Journey vs Prose & Codes
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.
Prose & Codes
Prose & Codes is a fun and fairly relaxing puzzle game where you’ll need to solve simple substitution ciphers involving excerpts from both popular and obscure literary classics that are listed as “public domain” while being serenaded by beautiful piano music. The game features book excerpts from 7 different genres, ranging from children’s stories to tales of epic adventures; several difficulty levels to choose from, and if you like what you’ve deciphered, you can even hop on over to the online library that is Project Gutenberg since all these books are available to read and download for free.Even if you’re not a whiz at solving ciphers, Prose & Codes will have you hooked from start to finish! The levels are very well designed and tailored to the difficulty setting of your choice, and the excerpts are all very well-selected. If you’re a book lover, not only can you have fun decoding the ciphers and bookmarking the excerpts that you love most; you can also take this opportunity to discover new titles that you might be interested to read.
Finding the corresponding book is easy as pie too since the game provides you with a nifty button that will direct you over to Project Gutenberg where you can download and read the books (in eBook form) for free.