Old Man's Journey, as the title hints, tell the story about an elderly man embarking in a long and uneasy journey. His quest will bring him through beautiful landscapes and exhume as old as painful regrets. A story about hard choices, hope and reconnection, where we're called to shape his path and guide him to his destination.

Broken Rules collaborated with Salon Alpin, an animation studio they shared their office with, creating this enchanting animated illustrated book.
I consider this game an actual book and it isn’t difficult at all to imagine it as a story to read page by page instead of an interactive puzzle game.

The game is a 2D one and the style is hand-drawn, very original, simple yet full of a million details. In every corner, crevice and niche there are plants, pots, signs, bushes, grass blades, rocks, birds, light poles, frogs, little houses, posters, photos. Countless different textures and thousands of other little things that aren’t functional or even just interactive.
They’re there only for the sake of the landscape and this is a huge part of their beauty. With all this attention to the details, each scene is so lively, so real beyond the “children’s book style” the game is made with and you really have the perception of being there and traveling with the old man.

At the moment I don’t know if Salon Alpin was the sole to handle all the graphic concepts and the animations while Broken Rules worked on the programming and the more technical areas or if it was a shared task. Whichever the answer, the results are nothing less than splendid.
The animation is outstanding and not only is coherent with the graphic style but finely enhances it, sharing the same simplicity.
In my opinion, a more complex animation would have clashed with the general look and atmosphere, creating a heavier “visual load” that would have distracted from what happens in the foreground.
For example, the more distant layers, like the far background, the sky, the walls, are often illustrations, the stormy sea is made by still images of waves and the animation moving back and forth in a similar way to a theatrical show, same for the trees and especially the bare ones where it’s evident that the branches aren’t animated individually.

The game itself is something more similar to an interactive story than a puzzle game.
The focus is always the narration and the puzzles are a nice interaction not to have a pure side-scrolling graphic novel.

It’s presented as a relaxed game, so the limitation to just 2-3 different mechanics not only makes perfect sense but it’s the right balance between diving into the story and interacting with the game.

When the Old Man starts his journey, he will see many different beautiful landscapes and the goal of each scene is to guide him to the opposite side by creating a path he’s able to walk on: if he comes from the high, them he must go to the bottom; if he comes from the left, he must go the right, and so vice-versa.

For most of the time, the landscapes are hills or villages/little towns with many levels on different heights.

• The old man can walk a path only when the higher profile of each hill touches the other one. The profiles are highlighted by a bold yellow line and you when they are in contact for the presence of a circle.
• You can’t move the level the old man is on
• There are little unmovable spots he can stand on that allow you to drag every other item freely (for example groups of big rocks or man-made brick structures).
• The old man will slide down the waterfall directly to its bottom and will do so where it’s possible to see the little white clouds on top. It’s neither possible to stop him or to start sliding in a different spot.

To create your path, you grab and drag the profile’s yellow line up and down until it comes in contact with another line.
The mechanic is simple but the solution is not always easy and straightforward. Some points ask you to invest some time and figure it out. Anyway, I can say that finding a solution is almost never hard and this makes the game suitable for a wide range of ages.

Globally, the mechanics you’ll find are:

• create a path for the old man to walk. You can do it by dragging the yellow lines until they touch. When it happens, a yellow circle will appear.
• waterfalls force the old man to slide down to their bottom. The spot in which he will start sliding is the first white water cloud on top of it. A small waterfall has only 1 cloud, while the large ones have 2 (one for each direction you can approach it from).
• At some point you’ll stumble into abandoned millstones. You need to create a path, in the same way you do for the old man, and make them roll down. They’ll break the walls that prevent the old man from going further down his path.
• The last one is..sheeps. During the journey, you’ll meet several flocks and they will block the path in a similar way to walls. You must click on them to make them move away but they will do it only for a short distance. If you click again, depending on the area you are in, they will either come back to their previous position or move again elsewhere. When they’re present, you’ll need to figure out the sequence of movements to bring the old man beyond them.

All the different mechanics are pretty much all here.

The game is structured to be a slow-paced, relaxing one, with some food for the mind regarding the story.

The soundtrack goes well with all the other parts of the game, the music is a subtle background but at the same time is the director of both the mood and the atmosphere, in the sense that without it, it would be hard -especially in some areas- to understand exactly how we should feel.

I mean, a stormy sea can recall both the pure feeling of "dreadful fury of the elements”, or something elating because of its magnificence. However it could also be something deeper and more disturbing, which perhaps is linked to the journey of the old man and his past. Something evocative if not cathartic: an accidental journey that leads him to reflect on what he carries inside.

The music is what makes the difference and guides the player to understand, or at least have some hints, about what they should feel and think regarding that specific scene: Is the storm only of the elements or is it also of the soul?

One of the sides I’ve liked the most about the soundtrack is that even considering the importance of it within the game, the volume is low and there are hundreds of other different sounds, linked to the environment: bird’s chirping, a fisher’s fishing reel, crickets in the grass, the creaking of a wooden bench, the pouring of the rain and so on.

In this way, it doesn’t matter how important the music is, there are no breaks in the immersion and you’ll never be estranged from the in-game environment.

Old Man's Journey is a game good to the heart. With a story that makes you think and adorable, brightly-colored graphics, it's the right game for an afternooon or evening in which you sit down with a snack and something fancy to drink, ready to unwind a long day.

The puzzle is just "one kind" and you can take all the time you want to build the Old Man's path and following his complex but story.