"Ce serait honteux de vous spoiler, tant tout l’intérêt du jeu est dans son scénario. Mais sachez que sa fin m’a retourné et que mine de rien, cela a eu son petit effet sur ma personne. Un jeu qui est capable de vous faire verser quelques larmes en moins de deux heures, on ne peut pas dire que c’est un échec, bien au contraire." GameSideStory.com - http://www.gamesidestory.com/2014/02/17/gametest-journal-pc-mac-linux/

On nous raconte une histoire sans vraiment se soucier de savoir si on la comprendra, presque en nous en tenant à l'écart, sous couvert de faire régner une sorte de brume existentielle. On se demande pourquoi avoir choisi un support interactif pour finalement faire du joueur un spectateur totalement passif et si peu impliqué. Car voilà bien ce qu'il manque à Journal, l'implication du joueur. Et c'est fort dommage d'avoir à écrire une telle chose au sujet d'un projet à l'évidence si intime.
Durée de vie 2 heures.

Journals are personal things; housing our thoughts, experiences, and deepest secrets as we pour our hearts out into their pages. In a similar way Journal the game is also deeply personal to its developer, Richard Perrin, being kicked around for nearly a decade and only just coming to fruition after passing through numerous different forms and surviving setback after setback. It's a passion project that needed to see the light of day regardless of how long it took to do so, but as any artist should know, after spending so long with your creation it's easy to lose sight of where it's headed and what it has become. For all the time and devotion put into it, Journal is not the masterpiece its creator no doubt envisioned it to be, unfortunately materializing as something far less profound and memorable.

Journal is the story of a girl. A girl having a very hard time attempting to come to terms with the recent upheaval of her life, as well as the general pains of youth attempting to find who she is in the world. It's a melancholy tale that attempts to deal with heavy problems in a realistic, relatable manner, but for all its endeavors to tell a more down-to-earth story than you often see in games, it overplays its hand by throwing its character through far too many hardships without ever elaborating on any of them. It comes off as disingenuous and almost exploitative, like an outsider trying to explain someone else's troubles without anything more than a surface knowledge of what someone experiencing them actually feels like. It's hard to feel empathetic when events unfold like those of a soap opera; without any explanation or justification, only serving to move the narrative onto yet another contrived moment.

The cliches extend to the characters themselves, all of which encompass some form of clique or extreme to better fit into their role of providing the protagonist with a wall to bounce questions off of, with the answer being largely insignificance. One of my biggest issues with the characters and narrative on the whole is how it presents an illusion of choice with no real changes or consequences to speak of. Something you say may affect a handful of lines of dialog (usually not beyond the immediate scene) but the plot itself remains the same, with the most important moments being completely out of the player's control despite the dialog options continually alluding to something more, as if you actually have some control of the outcome.

The worst of these moments are those that retain pertinent information until after you've had to make seemingly important decisions, without being given the facts to do so. For example, early on a friend of your character is accused of breaking a window, an act she denies and you are inclined to agree with, only later finding out that you were the one who accused her in the first place (and as is soon revealed, actually broke the window and were hiding the blame). These revelations come too late though, as you are forced to choose a side prior to being made aware of what actually transpired. It's like walking into a play during the second act; you're expected to already know the characters, their motives, and the the events that have occurred.

By the end of the game I was thoroughly detached from the protagonist, as her actions became more selfish and out of character as the game progressed, and I was helpless to influence any of it or even be clued in as to WHY she was doing what she was. For what is essentially an adventure game with the puzzles and exploration removed, for the dialog and characters to be so uninteresting and half-baked made for an experience that felt hollow.

It might not seem it, but this was a hard review to write. I wanted so badly to be drawn into the beautiful artwork and somber soundtrack which seem so ready to compliment a deeper story than we've become accustomed to, but it all fell flat. Perhaps it's a side-effect of Journal's tumultuous development process, but something went awry and the end result is less than amazing. It's hard for me to pan something that was obviously close to its creator's heart, but when it is flawed at such a fundamental level I can't write it off as something that can be overlooked, but instead have to dismiss it as a whole. Like the journal from the title, it's almost as if large portions of the game simply vanished, leaving you with a shell of what might have once been.

Full disclosure: this game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer.

To debate whether this game has artistic merit or if it is worth buying seems almost pointless. The game is currently 80 minutes, and even then it is where the game has you make all the choices you can achieve before proceeding. It is not a game like Gone Home, where the details to every little thing are incredible. The game has rough edges where the main character would often clip at edges or I would go through a door twice due to tapping it once and going to the left slightly. But...I feel like it is a game that needs to happen for the continuation of the medium of games.

