You can tell games like Journey have made an impression when game journalists collectively switch over to “art-mode” and start cranking out the fancy words. Journey isn’t a game, it’s a “delicate piece of whimsy;” its visuals aren’t “good,” they’re “captivating” or “mesmerizing;” the soundtrack is “grand” and “swooping.” You don’t “download” the game from PSN, instead “electro-fairies travel through a glowing cobweb of information and weave it directly into your PS3’s hard drive.” I understand the sudden change in tone, however. Journey is a beautiful game, and it inspires people to write, or try to write, beautiful things – myself included. Hence today’s strip.
While I have a love for quiet, understated games with simple mechanics, I’ve never really liked the “art games” moniker. Mainly because it puts games like Journey, Limbo, Ico, etc, in the same boat as deliberately obtuse “interactive experiences” like The Path or Trauma. Now I was going to go into excruciating, granular detail on this topic, but then I realized the Escapist already has a feature in which mildly-corpulent Englishman rants about the various evils of the genre. Way to make me feel like a third tit, Jim.
In case you missed it, Henry Huang and I did a guest comic for NameGame.
