In the new release Our Journey: The Silent Voice, you and a friend will take on the roles of a body and its spirit, one helping the other navigate the environment by sending abstract messages that the other must interpret. The body needs to get around the colorful little puzzle-box levels, but only the spirit has the information they need, and must pass it along by playing cards containing symbols and colors and shapes.
The idea of two players seeing and experiencing different things on their screens and needing to communicate with each other to bridge the gap is something we've seen in puzzley games here and there: the We Were Here series with its many entries might be the best known example, but I also enjoyed the brief Tick Tock: A Tale for Two on iOS.
Limited communication methods are a great thinky addition to this formula, and this concept has been around a long time in the world of tabletop games. If you can't just speak plainly however you want to, if your bandwidth or methods of passing information back and forth are somehow constrained, the puzzle of achieving your shared goals becomes trickier to think through.
Our Journey goes for exactly this approach: taking after classic boardgames like Dixit with its infinitely interpret-able painting cards or Codenames with its encoded communication, the partner who knows the way through the environment can only get this info across via cryptic, abstract images.
The game fleshes out the concept out with some expected videogame-y additions: collectibles to find, the ability to expand your repertoire of cards by making purchases from vendors (thus expanding your vocabulary) and some character customization options that you'll unlock along the way. Overall it sounds like a pretty full and interesting two-player experience.
Our Journey: The Silent Voice is out now on Steam, currently featuring a 24% launch discount.
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