Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery vs Journey
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is a story-driven, “choose your own adventure”-like, adventure-RPG where you get to attend the renowned School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Featuring a whole new storyline but with many familiar characters, you'll get to learn how to cast spells and brew potions, make new friends (and rivals) along the way, and get drawn to the many mysteries that the ancient school hides within its depths. The game even backs up your own adventures with an intriguing story about your missing brother who apparently was expelled as he had broken school rules when he was searching for the fabled Cursed Vaults.The gameplay is pretty casual and straightforward for the most part - as long as you have enough energy points, you can complete actions, tasks, and subsequently quests. However, it's unfortunate that the game doesn't use a more reflex-based gameplay during intense scenes that obviously call for more rapid actions. This is the only thing that truly breaks the immersion of the game.
Nevertheless, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is still a very well-made game and it is worth playing for the visuals, the experience of being an "actual" Hogwarts student, and the mystery-infused storyline. The game is free to play and is available on both Android and iOS.
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.