Journey

Journey was created by thatgamecompany, a studio that had already built a reputation with the meditative titles Flow and Flower, as a short but exceptionally emotional journey without a single word, dialogue, or any text explaining the plot. A figure clad in a red cloak crosses an endless desert toward a beam of light shining from a distant mountain, with walking, jumping, and brief gliding via a lengthening scarf - collected from scattered ancient cloth - as the only forms of movement. The controls fit onto two buttons, and the game never explains what the player is supposed to do - direction is dictated solely by the composition of the landscape and the light on the horizon.

A completely unique element is anonymous online cooperation - during the journey, the player randomly encounters other real players with no possibility of text or voice chat, the only means of communication being a musical tone, which creates an unexpectedly intimate bond between strangers sharing the same path. Because fellow players' names only appear in the closing credits, the companion remains an anonymous silhouette throughout, to whom players nonetheless form a surprisingly strong attachment. The visual style with rippling sand resembling a water surface and Austin Wintory's orchestral soundtrack, later nominated for a Grammy, amplify the emotional impact of the roughly two-hour experience.

Critics showered the game with an unprecedented number of Game of the Year awards despite its unusually short length and lack of traditional game objectives, and Journey became one of the central arguments in the era's debate over whether video games can be art. The remastered version for PlayStation 4 from 2015 brought the game to a new generation of players in higher resolution and with a smoother frame rate. To this day it's cited as proof that video games can tell stories in a purely emotional language rather than a textual one, and as a title that can be finished in a single evening yet stays in memory for years.