Journey: The Quest Ends

As far as I got.

Wow, was I cocky two days ago, thinking I would win Journey: The Quest Begins that same night. The game lured me into a false sense of security, though. The early puzzles were really easy. Later ones...well, I should have realized that this is the same company that made Zork.

The difficulty of the puzzles doesn't bother me so much as the linearity of the game. You need to do specific things in a specific order, and the game doesn't bother to tell you when you screw up. About an hour later, you realize you were supposed to explore that nymph cave more thoroughly, and you missed a key item. Helm talked about this yesterday. I went through a lot of "walking dead" moments before I finally found one I couldn't defeat and gave up.

Losing Hurth apparently broke the game, but I didn't know it at the time.

At first, I thought the game was a lot like Beyond Zork, with the ability to use multiple means to solve the same puzzle. But later I realized the game is deceptive in that way. If you use a spell to solve a puzzle when you didn't need a spell, for instance, you are liable to find yourself lacking crucial reagents at a later date. (This ultimately sunk me.) Beyond Zork gave you greater freedom of movement throughout the game world and more freedom to make mistakes.

To take an example, early in the game you are given the choice between a right and left path at a fork. If you take the left fork, you run into some bandits, but you can prepare yourself for the combat and come out well. Nonetheless, you much later realize that by not taking the right fork, you missed out an a crucial bag of spellcasting elements as well as the solution to one of the game's mysteries. In that sense, the game's "choices" are all mirages. You either have to keep reloading or save the game at every crucial branch so you can reload when it becomes clear you did something wrong.

The party loses.

Here's another example. At one point in the game, if you ask a dwarf named Hurth to tell you a story about the elves, you learn a few Elvish words. Shortly thereafter, you encounter an elf whose support you need to get a magic amulet. In order to convince her you're a friend, you have to say some of the words you learned. But if you misspell them--even capitalization--she runs off and you don't get the amulet. Beyond Zork wouldn't have had such dire consequences for misspelling a word.

The game also lacks the sense of humor of most Infocom games. At times, I tried to cast spells or use objects in unusual ways. The Zork series would have eaten it up. For instance, there's this one episode where some elves' trees catch on fire. The only way to solve the puzzle is to cast the "rain" spell to put out the fire (which in turn depends on having stopped at a river to collect water essence in the middle of a storm).


Zork would have had a field day with this. Cast "Wind" and the fire grows worse. Cast "Elevation" and you levitate one of your party members in the flames. Cast "Mud" and the elves get stuck while the fire surrounds them. Cast "Lightning" and just exacerbate the situation. You'd have a humorous account of just how and why and how badly you screwed up before you died. Journey just says that your wizard couldn't figure out "how it could possibly help." Laaaaame.

I solved a lot of the puzzles through brute force. Since there are a limited number of options at any given moment, you can usually keep trying various spell and action combinations until something works, then reload and do it for real. And yes, I did break my "no reloading" rule eventually, because I was sick of starting the game completely over from scratch just because I made one bad decision. The game is merciless. At one point, you find yourself at a tower and you can go up or down. If you go down, you find a chest of jewels with no obvious function. For reasons that escape my understanding, you have to mix some powder with some fire essence and cast a spell on the chest to find a particular gem. That's hard enough, but what makes it even harder is that if you leave the room to go explore elsewhere, the game doesn't let you get back to it again.

Nonetheless, I persevered through a couple dozen puzzles, solving each the best I could, maximizing my conservation of reagents and only using spells when they were the only option. Then I got to what I think (actually, a walkthrough confirmed) was pretty much one step from the end of the game, and I didn't have enough "wind essence." I don't know where I could have saved any, but there it is. I'm not starting over again.

This isn't even remotely a CRPG, so I have no idea why I played it as long as I did. The writing was good and the story decent and the puzzles were interesting, but a good game gives you more options for solving them and is less obnoxious about ensuring that an extra spell cast in the first five minutes keeps you from winning in the last five. Maybe this is par for the course in "adventure games," but I'm not an Adventure Game Addict. Might & Magic II is coming up, so let's plow on forward.

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A long time later--more than 8 years--I did return to the game and win it. See my updated entry.