Northern Journey - Everyday Chemistry

The Price : £9.29 (Even the price of the game is weird)

The Total Play Time : 10.4 hours

The Review :

On September 9th 2009, a man who hides under the alias of ‘James Richards’ met an otherworldly visitor. It was no alien, no demon or angel, no figure you would read about in a religious text, nor see in an astral projection. This visitor was but a man, a man from Another Universe. Richards had suffered an injury that left him incapacitated in the desert, happenstance would have it that the traveller discovered him and, taking pity, brought him over to take care of him. During his short stay they talked about the novel differences in their worlds, their arts, their cultures, their history, their music. It was on that last topic that Richards discovered in their universe all the Beatles were alive, in good health, and still regularly performed. The traveller even showed him some tapes with new Beatles music on it - Richards says that CD’s must not have caught on over there. When Richards was well enough he left, and despite being strictly warned not to share any of this experience, or god forbid bring anything back with him, he had stolen one of the tapes and released it to our world. The tape was called Everyday Chemistry, a Beatles album from Another Universe. Of course, it's a load of bollocks. It just so happened to coincide with the release of the Beatles remastered works, and miraculously was not taken down by Apple Music. It can be deduced that it was merely a sanctioned publicity stunt. But what if it wasn’t? What if he's telling the truth? I think he is. More than that, I think he was holding out on us. I think he brought back more than just the tape. I think he also stole a game. A game that would be similar enough to understand with the naked eye, but under scrutiny one would discover the tropes and conventions of a world far removed from our own. I believe James Richards stole Northern Journey from Another Universe and released it here, 12 years later when he finally got it working properly.

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Northern Journey on the surface is a bizarre, late 90’s looking FPS set in a foreign yet strangely familiar fairy tale woodland. Complete with witches and ghouls and spooky creatures, viking-esque weaponry, and weird but humorous characters. One could argue it defies a lot of conventions, subverts expectations, and innovates brilliantly all to confound and confuse the player, keeping them heightened and tense from start to finish. One would be wrong. Northern Journey’s greatest strength isn’t its mechanics or story or music or anything else actually in the game, it’s how brilliantly it gaslights the player. Northern journey throws insanity after insanity at you with a completely straight face. It offers no meta commentary, shrugs at your bewilderment, and takes itself completely seriously. When you question the game, it stares back at you blankly and asks ‘Aren’t all games like this?’ After a long enough time you start to think to yourself that yeah, maybe all games are like this. I’m the one who's wrong, not the game. It's subtle to begin with. On loading the game for the first time you are greeted with an enticing, dreamlike scene. The sound of a running waterfall, the visual of soft swaying evergreens, a rapid flute melody playing strange and alluring music. All as if you are about to be kidnapped by Fae. Then you mouse over the options on the menu and the most utterly absurd sound cues play. High pitched bounces is the best I can describe it. Every single time for every single option. Even when you start the game it uses the same sound cues for anything you mouse over in a menu. At first it made me laugh, but as you keep going and reveal more surreality, you stop laughing because you aren’t even sure if it’s meant to be funny, like a deadpan joke. Soon you discover the character models are also insane and a little grotesque. It’s initially unsettling but much like the rest of the game, you come to accept it. You reach the village and partake in conversations no sane person would ever have. There seems to be no acknowledgement of anything. The boy spitballing the man in stockades, the demon in the jail, the witches in their hut, the little gremlin burrowers who jump around and dig down into the earth, the banging under the church, the weird priest, the pet worm, the doctor who references modern culture, the dimensionally challenged architecture. It doesn’t stop and it's only one tiny fraction of a huge world. You get your first weapon and it's a sling shot with a wind up to it. At last, you think to yourself, something to latch on to, a foothold. Nope. The crosshair isn't even centred. It is a little white line like a smudge, as if haphazardly drawn and nonchalantly deemed fit for final entry. Every single weapon in the game is like this; its own crosshair in a different part of the screen, its own drop off, its own unique mechanic, its own unique ammo, some even require multiple parts to assemble. A good few are used exclusively in a couple of boss fights and then never again. One was used in a tiny pool area for about 3 minutes and then it was gone. There's an overwhelming transience to Northern Journey; you never stop moving and very little persists. This helps keep you engrossed and trancelike because everything is novel. Pretentiously, even the concept of everything being novel is in and of itself novel. Before I continue, I feel it important to explain to you something I have coined the Two Pipe Problem.

