Journal is a memorable game, but not a particularly good one. This creation of developer Richard Perrin and his company Locked Door Puzzle is noteworthy for its hand-drawn graphics, superb music, and vaguely morose teen-girl atmosphere that stays with you well after you wrap up the brief two-hour story. But the potential impact is watered down with too many after-school-special plot points and a disjointed narrative style that is way too avant-garde for the lightweight material.
Initially, however, Journal is very intriguing. The story centers on a nameless teen girl who finds that all of the pages of her daily journal have somehow gone blank. You start with a metaphysical mystery that might be termed The Case of the Erased Journal, but things veer off on a tangent almost immediately, with the journal being forgotten due to the girl's many other problems at school and at home. Her mom and dad have split up, windows have been broken, tests have been cheated on, and snow globes have been stolen. Nobody knows the trouble she's seen; if this kid were in jail, she'd be blowing a harmonica. Journal has a point, and some moving moments. But the entire plot is twisted around to create an unnecessary mystery.Nothing truly sticks, though. Journal is billed as a narrative-driven adventure--an interactive short story and a choose-your-own-adventure piece--but your choices in dialogue selections do little to shape the plot, and the girl's problems are kept at arm's length. Many have happened before the story starts, so you hear about them in retrospect. A point may be being made here about dealing with the consequences of your actions, but this storytelling at a distance dulls the impact of whether or not your character is the liar, thief, and self-absorbed twit she seems to be.
Other incidents force you into making dialogue choices without understanding the bigger picture. You can be a jerk when you don't mean to be, simply because you're not aware of what you've really done. Oh, sorry former best friend; I guess I broke that window and blamed you for it after all. Whoops. And some of the one-word choices given for attitudes you wish to adopt in conversations are needlessly confusing, leading you down paths you might not want to travel. The one ameliorating factor is that none of your choices matter very much in the end. Hanging out with the mysterious guy who works at the city park doesn't sound like the best way for a teenage girl to spend her afternoons.Stylistic choices cause more trouble. The whole "missing journal pages" concept isn't successful, partly because it seems like you're bouncing from one juvenile catastrophe to another rather than solving any sort of mystery, and partly because the story structure shoehorns in more mysteries that don't need to be there, or at least don't need to be held back until a big cheesy reveal at the end of the game. You're never sure who you are until the final act, when the illusions suddenly fall away with little rhyme or reason as the truth is exposed. If the circumstances behind that reveal had been part of the story background from the very start of the game, it would have been easier to empathize with the girl's plight and feel more attached to a sympathetic character, not the flaky, self-absorbed liar you have to live with until the curtain is pulled back mere moments before the game comes to a close.
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