"Though The Sojourn has a slew of satisfying puzzles and a thought-provoking narrative set in a beautiful world, its inconsistencies make for a messy experience that only shines through in certain bright moments."

You enter the world of The Sojourn contextless and directionless, only guided forward by a small light that enlightens your path forward, taking you through the life of a child in the game’s world. You are the eponymous sojourner, there temporarily to view the world, and you only see this story through baroque-style statues that signify important events throughout this child’s life, from birth to leaving its parents and beyond. Each chapter and, moreover, each puzzle is titled and signified with a certain aspect of life, ramping up to match the story as it culminates by the end.

It’s evident from the beginning that something is different in this world. Characters, though they act like normal people, always wear blindfolds, and, without wishing to spoil, it becomes clearer how and why as it pushes forward. As it does, it poses some interesting questions about power, wealth, and enlightenment with few answers. Because it portrays the player as the sojourner without giving context as to who the person you’re controlling really is, you’re able to fully immerse yourself in the world and formulate your own philosophical answers when you return back to reality.

After the initial entry, though, it’s entirely possible to miss the story. As the story of the people you follow is told only through the statues, there’s no dialogue. As you progress through the levels and the journey, you’re free to move quickly to the next set of puzzles, and if you don’t take the time to analyze the statues, it can become confusing quickly. The only other major method of storytelling is through the environments within the puzzles. Every world has its own environmental style and tells its own story, complemented by a diverse color palette and beautiful score. While you’re in the puzzles, though, the environments in the distance take a back seat to the gameplay and can sometimes fall to the wayside entirely.

"Every world has its own environmental style and tells its own story, complemented by a diverse color palette and beautiful score. While you’re in the puzzles, though, the environments in the distance take a back seat to the gameplay and can sometimes fall to the wayside entirely."

Filling the space between the narrative segments is the puzzle game at the core of The Sojourn. Your task is to traverse each puzzle to free your guiding light by using a set of statues that provide unique benefits to cross the gaps and avoid the obstacles in your way. The only way to interact with the statues is to enter a “dark” version of the world. In this version, you’ll be able to teleport and switch places with one kind of statue, strum a harp and rebuild broken bridges with another, and send a stream of the darkness across the stage with a third. Stages become increasingly complicated as you find new obstacles, like gates that need to be unlocked by putting a statue in a specified location, and new vehicles into the darkness, like a gate that will let you toggle the darkness every time you walk through it.

As puzzle games go, the primary puzzles are mild. Each puzzle is categorized as its own stage, and each stage is compact, giving you everything you need to solve the puzzle immediately at the start of each stage. This puts much more pressure on the complexity of the puzzles themselves, and the stages are usually simple enough to complete. As it progresses there are some roadblock levels that pose a much stiffer challenge, but the real challenges come in optional stages and challenges, which are the star of the show if you want a more difficult experience. Nearly every level will append another, more difficult challenge onto the stage after you release the light, and you can leave the level and progress the story or continue to complete the second puzzle. The harder post-stage challenges award “merits,” which are effectively scrolls with fortune cookie-like sayings on them, but these are the best puzzles in the game because the journey to get to their end is always rewarding.

Across the campaign, however, there are numerous inconsistencies that make The Sojourn feel like it had separate parts developed in a vacuum. Mechanics are often introduced at seemingly random points in the story, with wide ranges of time between introductions, including a multiple hour lull that leaves little time to acclimate to late-game mechanics before the final push. This causes the game to get tedious at points, feeling like you’re doing the same challenges repeatedly without any new elements, and too fast in others with a barrage of new elements. The progression system also changes in each chapter, switching from an elevator to a mountain climb to a portal that brings you to an entirely different area that contains the puzzles that unlock the path forward.

"The Sojourn feels like it had separate parts developed in a vacuum. Mechanics are often introduced at seemingly random points in the story, with wide ranges of time between introductions, including a multiple hour lull that leaves little time to acclimate to late-game mechanics before the final push."

These culminate in a feeling of independence between many of the game’s characteristics, especially between the narrative and the gameplay. Aside from having to free the light at the end of each stage, there is very little reference to the story in any of the puzzles, nor is there any connection between the puzzle elements and the story moments. The puzzles are framed as obstacles that are meant to slow your progress in the story, and it feels as though neither adds anything to the other. The final chapter amplifies this feeling, too, because it stretches its gameplay content to accommodate for the completion of the story. As you progress through the chapter, there are no new elements introduced, and the puzzles do not get significantly longer, more complex, or more difficult. There is no reason for it to continue as long as it does aside from the completion of the story. This makes what is ultimately a 6-8 hour experience feel like it overstays its welcome. While the gameplay itself is usually satisfying, by the end you’re ultimately completing the same task every time, and it doesn’t feel like it has gotten any more difficult or it is paying off the work you’ve put in to get there.

