One of the few "modern" luxuries I have is a Playstation 3, a birthday present last year on a very very good Black Friday sale from Toys R Us. I don't have many games for it, though, and the majority of those that I do have were purchased second hand or downloaded for a few dollars off the Playstation Network. ($60 for a brand new title? That's a day's worth of pay for me!)
However, once in a while I treat myself to a new game when it comes highly recommended, and the buzz in the gaming community for the last two weeks has been thatgamecompany's Journey, a $15 downloadable Playstation Network exclusive.
There's been a lot of arguments that video games can be a storytelling medium unto themselves, and many of the sprawling epic RPGs do just that - tell a long, engaging story that would be far too tedious in movie format and far too confusing in a written format.
Journey takes some of those concepts and distills them down to their purest essence. There is a story, but there are no words. There is a game, but there are no instructions. There is a goal, but there is no explanation.
Gamers, many of them hardened industry veterans or cynical 20-somethings or naive teenagers, are mostly saying the same thing: The game has a mystical quality to it.
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