OLD MAN’S JOURNEY
Old Man’s Journey is the kind of game that is just beautiful to look at, inspiring your reviewer here to take a million screenshots. Amazingly, I had to be careful that the images you see aren’t puzzle solutions. Why? This is a game you solve by manipulating the landscape to progress. The player clicks and drags the contour of hills until they form a path that the old man can traverse to a new location. I can’t think of anything to compare it to. Both its visual style and gameplay feel very unique to me.
The old man in the story is hanging about his seaside home when a letter arrives. Without hesitation, he goes inside, packs a bag and gets his walking stick. And so, you begin guiding him towards some unknown destination. It’s a long journey, broken by frequent sitting down. Periodic benches signify the end of levels and provide the man with quiet moments to remember important events from his past. Initially, it’s unclear what the story is about, but you soon get a sense for what has happened, and can guess where he is going.
There is no dialogue, although the people and animals encountered by the old man do often react to his presence. It’s the kind of game where touching everything makes doors open and close, or plants sway in the breeze, but you can’t actually walk into houses or use objects. The memories are simply set as, mostly static, images. But they’re packed full of information, if you look closely. This story is very small, in some ways, even when the setting is at its most grandiose. The old man even hops into a hot air balloon at one point.
When you’re dragging contours to make a path for the old man, you sometimes get the sense he’s lost his way and you’re helping him to find it again. Other times, he seems to be waiting patiently for you to figure out something he already knows. The rules are simple. You can’t move the piece of terrain he is standing on and structures, like rock walls or dwellings, generally aren’t malleable. Hills however, can be stretched and shaped so that yellow guidelines make contact points and he can then agilely hop from one hill to the other.
Occasionally, the old man meets environmental complications. Herds of sheep need to be thoughtfully moved to non-obstructive places and heavy wheels can be made to roll down hills, breaking rock walls. He sometimes travels by boat and, once, by train where you have to scramble to move rails into position. The only fail state is that the train stops, but it’s an effective deterrent. My kids particularly liked when the old man was on the back of a ute and the road puzzle took us back and forth over a bridge a few times. “We’re so lost!” They shrieked.
Indeed, I ended up playing this with my kids, over three cold nights, on a laptop in bed. It’s a snuggly kind of game. And my kids rarely snuggle, they’re usually too busy kicking and squirming. We all wanted to see what would happen next, the man’s simple memories being more than enough reward for short periods of hill wrangling. This is a story about familiarity and distance, as well as the decisions people will make over the course of a lifetime. It also gave me a bad case of wanderlust, or at least the impulse to plan a bushwalk at the weekend.