JOURNEY TO THE SAVAGE PLANET
In space, no one can hear you squee
AT FIRST, it doesn’t seem so savage. Snowy, perhaps, as you teleport off your spaceship, supplied by the fourthbest interstellar exploration company, damaged and out of fuel. There’s nothing to do but explore, and the first creatures you find are benign and amusing, especially once you work out how to make them fart carbon, an element you’ll use for more than just getting a cheap laugh.
The world is beautiful and peaceful, a central mystery drawing you ever further from your ship as much as the need to survey the planet for potential human colonization, collect materials, and make repairs. It’s not long before you can craft a simple pistol, and when you do first get attacked, it’s more of a shock than a danger, the cute aggressors reduced to a pile of useful elements with a few shots. Created by former members of the FarCry and Assassin’sCreed teams at
Ubisoft, Journey feels much more like No Man’sSky than either of the Ubi games. It’s nowhere near as expansive as that game, however, with everything you see hand-placed rather than procedurally generated. But the apple hasn’t fallen that far from the tree, with objective markers being present and correct. Structurally, too, we’ve seen this before: You collect in order to craft (your ship has a 3D printer), and you craft in order to unlock new pathways for exploration. New areas offer new resources and new opportunities for crafting new things to create upgrades that open up…. You get the idea.
The game can be played in co-op, and there’s a fully voiced AI companion to make sure solo players don’t get lonely. The CEO of the company that sent you out makes appearances through comedic video messages, and they’re a highlight of the game. Looking every inch the mad professor, his thirst for knowledge about what you discover is matched only by his relaxed attitude to your safety. Given that when you die you respawn in your spaceship, facing a trudge back to your corpse to reclaim equipment and collected elements, there’s little penalty for overenthusiastic exploration.
Your boss isn’t the only comedy element. All the farting and exploding into goo make this a world apparently built for entertainment as much as exploration. Your spaceship plays constant ads for dreadful products you have no hope of obtaining, and its computer—rattling along at 150MHz—is home to video messages from yet more sponsors. Scanning the flora and fauna gives you snippets of information about them, crisply written and short enough to have you looking for more. Actually, that phrase pretty much sums up the game. As a parody of capitalism, it’s amusing, and you’ll want to keep pressing onward through the less-than-linear six-hour runtime, but it fails to hit home with any weight as it’s all so detached from the exploration and collection going on out in the cartoonishly colorful world.
That said, there’s a great time to be had on AR-Y 26. Heading out and murdering the local wildlife is such a staple of videogames we’re surprised it didn’t get abandoned years ago, yet when combined with an eye for cutesy creature design and a witty turn with dialog, perhaps it’s not so out of date after all.