The Power of Flight

TheEscapist: How do you tell a story without dialogue? How do you craft an emotional connection between game and player without characters speaking to each other, without text driving a narrative? The games, films and novels that leave a lasting emotional mark almost always do so through words. NiGHTS: Into Dreams on the Sega Saturn and PS3's Journey rebel against that tradition by telling their stories through the language of game mechanics. Flight lies at the heart of both games, but the 16 years separating their releases illustrate exactly how that language has evolved. While NiGHTS broke new ground with inventive flight-based gameplay, it was still saddled with the old language of an arcade-style scoring system. Journey strips all that away, rewriting the vocabulary of design to focus on presentation and human interaction