makes it possible for people to know a lot and talk to each other all the time in the real world. Players feel like gods when they use power in video games, like when they fire a rocket launcher or play as a character that can’t get hurt,
The writings of Joseph Campbell and lunch with astronaut Charles F. Bolden, Jr. also influenced it. Chen says that Bolden told the game designer stories about how some of his “hardcore atheist” Space Shuttle colleagues became religious after spending time on the moon and seeing Earth from a far distance.
Chen called it “awe towards the unknown.”