Full disclosure: I fell asleep about a half hour into my first attempt to play Journey, the latest experience from Flower creators thatgamecompany. I'm not entirely sure this wasn't the intended effect of the endless stretches of lonely desert sands and dirge-like music that characterize the beginning of the game. Whatever the intention, there was something about the main character's relentless plodding towards far off ruins that relaxed me to the point of unconsciousness.

Journey ps3* Release Date: March 13

March 13 MSRP: $15 Official site * = platform reviewed

My second attempt to play Journey was during an online play session set up by publisher Sony to ensure that early reviewers got to experience the game's unique cooperative multiplayer mode. That mode is supposed to pair you with another random, lonely wanderer without any means of communication or identification save for a player-activated, sonar-like ping. Yet throughout my short sojourn through Journey's hauntingly beautiful world, I didn't stumble upon a single other person, making my trip likely much more lonely than the creators intended.

Beautiful, memorable imagery

Not that I was totally alone for the trip. Journey's barren wastes are dotted with bits of floating red paper that almost seem alive, dancing around the mysterious protagonist like lost animals and granting limited flying abilities as they come close. Simply watching these animated creatures flutter about in the wind was enough to keep me from feeling too lonely trekking through the game's vast wastelands.

And even during the prolonged sections that lack a single other moving object, the game's environments themselves provide an almost companionable presence. Scattered, ancient stone ruins speak of an unseen age and history on which your travels represent merely a speck, and Journey's exquisite use of light and shadow imbues these environments with a quiet, painterly beauty that will draw you forward just to see what amazing new imagery is coming around the next bend.

The game is just packed with detailed scenes that are likely to stick with you for a good long while: the way the sun reflects off the sand as it shines through the columns of some long-forgotten ruin; the way your mysterious, robed character gently swims through a veritable aquarium of light; the way the wind whips the visibility to nearly nothing as you slowly march through a snowy mountain terrain. A soundtrack that dips and soars along with the scenery also helps tug at the emotional heartstrings through moments of despair and of almost transcendent joy.

More an experience than a game

And yet, for all its beauty, I can't help but feel that Journey would have been better realized as a short, animated film than in its current form as an interactive game. While there are some incredibly simple puzzles to solve, and a smattering of situations where timing and visual acuity are necessary to avoid threats, Journey is mostly an inexorable, er, journey from one apparent checkpoint to the next. The natural beauty inherent in that journey isn't really enhanced by the ability to control it—on the contrary, the need to fiddle with the camera and constantly adjust your movements actually makes it harder to appreciate some of the game's more poignant sections.

"Being able to make the journey for yourself is the whole point of the game," some might argue, and that's probably true as far as it goes. But for me, Journey's limited interactivity seemed to have very little bearing on how the experience unfolded. For the majority of the game's short run time (it takes less than two hours from start to finish), I felt like I was watching an amazing, abstract art house movie where, for some reason, I had been given the ability to push the main character slightly off the center of the obvious, preset path he was on.

In one particularly exhilarating section, I initially weaved the protagonist left and right as he glided down a sandy hill, with fluttering, dragon-like ribbons floating all about. Once I realized there was no apparent purpose to my swaying, though, I just let go of the control stick and let the character flow down the path through the power of gravity alone. Perhaps I would have felt differently if I was interacting with another human-controlled character as I made my trek, but wandering alone, I felt like I was watching someone else's journey as much as guiding my own.

In Journey's final scene, I was marching forward towards the obvious goal, as I had many times previously during the game, when I experimentally let go of the control stick, to see if I could prolong the moment. Instead, the protagonist kept walking forward, as the background string music swelled and the scene before me faded out into a burst of white light.

That's Journey in a nutshell, right there: a staggeringly beautiful experience that you don't control so much as you're controlled by it.