High School Life vs Journey
High School Life
High School Life is an interactive story game that might be a bit simplistic. Instead of having a deep and well-hashed-out story, the most you'll be doing in this game is dressing up to meet and flirt with boys, and hopefully, you'll get a date to the school dance, be it Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins, Winter Formal, Valentine’s Day or the actual Prom. You don't get to spend a lot of time in the actual high school setting though, despite being a game titled as "High School Life".The characters in the game aren't very well-designed either. The boys in the game seem to look especially flat-faced and honestly, a bit on the ugly side of things. The "texting a friend" feature is pretty interesting but it would have been nice to have some sort of interaction with your BFF at school, where again, being a high-schooler, you should be spending most of your time at.
High School Life is a pretty shallow version of an interactive story game and hence, is a poor alternative to games like Episodes or Choices, but it might still be enjoyable for some players who like something simple.
Journey
Journey is literally a quintessential "artsy" adventure game. Why so? Well, the game puts you in the shoes of a mysterious robed figure who you will control throughout your adventure across beautiful, quiet and mostly desert landscapes. Each landscape provides players with a puzzle to solve that will allow them to move on to the next scene, though players can simply roam around the place and drink in the gorgeous visuals.There isn't a lot of buttons in the game and that's fine enough since you really don't need much to solve the puzzles, but personally, I'm incredibly intrigued by the Sing function. Although it is used to solve certain puzzles, most of the time you'll probably be using it idly while your character is travelling. Depending on how long you press the button and how fast you do so, you can actually create amazing little tunes that you'd love to have it recorded down and turned into perhaps a ringtone or something.
That said, Journey is a game that's so much more than composing music and solving puzzles. It is a journey (like its namesake) to help the robed figure discover who he/she is and to help you figure out what's happened in the game world, resulting in the sprawling desert that spans most of the game.