Original Journey

My first few minutes with Original Journey had me genuinely delighted. Bonfire Entertainment - a small indie team out of China whose roots trace back to a graduation project - drew this world by hand, and it shows in every frame. The Ato are round, squat little plant-soldiers crammed into mech suits, and the monochrome pencil-sketch art style that renders them, their enemies, and the hostile terrain of Planet Shadow feels like something pulled from a sketchbook left on a spacecraft. The design intention is immediately legible and kind of wonderful. That initial warmth carries you a good while before the seams start to show. Mechanically, this is a 2D side-scrolling rogue-lite built around short, procedurally generated arena stages on Planet Shadow's floating landmasses. The core loop is: drop into a screen, kill every enemy, collect loot - crystals, monster parts, scrap metal - then decide whether to push further or retreat to base for upgrades. You can dual-wield over a dozen weapons simultaneously, mapping one to each trigger: grenade launcher in one hand, shotgun in the other, or a machine gun paired with a shuriken gun if you want to feel clever. Turret placement adds a light tactical layer, letting you set up choke points while you flank. Armor comes with socketed one-use chips - buffs for HP, ammo capacity, speed - which give the loadout customization a quiet Diablo-adjacent satisfaction. Death drops your carried loot on the spot, and you get exactly one attempt to recover it before it's gone for good, a risk-reward tension that almost works. The trouble is compounding. Aiming is auto-controlled, your weapon bobbing on a fixed arc that the player cannot freely direct - uncomfortable in any shooter, genuinely painful when ammo is scarce. The mission structure leans hard on busywork: collect twenty monster teeth, walk five zones to talk to a character, walk five zones back. Repetition is a feature of rogue-lites but a flaw here because the procedural levels do not vary enough to keep those return trips interesting. Some reviewers clocked seven-plus hours in the opening forest zone alone. The bonus mission types - a racing segment, a sharpshooting challenge - feel bolted on from a different game and land as jarring detours rather than welcome variety. English localization has rough edges too: text overflow, a typo here and there, an occasional wrong character name. And yet. The art never stops being genuinely beautiful. Enemy variety is real: different movement patterns, different attack angles, parts that chip off as they take damage. The level-up system, which immediately refills your health on rank-up, produces those rare adrenaline moments where a near-death experience turns into a miraculous recovery mid-horde. The story, thin as it is, carries a melancholy worth sitting with - a species exhausting its last hope on a hostile world, and the slow revelation that the invasion is not as righteous as the briefing made it sound. For players willing to treat it like a slow-burn podcast companion rather than a focused action experience, there is something genuinely fond here. Steam lands it at a mixed 63% positive across 132 user reviews, and the Metacritic score of 66 feels accurate: this is a game with clear craft, clear love, and clear unresolved friction between its ambitions and its execution. The hand-drawn art style and the quiet moral weight of the Ato's story are things I will remember. The aiming system and the quest backtracking are things I will not miss. Worth picking up at a deep discount if you have patience for grind and an eye for handmade things that almost got there.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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