The Mass Effect 3 insanity run continued this week. Honestly, it hasn’t been hard at all so far. According to my achievement progress for “Unwavering” (which you get for completing all missions on insanity) I’ve done 21 out of 27 missions, so I’m making good progress. It’s actually been going faster than my initial “normal” playthrough, though I’m curious to see how the final missions are on insanity. Pro tip: Energy Drain is, in my mind, by far the best bonus power to take (unless you already have Energy Drain as a class power of course). That power is stupid good; nothing else available comes close.

Playing on insanity has been fun, even if ME3 isn’t primarily about challenge, and there are also better pure shooters out there. Still, playing this way makes me realize that ME3 has easily the best combat in the series. The balance of guns and powers, and just moving and aiming in general feels better than ever (though getting in and out of cover is still nowhere as responsive as, say, a Gears of War). Speaking of, a friend and I played through Gears of War 3’s Raam’s Shadow DLC yesterday, which was pretty fun. Its big selling point is supposed to be that you get to play as Raam and his crew, though I was a little disappointed that you don’t get to play as the bad guys that often. There were only two short segments where we played as Raam and co., and the rest of the time was just normal Gears stuff. Not that normal Gears stuff is bad, just that I expect a large piece of DLC like this to be about something different.

The other kind of disappointing thing is that while the host gets to play as Raam himself, who is pretty badass, the rest of the players don’t have it as nice. I can’t speak to how the elite Marauders are (that’s what players 3 and 4 get), but the elite Theron Guard that player 2 gets is pretty lame. He just plays like a pretty normal Gears guy, which is not what you want from something like this. Still, the DLC was surprisingly lengthy, and was a good time on the whole. Not a bad way to go for anyone wanting more Gears action.

The other thing I played this week was Journey. Man, that game is great. It’s also short. I think it only took me about an hour and a half to play from start to finish, but it could take another hour or so if you explored every little nook and cranny. At $15 that may be a somewhat dicey proposition for people who like to judge games based on weird hour-to-dollar ratios (you know, crazy people), but I loved the experience I got out of it; it was pretty much perfect. It’s kind of a hard game to describe, but that’s partially because it’s so simple. You just go on a journey, and that’s about it. It’s about travelling across this epic landscape, and seeing what there is to see as you go from point A to point B. The mechanics are incredibly simple, there’s no combat or conflict to speak of, and there’s no mechanism for judging your performance. Journey exists to let you experience an incredible sequence of sights and sounds at your leisure, each one as varied and beautiful as the last.

That’s what makes the game resonate so well. It looks and sounds absolutely amazing, and the way the game is paced is perfectly designed to guide your emotions through all sorts of memorable turns (I had chills go up my spine on multiple occasions, most prominently at the end). If nothing else, Journey is a master at the art of showing but not telling. It doesn’t explicitly tell you a damn thing, yet I have no doubt that anyone who plays it comes away knowing exactly what happened, even if they can’t put it into words themselves. I really enjoy this type of narrative. The other really interesting component to Journey is the “multiplayer”. Similar to Demon’s/Dark Souls, other players just kind of come in and out of your world. Since there’s no combat, however, you are simply sharing the same space with someone else, thus gaining a companion to journey with. I spent most of the game traveling with one other person, and the level of camaraderie the game effortlessly instills in players is incredible. I won’t spoil anything, but there were moments where I genuinely felt bad for my companion as he or she stumbled along, and I’d like to think they felt the same way about me. This is all the more impressive given the fact that there is no way to communicate past a hilarious little chirping sound you can make. I think this style of multiplayer is amazing at getting people to play together while keeping you fully immersed. I think it leads to a more raw set of player interactions than you would have otherwise, and I hope we see more games do this stuff in the future.

So yeah, Journey is great. You do little more than go from one place to another, but the emotional journey you take to get there is something that games rarely do with any amount of craft, and certainly not at this level. I highly recommended it. So what’s next? Last week’s games seemed to turn out pretty rotten, so I’m basically biding my time until Xenoblade Chronicles finally hits North American shores. I’m pretty pumped for that. Until then I’ll keep rolling on my ME3 Insanity run, and should fiddle with Raam’s Shahow a little more, but nothing major there. So that’s all for now, until next time!

Currently playing: Mass Effect 3, Gears of War 3