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There exists a common game design paradigm which can be surmised as letting the player enter the shallow end, and slowly moving them up to the deep end. A new feature or mechanic is introduced in a more tightly controlled environment, and the player is allowed to freely experiment and familiarise themselves with said mechanic. When the player is comfortable, the game expands on the mechanic and tests the player with harder but familiar scenarios. It’s iterative gameplay. Perhaps one of the greatest proprietors of this paradigm are Valve, and their single player games. It’s easiest to see in Portal as it gently introduces you to simple puzzles with simple solutions, and eventually uses those simple lessons as building blocks for harder and harder scenarios. The game doesn’t chuck you in the deep end, everything you are facing is matched by everything you know. It's tried, tested, and true. Typically a great method and used for most games. The issue however, is that sometimes a game will introduce a new mechanic and over indulge themselves. Maybe it's a new enemy type and suddenly all you encounter is that enemy type. Maybe it's a new weapon and all you get to use for the next 40 minutes is that weapon, Maybe it's a grappling hook section and suddenly you are swinging around for hours. Some intern put a lot of hard work into this mechanic and by god, you will fucking enjoy it. Though it's a problem many games encounter, I feel one in particular demonstrates it perfectly. Wolfenstein : The Old Blood, DLC for a fantastic game that is itself less than fantastic. Near the very beginning of the story for the DLC you find yourself stripped of all weapons except for two pipes. These two pipes are simple melee weapons, and can even form into one long pipe should the need arise. For the next hour or so, you are beholden to these two pipes. Every platforming section of this level involves these two pipes. Running and sliding under door ways? Two pipes! Climbing up crumbling walls? Two pipes! Pulling out ladders from above? Two pipes! Disabling power armoured soldiers? Two pipes! Wrenching open blast doors? Two pipes! Stab a man to death as he attempts to do the same to you? Two pipes! Cave a man's skull in? Two motherfucking Pipes baby! There isn't a problem in the world that can't be solved with these two pipes. It wears off frighteningly fast.

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Northern Journey is the antithesis of the Two Pipe Problem. The game constantly introduces new mechanics that you never use again, each one more fleeting and charming than the last. It's a theme present in everything. Except for your core weapons and a few characters, everything changes. You almost never encounter the same enemies ever again. Every area is full of unique enemies that incredibly still have interesting and unique gimmicks to them, and then it's over. You will encounter an anthill, remark at how interesting this swarm type enemy was, and then never ever see it again for the entirety of the game. The finality of it feels succinct and sincere. As if you have just wiped out all the ants on this island. That feeling sticks to you. You will never use the flute again. You will never hang glide again. You will never use the harpoon gun again. You will never shine light into deep-lake creatures' eyes again. You will never be pulled by the siren call of the Nokk again. Outside of one area, there are perhaps two more ropes to use the pulley on. You will never use the diving bell again. You will never see the NPC’s dance again. You will see a million different fucking spiders because Fuck You thats fucking why! By the time you feel even remotely familiar with anything, the game has already moved on, leaving you behind. It really feels like the game is fucking with you. There are shortcuts to areas you can backtrack to, but you will never need to backtrack to them. There are fetch quests where the item is 2 feet away from you. There are multiple enemies in a row where their super effective weapon is handed to you, and then you never get to use it again. Sometimes you will have to go out of your way to assemble something you will use for five seconds. There's a tower with unkillable enemies you just have to race through for dear life. Theres a weird as fuck shadow demon who follows you around in one area that’s never brought up again. He’s just some dude chilling in the woods, peepin’ at yo ass. I’ve mentioned a multitude but I’ve barely remembered any of them because the game blends them together so well, and after a short while, you just accept it and let it wash over you. You can’t even reload! If the weapon has any kind of magazine, then it must be fired to completion before being able to put a new one in. Somehow I didn’t even notice this until near the end of the game, highlighting just how well the game blends the absurdity into your new reality. The magnificence of Northern Journey is that it never pulls you out of this experience. By degrees it boils you alive, like a frog in a slowly heating pot. There is never something so absurd (in context) that you outright question it, never something so funny that you are reminded you are merely playing a game, never something so teeth gratingly difficult that frustration supersedes wonder.

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After it was done and I had some time to look back over it all, I felt a little remiss that more games aren’t like this. Maybe it's a comment on how bereft of any kind of originality modern games seem to be if I truly felt Northern Journey came from Another Universe. Or maybe I respect that it harks back to gamings earliest days when they were doing anything, throwing shit at the wall, no wrong answers type of deal. There's a lack of fear fueled by a lack of experience. If you don’t know the tropes of a genre, and you have the tools of creation in front of you, guess what? You get to make new ones, or accidently reinvent old ones. With video game development being more accessible than ever, and increasingly so, anyone can make them. But that doesn’t really dictate how we make them. Innovation and iteration are words I’ve used and repeated throughout this essay to help convey the idea that much of what we do is built up on much of what we have done. And though through this we have created some of the best works ever made, in doing so we have refined and defined and tightened our solution space for art. Tightened, or even strangled. As we continue, over time our knowledge will converge to a point where every ‘solution’ or new piece of art, ends up looking too similar to everything else. Like a novelist who only knows how to write one essential story, or a film director who only knows one style, or a farmer who only uses one field, choking the earth. This issue is prevalent in areas where art is treated as a commodity above all else. Northern Journey is one of those rare gems where it never attempts to expand your horizon, it just simply turns you around to show you there is still a whole world left to explore. It should be an example to game designers everywhere to remember to challenge even the simplest of notions. Why are crosshairs centred? Why are the same enemies present throughout the game? Why can’t we have new and fun mechanics even if we are only going to use them once? It's fun isn't it? It is. And even if it isn’t, it is definitely brave, and I admire that. It might genuinely be the case that this game isn’t for you. I loved it wholeheartedly but there were many sections which were outright horrible to play. In a good way, but still horrible. Think, creepy bordering horror. Enough so that some people might get turned off completely, and that’s alright. I just hope you can appreciate its methodology and how it drips with creativity and madness rather than a calculating genius. Now that I’m out of it and I look back into its eyes and it asks again ‘Aren’t all games like this?’ I can honestly say no. But I wish more tried to be.