Old Man's Journey by Broken Rules is a game that I actually received a Steam Code for through a giveaway on Instagram from Streamer acedicon. However, I never found the time to actually play it on my computer (although I definitely will, eventually), for which I had felt pretty guilty. So a couple of weeks back, I picked it up on the Switch, being the platform that I have put the most amount of time into over the last three years.
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| There are plenty of instances where you can walk to an overlook and the camera pulls back for a better view. Just because. And I love that. |
Knowing that this was a short game (playable in about an hour-and-a-half), I went in fully expecting to be finished in the same sitting. That was not actually the case, partly because it is me and I like to take my time in games that look as beautiful as this, but also because some of the environmental puzzles took me a little more time than they should have. But I am perfectly fine with the fewer than five hours I spent in this story.
I also played while Conklederp watched and admittedly, some of the scenes dealing with the Old Man and his relationship with his wife that happen between stages were kind of emotionally difficult, so I found myself breaking the game up into playing a couple of chapters at a time.
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| The bright yellow lines indicate which layers/hill you can move & where it interacts with other layers/hills. |
The mechanic here is that you need to get the Old Man from Point A to Point B, and you do that by manipulating the environment, one section at a time so that he can easily traverse each section. Unlike other point-and-click games, there are no items to gather along the way, although in more than one section, you do have to move hills/roads to get rid of barriers that otherwise block your path.
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| This would typically not end well. |
Maybe it is because both Conklederp and I have worked in industries where the predominant population are people 70+ years old and hip-breaking is a real fear that can lead to the death of an otherwise healthy person, but the waterfall sections in this game were not readily apparent to me. There are a couple of areas that require the Old Man to seemingly traverse across the top of a waterfall, but what the game wants you to do, is to have the Old Man begin to walk across the top, then he plummets 10+ feet, very likely shattering both hips and a handful of other bones. Having this in mind, it was not readily apparent that walking along the top of a waterfall for the sole purpose of falling. Couple with that with the game allowing you to drag a line in the waterfall when you click on it, only confused me before I figured out that falling was what you were supposed to do. That was really my only gripe with the game.
I think I did look up a walkthrough (heh-heh) two times because I felt that I had gotten myself into a corner where I could not figure out which order I was supposed to move a hill, move the Old Man, move another hill, move the Old Man back, then move another hill another way and you get the idea. The second time was in a scene where I had not noticed that upon moving a hill, I unknowingly rolled a boulder down to another hill destroying a cobblestone wall that was blocking my path further along the stage. I had heard the hitting/crumbling of the wall by the boulder, but my attention was focused elsewhere and had not realized what had happened.
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| I'm telling you, the vistas in the game. Mm!! This could be a painting. |
Yeah, I enjoyed Old Man's Journey, even with it taking more than the 1.5 hours HowLongToBeat hypothesized it would take me (it took me just under 5 hours), but this is a game that is calming to look at, even when the game changes to this peaceful countryside strolling to a truck driving-on-rails game. The art style makes traversing the hillsides and through small villages a lot of fun and peaceful-like, which was an interesting juxtaposition compared to the emotional tone of the story which has its ups and downs. Just like the countryside.
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