Yo I have always thought that there is a contradiction at the heart of video games: by virtue of their interactivity, I find them much more attractive than television, music or movies, but I have never related to them emotionally and psychologically to the same extent in That I do. have with other forms of entertainment. The Jam sang all the thoughts I had as a working-class teenager. Watching Friends, I aspired to go in and out of my friends’ apartments at 20 and tell jokes. Bruce Willis movies always made me feel like I too could get out of any situation. And lately, Matt Haig’s books have helped me explore depression, anxiety, loneliness, and what, if anything, I’ve done with my life.
Video games never did that for me. Until I played Old Man’s Journey.
It was one of those games that goes unplayed forever, because I didn’t want to play a game about an old man. So I started to feel like one. My youngest son turns 18 next January. Being out of the other end of parenting is a relief, but it also feels like the start of a final act, after I’ve made a mess of the middle one and can’t go back and replay it. I got on the bus recently, albeit wearing a Covid hat and mask, asked the driver what the correct fare was and he charged me the senior price. So I figured I’d better play Old Man’s Journey while I could, before my fingers withered and fell off.
I don’t know if it’s a deliberate attempt to make you feel like you’re going through a senior moment, but the game doesn’t really tell you much. You just start in an animated landscape with your old man in an old house. The postman delivers a letter, calling the protagonist to action. But the content is not told. The old man just puts on a backpack and leaves. Where, you don’t know.
Every few screens you solve a puzzle and unlock a flashback. The way you do this is quite beautiful: point to parts of the stage so that the old man walks towards that place, or interacts with something or someone. If you can’t reach? Raise and lower the terrain levels to join paths.
So, it’s a point and click adventure game meets puzzle game and flashback mystery. The initial memories you unlock are the happy ones to fall in love with. But then parenthood hits, and the nature of those memories changes. Lo and behold, this is a story about a bad father. Not evil, but occasionally selfish; a father who made mistakes. I can go up and down terrain on Old Man’s Journey, and I like to think that I have tried to move mountains for my children. They do not agree. They think I moved them for me. They feel like I moved the wrong mountains at the wrong time.
One scene shows the old man sitting in his boat in a harbor under the northern lights, but not looking up at the beautiful sky. Instead, he is looking at a photo of his daughter. He is miserable. What use is traveling to see beautiful things, if the most beautiful thing was there in the first place? He should have stayed put.
My family has moved house 16 times. It’s the nature of my job. I moved us for a better life. Two-thirds of my children say the effect was the opposite. I say, one never knows the road not traveled. They say, “Thanks, Dad, so you’re telling us that we might have needed even further therapy?”
This game about parental regret and bad decisions stings me. I won’t spoil the ending because I think everyone should give it a try (it only takes two hours to complete), but if you ask me, some characters get a raw deal and some are left out. I’m really letting my own feelings flow through my experience with this game, and that’s marvelous.
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It means that, finally, a game speaks to me like music, books and movies do: I relate to it. Ironically, the lack of words helps this. The game does not feature dialogue. You have to fill those little bits in yourself. The stories in the games I usually play are often explained so explicitly. They have to be, actually, because the goal is for you to get a character from A to B to C to D, and in doing so, the game has to give you the whole plot. It’s interesting to have a game where you can complete parts of the story and add your own feelings.
It reminds me of Firewatch and As Dusk Falls, other games that feature questionable parenting, selfish acts, and relationship regret, where you piece together information in a non-linear way to produce unpleasant endings. These games appeal to me now because they make me look at myself and my life in a way that cartoon plumbers and hedgehogs never did. These video games are challenging in a truer sense.
