A Review of ‘Northern Journey’

 This is a review of a videogame ‘Northern Journey’ by Sild Studios. I found out about it via this video;

 

 
I thought this would be interesting to False Machine readers and OSR types as a game art which has a bunch of OSR-type theming and but also as a distinct work of art by chad neurodivergent creator who made it while sitting in a cellar for several years.
 
(Maybe also with fans of 'Thief' and the Thief modding community maybe? It has that kind of feel.)
 
 

 

Chad Neurodivergent Creator

 

 
Interviewer - "Working on your own, you must have had a pretty deep schedule."
 
Chad - "No I didn't really have a schedule or a plan. As you are working on something, things, story beats, come to mind. So for instance you might realise you want some mountains, or you want to fight a witch. Then you might be in a forest and realise you need something to go between the forest and the mountains or it doesn't feel right "
 
Chad - "There were a lot of things I didn't spend time doing. Like sketching and drawing and planning enemies and whatnot. I usually just made them then and there."
 
Chad - "The game was made in a cellar and there were a lot of spiders there so there are spiders in the game."
 
Chad - "Anyone can make music really, you look at pictures of the place you are making music for and start making sounds."
 
So, he made the game by making the game.
 
I will return to this in the end.
 
 

The Level Design

 
Northern Journey combines vast-feeling levels and wide-open spaces with complex, nested and carefully planned challenge routes. In the interview above the creator says they often solved design problems by just removing space, bringing things more closely together.
 
Often the routes and locations are nested vertically, with looping fishbone paths, leaps and scrambles taking you from one to another, or caves, long diversions or surprising detours leading you back to somewhere you have already seen from afar, maybe only a few feet away from where you were standing, buy previously unable to reach.

 
The internet tells me that this is “like Dark Souls”.
 
You are almost always in sight of the promise of a future journey,  being shown expanses you might traverse, places you might visit and methods you might use. There are keys to open doors but there is also a winch thing you can use to access ziplines which take you whooshing across these densely-plotted levels - you can see the ziplines coming in but can't access them till you get this widget. In terms of level design this is in practice, just another kind of key or teleportation system, but it doesn't feel like that, instead it feels like an extremely cool reward for achieving stuff.
 
How could this feeling be expanded to OSR-style games? With difficulty I think. The functioning of team play using largely the minds eye and maps doesn’t work the same way as in a videogame. In Northern Journey, the ‘correct’ or accessible routes are obvious and the language of the game and movement in its space is easy to accept. You know you can’t climb things above a certain set incline, so you don’t bother. In an OSR game you can try climbing things above a set incline, and can try doing a whole bunch of things that wouldn’t work in Northern Journey.
 
As well, the presentation of a vertically nested environment is more difficult in map form, and the sheer power of a open view of a big landscape promising various adventures and possibilities wouldn’t act the same way.
 
Perhaps to some extent, partial maps, rumours and ‘promising objects’ serve a similar aim in D&D adventures. I tried to do something a bit like this in Demon-Bone Sarcophagus but apparently fucked it up ☹.
 
 

The Music

 
The music is custom, nothing in its pockets but knives and lint. It’s dungeon synth/ambient created for each environment. This is distinctive because there really isn’t a big gap between the sounds of the environment, the twitchy calls of insect danger (or witches), the wind, the treetops moving in the wind, the echoing of cave noises and whatever the ambient music is for that area.
 

 

The Fucking Spiders

 
Or monsters generally, but most of them are fucking spiders.

 
None of the spiders are the same, look the same, act the same or interact with the environment and the player in the same way. Some crawl in the undergrowth quietly, some swarm in gangs, some hover and leap, or hang in treetops and drop on you.
 
The enemy design, movement plans and AI loops are carefully integrated into the environments, the spiders in the trees, the tree-tops slowly waving, the spiders in the waving grass which bob and move in the same rhythm as the grass.
 
The juddering, weaving repetitive but incoherent attack patterns of the insect enemies exist apparently because they were easy to program - presumably real insects are running something not that much more complex than the systems in a modern computer.
 
The deep integration with the environments means you spend a lot of time hiding, listening, watching, stalking and paying a huge amount of attention to trees, grass, sounds and movement.
 

 

The Combat

 
I feel like there are two main ways to run the combat in Northern Journey; Doom Style or Cheese It.
 
If you have really good twitch sensitivity and aim then you could maybe burst into target-rich environments and race around shooting things while brilliantly swapping weapons for optimal effect. I absolutely could not do this and so most of the time I just cheesed it by save-scumming, creeping forward till I trigger one or two enemies then running like fuck away till they are lined up behind me on an attack run, then turning round and shooting them, save-scumming and doing the same thing again.
 
The sling was an interesting embodied weapon. You get it for free, it never runs out of ammo.
 
On pulling out the sling the p.o.v character WHUMPS it round your head, one, two, three, four, five, six times then puts it away. You can trigger a cast at the peak of any of those WHUMPS. If you wait till the 3rd or 4th WHUMP, the damage goes up to 100, which is actually not bad, on par with other weapons, or you can release early for a faster shot with less damage.
 