Throughout The Sojourn’s playtime, you’ll find some bright moments, both in the puzzles and in the narrative. If you take the time to delve into the story, it offers some profound questions, and the puzzle gameplay is rewarding, especially in the harder optional challenges. However, to get there, you’ll have to chug through immersion-breaking design inconsistencies and an experience that takes too long to wrap up. The puzzles and narrative are interesting on their own, but, as a full package, The Sojourn has disappointingly independent elements that make it a messy experience.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

It’s certainly an interesting pitch, and one that got us quite excited about what The Sojourn might hold for us. As such, we reached out to Shifting Tides to ask them a couple of questions about the game, about everything from its visual imagery and its storytelling style to the games that have influenced them and their general experiences with working on such a title as a small indie studio, and Aria Esrafilian, lead programmer on the game, got in touch with us with a lot of really interesting answers.

"We want to keep The Sojourn meaningful and kind of philosophical, so there is a point and message we have in mind to share with the community."

From what we’ve seen of the game so far, a lot of the game’s story seems symbolic and philosophical. How exactly do you explore these deep themes through gameplay?

You are right! We tried to make almost everything symbolic, so there is a meaning behind every single part of the game, perhaps not all players will know about every meaning, but they will get the whole feeling and the message we want to deliver. We want to keep The Sojourn meaningful and kind of philosophical, so there is a point and message we have in mind to share with the community.

The first and most visible layer of storytelling in The Sojourn that grabs player’s attention on sight, is the story of some statues. They will appear in the form of sceneries followed by narration, which will be in most parts of the game. We chose a deep and complex story with a symbolic and minimal narration as the best approach to tell The Sojourn.

What can you tell us about the worlds of light and darkness and how exactly they fit into the story and gameplay?

We want to show that we all come to this world as an entity of light with pure hearts, but with great potential for darkness, a darkness that lingers in the outside reality. We then explore how this light can be affected and change as we are growing, discovering, knowing and how people can be ignorant about it and how some people might want to fight this routine. In the game world of light is the pure world inside our heart and the dark world resembles the reality around us that we are living in. Players will traverse between these two worlds to solve puzzles and progress into the game and story.

How exactly do you work to ensure that the puzzles, the story, and the visuals all complement one another?

This was one of our biggest wants: to keep everything in harmony. If we wanted to design something, we had to make sure it was lending more meaning to all aspects or at least it was in the same line. For instance, it was really important for us that game mechanics feel organic and natural while playing. It demands lots of meetings and many deep and sometimes philosophical talks to make sure all aspects are perfectly compatible, but we think what we now have is totally worth it!

"Our main goal was to create something that intertwined complementing aspects to create a single unique experience."

What are some of your major sources of inspiration behind this game?

Our main goal was to create something that intertwined complementing aspects to create a single unique experience. For instance, in the puzzle genre, we always admired what Portal 2 did. And that’s what we wanted, a game in which gameplay, visuals and story are all in line and in harmony. Not many games achieved this specially in this genre, but this was what we aimed for.

As for another example, we really liked how The Talos Principle combined simple mechanics to solve complex and evolving solutions. We were also pretty much in love with Journey and how its atmosphere conveyed the different feelings in different stages of the game.

Can you give us an example of what kind of puzzles we can expect to see in this game?

The easiest way to say is how you solve puzzles and how we are introducing and combining mechanics together to make puzzles harder is somehow similar to Portal 2. However, the mechanics and how you should play with them is another world. Just to give you an idea how the game plays, players have access to different sources of power to empower themselves to enter the alternative dark world and there are different mechanics, platforms and bridges that are only available and accessible in that world. We will also have lots of extra mind bending achievements all over the place for those who just can’t get enough.

Are there any particular challenges you’ve faced during the game’s development?

Technically no, but we put a huge amount of time into perfecting our ideas and designing different elements and parts such as puzzles, art styles and story. To be honest, that was the main challenge for us!

"We are able to exercise more creative freedom but it is a common pitfall for ambitious projects to not consider the final deadline."

Would you say that an indie studio is able to exercise more creative freedom in making games such as this one?

Exactly! We are able to exercise more creative freedom but it is a common pitfall for ambitious projects to not consider the final deadline.

