Journey, the delightful and serene game from That Game Company has finally made its way over to PC, available exclusively on the Epic Games Store – and in theory at least, the transition to this platform should allow for the definitive experience; a game freed from its technical constraints on console and allowed to scale on the hardware of today – and tomorrow. I’d say that the potential is there for this game to deliver that experience, but we’re a patch or two away from perfection.
It’s over seven years now since ThatGameCompany’s original release wowed PlayStation 3 gamers, and the objective is simple enough: there’s a mountain in the distance, and your job is to traverse the desert to get there, meeting up with and collaborating with other players en route – though any kind of communication (be it speech or text) is not possible. The concept is straightforward, but the experience and the art style is simply magical.
Three years after Journey’s original launch, developer Tricky Pixels handled the PlayStation 4 conversion, which doubled frame-rate to 60fps and boosted resolution from 720p to 1080p. It’s a great game, but aspects of the original presentation changed in the transition between PlayStation consoles: sand rendering was altered and motion blur was removed. Anti-aliasing fell a little short, and there were some slight dips to performance. A PS4 Pro patch was never released, but boost mode should be able to resolve the minor frame-rate issues, at least.
The PC version brings another developer into the mix, with the game’s publisher – Anapura – at the conn for this one, and I’d say that the port is competent overall, though there is clear room for improvement. Let’s talk about the plus side of things first: arbitrary resolutions are supported, and Journey is fully supported on ultrawide screens. Personally, I found the move to a 21:9 aspect ratio to be transformative for this game – the ‘cinematic’ look is sublime. Secondly, there is indeed support for higher refresh rate displays – but this is where some problems start to emerge.
Journey PC has windowed and full-screen support, but the latter option actually seems to be of the borderless window variation. This means that any resolution you choose in-game is scaled to your desktop configuration. So, for example, if your desktop is set to 4K but you run Journey at 1080p, you’ll get scaling – the quality of which is somewhat poor. The same limitation is in place for higher refresh rate support – you’ll only be able to access, say, 144Hz, if your desktop is set to that configuration before you boot the game. It’s a pain, to be honest.