This starts as a crap and awkward weapon, but as you get better with it, it becomes quite workable and your skill with its timing helps you upgrade it along with your other stuff so it never quite goes out of fashion.
 
 

Characters

 
Oddities drawn from something like a folk tale; a village idiot, a suspicious priest, a fool in the stocks, a policeman in his hut, some mysterious crones with a bubbling pot, a doctor throwing runestones and laughing, a sketchy soothsayer whacked out on fumes, an isolated engineer living in a box held over an abyss; there is literally no-one normal in this village,
 
Crones - Lots of crones in this one, a large variety of tricky witches doing crazy witchy things, trying to push you off bridges, strand you in infinitely black pools, fly screaming and cackling at you on broomsticks
 
The Mysterious Flute Player – is he Odin? A wizard? The Gygaxian Game Master? He feels a little like all of these things. He has his own theme and you can hear him noodling on his flute as you enter some levels. At other times a dog or raven will turn up with a rune-stave message.

 
 

The Special Missions!

 
Caving, cave-diving, diving into a haunted, drowned village in a leaky bathysphere, taking a hang-glider through super-mountains, diving into a maelstrom & coming out the other side, slowly scaling and ziplining up a staggered and vast mountain face; 

the darkness, fear and paranoia was lovely. In particular the bathysphere mission and cave-diving was just utterly rich with darkness and a deep sense of strange otherness. Any Veins of the Earth fans  would enjoy these.

 

The Ending

 
There are parts of the end I love, and which feel a lot like the pure mood of the game and other combat-based parts I don't love anywhere as much.
 
It feels like a lot of supernatural problems in Norway are solved with a midnight communal village rave to dungeon synth electrobeats. Probably this is just how they do it, who knows. The game nearly ends with what I think should have been the final scene, a game of keep-away with a bunch of crazy villagers dancing in a circle around a cursed dimensional violator while the village idiot keeps trying to grab it and run away, while demonic root monsters run interference. Then there is a tower shooting bit which is less interesting.

 

 

Hyperreality

 
A game about an environment by a guy who lives in that environment. The production loop is a hiking loop - guy goes for a hike or climb in Norway, takes photos, records sounds, observes nature
then comes back to the spider-cellar, makes textures from the plants and rocks, builds the sound of streams from the recordings.
 
All of the sounds and textures in the game are made by the creator, so those curiously pixelly textured shadows, waving plants, lichen-spotted wood, are all recovered dreams from the real world.

 
The combination of the tightly-plotted but expansive-feeling level design, the intensity of dealing with the FUCKING SPIDERS and this transposition and concentration of the natural phenomena means with Northern Journey has a kind of Hyperreality, like its NorwayPlus. The same hyperreality you would get from surrealism but driven towards a natural environment, a bit like 19th century romantic paintings of guys staring at the alps where a natural view is intensified, but in this case it’s a game and a process of doing which includes movement, exploration and challenge.
 
(I am not saying Northern Journey is 'like being there' which I think would be a mediocre aim and which I am unable to confirm anyway, bit it is more like an intense, lucid dream of Norway)
 

 

Singularity of Vision

 
Though original, no single element is absolutely better than the best in other games, though much is very good. Instead we must speak of the combination and synthesis of elements in a manner original, expressive and rare. It would be hard for a large group the make *this particular* game because things were combined and "cooked" very closely and very intuitively.
 
The textures, plants, sounds, arrangements of form, living entities, (especially the spiders), etc, are all seemingly drawn from life and inscribed directly into the game without much pre-decision or conversation.

 
For instance; in one level the waving of grass mimics the colour and movement of the resident spider enemy, which skitters and bobs exactly like the movement of the grass in simulated wind. in another, the texture and size of an attacking spider means it blends with and seems to move "under" the textured knee-high foliage. Combined with its silence (which would have no significance if not for the aural tapestry of the levels), this makes it a particular paranoia-inducing threat.
 
There is a level where, after coming out of a deep dark and claustrophobic mine, you do nothing but climb and zipline up a seemingly endless series of mountain faces, facing a rolling grey sea, it’s wonderful and arguably 'nothing happens'.
 
These things, if done as part of a group or company, would have taken meeting after meeting and description and argument after description and argument. Here, done by one individual, they are simply created and arranged immediately, intuitively, in a manner which speaks of a coherent world, creates beauty and interest in the eye of the beholder an is 'gamic' or playable, leading to interesting and cohesive play.
 
The whole game is like this; a collage or weaving together of elements, some drawn from nature, but woven coherently, subtly, to create a kind of hyper-reality. The sensory aspect of a Norwegian wilderness/biome, compressed, transformed and made into something that can be played. Any addition of complexity of the kind a corporation or marketing director would instantiate would disrupts this clear fluidity and directness of approach.
 
The credits are literally three lines;