I’ve been checking The Journey Down, as it was slowly getting released chapter by chapter and liking it. Though never quite loving it. Which might be the reason why I was never feeling quite that interested to check the finale of it, even though it’s been more than a year and a half since it got released. I have now, however, so I might as well talk about the game as a whole.
The Journey Down is a really cute stylish point and click adventure episodic game with unique Afro-Caribbean vibe and some stylistic influence from Grim Fandango. It’s a bit reminiscent of LucasArts games in gameplay too, though with a more simplified interface of just one contextual verb (usually Use or Look at) per mouse click and drag and drop for item usage. It uses the realtime characters with often beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds to create the feel of a CGI movie which works really well in most cases, especially by Chapter Three where art often gets a lot of really amazing (non-interactive) detail.
It starts with the rather simple Chapter One, where unlikely heroes of Bwana and Kito get involved in a complicated plot involving gangsters, history researchers and ancient mythical beings due to their long lost father. The chapter is quite short, taking around an hour and a half or so, has a couple of pretty simple, though sometimes annoying puzzles and some nice side characters. Though, at this point the game had clearly lower budget for the voice acting so a lot of it is of rather poor quality in terms of both performance and sound quality. At least the music was given a lot of care and love. It has a nice mood, but feels very much like a prologue to something else.
Chapter Two tries to expand things quite a bit. It is far longer (possibly the longest chapter of the title), though still will take you under 5 hours. It has a more complicated story progression, more involved puzzles, more characters, far better voice acting and even more detailed art. Unfortunately, it also feels the least fun to play out of all chapters, since it has quite a few moments of complete confusion over what you should or can do next, which, with how many characters, areas and items you get, gets pretty complicated. Additionally, this is the chapter where it becomes rather evident that the plot rushes towards its story bit conclusions often jumping over entire arcs just to get to the point.
And finally, Chapter Three feels the most refined out of them all. The puzzles are mostly well done, the art is stunningly good, the voice acting is the best of them all, the writing is better while the music is at its best. Yet… it still suffers from a lot of problems of the Chapter Two. There are several instances where you might have a bunch of items on you, a bunch of places opened up, yet no clear logical path to take due to how badly the game sometimes presents problems and solutions. It’s less annoying than in the previous chapter, but still can become annoying. What’s far worse than the previous chapter is how the story takes huge leaps through entire plot points and character development. Characters meet, become friends and join to save the world in a matter of just an hour, without any of that ever feeling as important as it should be. So you mostly go through motions over the course of under 3 hours while enjoying the mood and the sound of the game.
Whenever you should check The Journey Down or not really depends on if you can enjoy Chapter One for what it is, as the game never truly evolves past that. It remains oddly swift in the plot, awkward in writing, but absolutely stunning in terms of music and visuals. I enjoyed playing through this episodic title throughout the years enough, but I’m hard pressed to actually recommend it to anyone, especially now when we have such a wonderful variety of point and click adventures to pick from. That said, I can’t simply dismiss the title either, as it’s definitely worth at least checking.
P.S. All screenshots but one here are from Chapter Three.