Journey (computer game, 1989)

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Journey is a text adventure with graphics and role play elements by Infocom from 1989.

action

An unnamed country in the fantasy genre has been plagued by crop failures, rotten well water and disease for the past five years. Lavos village sends out a group of residents to seek help from the secluded wizard Astrix, but the group never returns. The player controls another group of initially four people who go in search of the previous group, Astrix and the cause of the plagues and have to find seven magical stones distributed over the game world. As is typical for role-playing games, it is a heterogeneous group whose members cover various tasks and skills: Zimmermann Bergon is a warrior and the leader of the group, Praxix is a magician, Esher is a doctor and Tag , which the player can rename as desired and from his perspective the plot is narrated to a businessman's apprentice. After finding the seven stones, the group has to face the final boss "Evil Lord", who is responsible for the plagues on the land.

Game principle and technology

Journey is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is supported by (non-animated) illustrations, but is largely up to the player's imagination. In contrast to previous games, commands are not entered via a parser . Instead, commands and objects are selected from a menu using the mouse or joystick , which makes the game a hybrid of text and point-and-click adventure. Since the game is shown as text, Journey is counted as a text adventure.

Infocom advertised that in Journey, in contrast to most other contemporary text adventures, you couldn't end in a dead end, but that the game had different event paths ready. In fact, there were numerous endings, only one of which was considered a final victory. All other endings were followed by commentary on the game, if requested, pointing out wrong or non-optimal decisions and thus providing hints for a more successful repetition of the game. The narration took the form of a retrospective Tag, who many years later reproduced the plot from his memories; it also follows that the death tag in the game was not possible.

Infocom included a red fabric bag with a crystal (made from plastic) and a map of the fictional country in the game as so-called Feelies. Both were referenced in the game and thus represent copy protection.

Production notes

Journey was supposed to be the first game in a planned trilogy called Golden Age. However, it was the 35th and last adventure that Infocom created as an independent development studio. Subsequently, the studio was closed by the parent company Activision .

The designer of the game was Marc Blank, who is one of the most prominent authors of text adventures through his work on Zork , Deadline and Enchanter . The game's graphics were created by the painter and sculptor Donald Langosy, who previously worked with Infocom for Shogun .

reception

The British magazine The Games Machine stated "mountains of wonderful, atmospheric text and beautiful pictures" and that Journey had "hit the heart of the adventure genre", but complained that the player's freedom compared to a classic text adventure was limited. In the Computer Gaming World , the Wizardry and Ultima designer Roe Adams praised the story and controls of the game as well as the “breathtaking” graphics, but also mentioned deficiencies in the game design such as frequent dead ends, some of which were based on fragile resource management and for the player therefore cannot be avoided.

magazine Rating
ASM 9/12
The Games Machine 87%
Power play 73/100
SPAG 72

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Review in SPAG magazine. Retrieved January 25, 2015 .
  2. Computer Gaming World # 60, June 1989, p. 32, available online