~4 minute readPC Players
Journey
Infocom, too, is taking advantage of the much-improved graphics hardware found in more of today's PC compatibles. Journey is Infocom's second major venture beyond its signature text games. The first was BattleTech, a long, complex, science-fiction role-playing game, certainly an impressive debut. Journey, a fantasy game, is much less complex, and is more strongly tied to Infocom's text adventure tradition. In fact, it's simply an illustrated text adventure with a menu-based user interface.
Although the differences might seem cosmetic, the menus significantly change the way this type of game is played. In the old Infocom text adventures, you typed instructions which the program would interpret and execute (assuming it could figure out what you were talking about). Typing in the sentence-length commands was a frustrating experience for some people, but it also meant that your choices were practically unlimited. Since you could type virtually anything, you had to analyze the situation and determine what was the appropriate thing to type. With menus, however, your choices are limited to what's on the list and are often completely obvious. The Scout command, for example, appears on the menus only some of the time. When it does show up, it's usually appropriate to choose it.
Frustration thus disappears. With it, however, goes some of the puzzle-oriented charm of the old Infocom games. But experienced players must realize that Journey represents a completely new kind of game, and that in some ways it's not a game at all.
Like Activision's Portal, released a couple of years ago. Journey is more like a novel than a text adventure. Yes, you make choices, but if you make the wrong choices, you'll find out fairly quickly. Your goal is not to decipher puzzles, but rather to find out how the story ends. In other words, it's quite like reading a novel.
The enjoyment derives from the story rather than the game. And Journey boasts some of the best interactive fiction writing ever. Most of the text consists of well-written narration, something rarely seen in text adventures.
The illustrations are another source of enjoyment. The MCGA version of Journey offers several extremely attractive pictures, each accompanied by descriptive prose. The next step in this genre will be to integrate the graphics with the game play (somewhat like Mindscape's Deja Vu series), but for now these well-executed illustrations are strong additions.
The story itself is fairly straightforward. You must journey outward from your home town, trying to find out why the world has changed. Quickly, you discover that an evil being is responsible for the problems, and you have to collect three precious stones to save the world. One belongs to the nymphs, another to the dwarfs, a third to — why not find out for yourself?
One of the more pleasant (and helpful) features of Journey is the stories narrated by various characters. As your quest proceeds, you will often notice a menu option which allows you to hear another story. Select it, and one of the characters will explain something you've just discovered, usually in the form of a tale. This is the kind of thing that happened to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings — something fantasy buffs have sorely missed in interactive fiction.
All of this emphasis on the story has its price, however. If you judge the worth of an adventure game by how long it takes to finish, you may conclude that Journey is lacking. Thanks to its menu system and helpful hints, the game can be completed in a single weekend. With Zork or A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it could take hours just to get through the first three or four obstacles. Those games burned a large number of brain cells. Journey, by contrast, is much less mentally demanding. But we think Journey's tradeoff is successful. Furthermore, it points toward a possible future of this genre. If interactive fiction is to be worth our attention, it must incorporate the same qualities that keep people reading novels. In other words, it may evolve into a storytelling medium rather than a gaming medium. Journey is an important step in that direction.
This article appeared in
Game Players
Nov 1989
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