Hopefully we were crazy enough to have a similar experience and tried to be more creative! After close to one year of production we completely forgot about the art style we had because we were not so happy with it and started right from scratch to bring something new!

What gives an indie team an edge in my opinion, is how indie teams can tackle different aspect of design. It can be extra time consuming, but the result can become far superior to other games that are made under supervision of a group where money/budget is their first priority.

You’ve stated that there will be four chapters in the game. What kind of progression will there be from one chapter to the next?

The chapters resemble human’s chapters of life, so story-wise players will witness how the world of The Sojourn evolves from a happy and beautiful dream to a mysterious and reality that has to be questioned. Gameplay-wise, each chapter brings new ways to enter the alternative world, with these new tools player find new ways to use the mechanics of the game, new ways to combine them and new interactions between them.

Is there any particular reason why the game hasn’t been announced for the Nintendo Switch?

We would love to see The Sojourn on the Nintendo Switch and I believe is a good fit for the platform. There are no plans at the moment, as having three platforms for the release is a huge amount of work and we need to take our time to have a closer look at the Switch later to see what we can do with it.

Can we expect more games from Shifting Tides in the future?

Definitely! The Sojourn is the very first step for our brand new company and we want to take it as strong as possible, so expect to see more games from Shifting Tides in the future.

"The game doesn’t have a mainstream visual with lots of explosions, destructions and photorealistic environment and characters and delivers its own heavily directed unique and stylish visuals and art styles which might not have huge differences between different machines and configs."

The game will feature Xbox One X specific enhancements. What can players expect if they are playing the game on Xbox One X? Is 4K/60fps on the cards? And how will the PS4 Pro version turn out in terms of resolution and frame rate? How is the game running on the original Xbox One and PS4, frame rate and resolution wise? Finally, From a development perspective, how do you find the Xbox One X to be? With so much GPU power, we are sure you must be doing some amazing things.

It is a bit early for us to consider and talk about these topics in-depth. For porting the game, Iceberg Interactive is helping us and will handle things and thanks to UE4 it shouldn’t be that difficult to achieve a clean and smooth build on consoles. First tries promise strong final builds! The Sojourn has very stylish visuals, we barely used textures and some other memory consuming stuff, so in case of memory the game is in a really good state and we have a smooth framerate on original Xbox One and PS4, considering that the optimization phase has not started yet. The game doesn’t have a mainstream visual with lots of explosions, destructions and photorealistic environment and characters and delivers its own heavily directed unique and stylish visuals and art styles which might not have huge differences between different machines and configs. So we may want to take benefit from more GPU power to deliver higher resolutions and smoother experience on consoles if possible.

Next-gen is coming sooner or later. From a development perspective, what is your biggest expectation from the next PlayStation and next Xbox?

Yeah, rumors are everywhere and we are very excited to see what is going to happen with the next generation. As indie developers, the best thing for us is having a straight forward pipeline for porting the game, same architecture for different platforms and having much higher performance, so we can finally and literally have our imagination as the only limitation! And of course, having more focus on indie publishing programs from console manufacturers would bring the whole industry to another level, as this generation did on its own.

Will the game have any sort of loot boxes or microtransactions?

The answer is no! We are doing our best to deliver an emotional, deep, meaningful, symbolized and kind of philosophical experience, and under any situation we won’t ruin it with any kind of monetization ideas inside the game!

Iceberg Interactive have announced a new first person puzzle title, The Sojourn, which is being developed on the Unreal Engine by indie development team Shifting Tides, and will be launching on PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2019 (that’s as specific as they’ve gotten for the release date). They’ve made the announcement via a trailer (of course), as well as a press release.

The trailer doesn’t show much gameplay, but it does show plenty of in-game footage, and while I can’t speak to what sorts of puzzles the game’s going to have, I can at the very least say that it looks beautiful- the art style, the lighting, just the general visual palette. It’s all very beautiful indeed, and also more than just a little reminiscent of Jonathan Blow’s 2016 masterpiece, The Witness (also a first person puzzle game, of course, and with similar vibes too, I must say). You can watch the trailer below.

It also looks like The Sojourn is going to be something of a story-focussed title. “The Sojourn is a thought-provoking first-person puzzle game in which you traverse the parallel worlds of light and darkness in search of answers to the nature of reality,” the press release says, before once again going on to describe the game as “a captivating tale of light, darkness, and the nature of reality.”

It looks very interesting, to say the least. Here’s hoping they release more info on it soon- my initial reaction is a positive one, that’s for sure. What are your thoughts on The Sojourn? Fire off in the comments section below.