The character goes by unamed, and the first few minutes are rather naively optimistic. You are exploring why the pages of your journal are missing! It will be a intriquing journey of mystery and investigation. But the game hides what your character did and did not do, thus leading to misenterpretations where you make a choice that you regret instantly.
But, the game benefits from these choices. It is a very truthful game where the main character is not a vessel or a blank slate for the player, but is truly a confused young girl who is unsure of what is the right or wrong thing to say or do. Gone Home is where you view the experiences of a confused girl, while Journal is more about BEING a confused girl. I am really glad that my character doesn't agree with my own stance on the matter, even when she makes a choice I would have made because I am a seperate person from what her life is.

The art, while getting a lot of praise from people, to me is very simplistic and helps achieve a children's story feel that betrays the true meaning of the game. You do not help people in this game, nor do you make lifes better. It is what a child would feel when going through such a painful moment in their life, and I really do respect and admire a game that can achieve such clarity on the subject of childhood innocence and even if it is possible.
I say that it is a important step in video games is because this is a really personal story for the writer and artist. It is not a game where there is any power trip nor any sense of accomplishment, and is really not about finding the truth or letting go of things. It's about a normal person dealing with things that can never be undone or fixed. To spoil the ending or even the moments within it would ruin the experience of actually going through it.

Would I recommend this: YES
It is a very close and personal game, where the length or technical lack of polish does not ruin or even bring down the honesty and bluntness Journal has brought. I wish I could say specifics, but to do that would ruin your own experience with it.

Suggestion for developer: I believe more polish to the game would be benefical, and more stories from the writer and artist would be greatly appreciated.

Personal Rating: "Grab it during a sale"
Traditional Rating: 5.5/10
Genre: Indie Adventure

I am not really sure what to make of indie darling Richard Perrin's (the maker of the wonderful puzzler Kairo) latest game - Journal. It's clear from the ending that it must have been a deeply personal project, but I am still not entirely convinced the adventure game medium was the best way to tell this tale. First things first - Journal is not much a game, but more an interactive choose-your-own adventure kind of experience. How you view this in relation to what you consider constitutes the act of gaming will greatly affect the way you will probably feel about the title. Most are probably going to be dismissive about it and that is perfectly fine since Journal exists in a tightly sealed niché vacuum. I am all for games expanding beyond the traditional shoot-to-kill or might-and-magic tropes that have become gaming's hobbyhorse of late but I am not convinced that Journal is going to be the one to breach those shores.

The game opens with an unnamed girl whose diary seems to have lost all its pages. Interigating friends and family on the various topics that crop up or situations the young girl finds herself in will result in her journal once again fleshing itself out. These engagemets will also start to give you some context into this young girls life. We soon learn that her parents are seperated but we don't learn the truth behind this seperation until the final stages of this brief adventure. The games central themes of loss and grief are slowly recorded within the journal but the problem here is that the journal, a central plot-device, is often left on the sidelines as we endure one too many angst-ridden teenage growing pain moments (the Diary of Adrian Mole this most certainly ain't).

Maybe I am just too old and I have forgotten what it must feel like to be a selfish teenager and all the drama that accompanies those evolving years, but I found I cared less and less about stolen snow globes, broken windows or cheating on math tests and even more so when I was trying to do good by helping a pair of school friends fall into love when beneath the surface of this action it did nothing but cut and scar my young protagonist's heart. There is a bigger theme at play here that eventually gives rise to the reasons why the young girl is behaving the way she is and I am not going to reveal it for those still interested in playing Journal. This late game reveal does try to ground the actions that preceded it, but in the end I found it didn't really move me.

There are some striking things to be found in Journal though. The carnival puppet show that moves each chapter along is engrossing and very well told, eventually tying into the games main storyline and one can't deny it does exude a certain British charm, even if that charm feels as though it has come direct to us from the 1950's. There is a human beating heart at the core of this game - it's just a pity that it's all so surface-level philosophy (ripped straight from psychology 101) than the actual tapping into of one of life's realities - that life can often be a tangled mess when concerned with the likes of human emotion. The game is accompanied by a lovely piano score that while often depressing to listen to suits the tone of the game quite well.

Journal asks that its user be a bit more introspective, but in the end the message it conveys is something one would more likely find written on a milk or cereal carton and that ultimately diminishes its power. Try it - if you dare to be different - but just don't expect your indie world to be spun off its axis.