The best part about being laid out for several days with a respiratory tract infection is the chance to catch up some games you’ve been meaning to play for ages. And so it was that earlier this week I got to lay back with the iPad and play SkyGoblin’s The Journey Down. And now I’m going to enthuse about it.
In The Journey Down, Lying Down, Reading The Journey Down
The Journey Down is, at it’s heart, an old-school point and click (or tap, this is the future after all) adventure game. Inventory puzzles, memorable characters and locations, and a use-fish-with-pelican approach to problem-solving will remind gamers of a certain vintage of the golden age of adventure games – LucasArts at their height. Day of the Tentacle. Full Throttle. Monkey Island. I’m going to come right out and say it – The Journey Down is, in my opinion, the closest anyone has come to filling those long-empty shoes. The verbs may be gone, replaced with contextual dragging and tapping, but the humour, the depth, the gorgeous art, and above all the pitch-perfect self-awareness of the humour.
Bwana and Kito
But let’s back up a bit. What is The Journey Down? Set in the fictional St Armando we join two brothers, Bwana and Kito, running their “Gas and Charter” business on their own after being abandoned by their adoptive father Kaonandodo. We find them down on their luck, the game opening with them learning that their electricity supplier shut their power down after having the nerve to demand that the brothers pay for the services they use. When a woman arrives looking for a mysterious book and is willing to pay for help the young brothers jump at the chance for some easy money. Inevitably, they have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for. And because this is part one of four, and the only chapter so far released, we know little more than them…
Makonde Art
The art and audio style are as flawless as they are unique. For such a small studio SkyGoblin have managed to pull of something magical and instantly recognisable. The voice acting is superb and suitably over-the-top, and each character sports a mask for a face, many based on real-life African tribal masks. Rather than find the masks strange or jarring, they combine with the settings and the voicing to draw you in to a wonderful world of mudyuggler stew, sophisticated sailors and musophobic fishermen.
The game also features easy humour, full of knowing, self-referential nods to the genre without ever being so crude as to break the fourth wall. Thanks to the relatively small scale and a happily restrained number of environments, you are rarely left puzzling over where to go next or how to proceed. The puzzles are generally logical – or more accurately, logical in the context of St Armando – and I only had to reach for a walkthrough once or twice. Hey, I was ill remember?
I thoroughly recommend it to anyone. If you’re a fan of the genre then The Journey Down will be everything you miss from the good old days, and if you’re new to the world of puzzle adventures, there’s hardly a better game to be introduced by.
Port Artue From Part Two.
[It goes without saying that I love the soundtrack. Watch this space.]