Journey

GAME OF THE WEEK:7 cert, Sony, PS3 *****

Journeyis the latest offering from the makers of Flower. As you might expect, it's haunting and unique.

Playing an androgynous figure in a hood, you must traverse a harsh desert to find a certain spot on the horizon. Your character’s face is hidden, but you see their glowing eyes. Along the way you find old buildings and cities that have been reclaimed by the land, but they each hold hidden passages to the next stage of your journey.

Journeyis technically a fantasy, but everything is understated: you can briefly levitate if you gather what look like little flowing cards, and there are playful flying carpets with tails that make them move like deep sea fish. A few other surprises (not all (pleasant) pop up later.

This is possibly the best game of the year so far: it’s an intelligent, absorbing experience, and the graphics and music are gasp-inducing in their beauty. The desert sand seems to have a personality of its own, swirling, hissing and flowing around our hero; the streams of water glisten from the sunbeams which peek tantalisingly from the corners of buildings corners and mountain-tops. The architecture (fantastical, mixed with Asian and Middle Eastern influences) is both familiar and otherworldly.

Journeyis more powerful for being wordless – it's all expressed in the visuals and music. The gameplay is exploration and puzzle-based, changing in pace every now and then as our hero alternately hikes along sand, slides down long hills or levitates over swathes of land.

While your average games developer seems to be taking cues from James Cameron and Michael Bay, Journey's creator Jenova Chen is more like the Bernardo Bertolucci of the gaming world.