Skip to content
The Sojourn is a puzzle game, which feels a bit like Portal but even more gorgeous, as you can pick up and put down statues onto particular platforms, which is like when you had to set a cube down on a button in order to unlock a door. Sometimes, you’ll walk along stone platforms with gaps that can only be filled once you’ve stood on a pool of dark energy – and as soon as you walk away from that the dark energy reduces down to zero; and sometimes, making these harps ring out is what completes such gaps.
Sometimes, you’ll just trade places with the statues. This is rather like hyper-jumping within the same level, so you can move along without losing any dark energy, and you can effectively skip along the level. but the level design is devious and it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.
All the while, this can only happen when either they have a Relic attached to them, or if you’re carrying the Relic, which also allows you to ring a tune from occasional big harps which are spread around the environment.
Going back to the Relic, and sometimes, a combination of putting that into each device, or holding onto it, is the way to succeed in completing an environment, getting to the end and occasionally picking up a scroll, which is basically like an extra achievement, since you can leave the environment without collecting those if you choose to skip that extra hurdle.
I know it sounds like I’ve been on the magic mushrooms, but I can promise you I haven’t! I would just advise you checking out the above gameplay to get a feel for the game.
Overall, I keep getting shades of the bizarre but wonderful ’80s game Sentinel, only in as much as that you can teleport around the environment.
Plus, this also reminded me of the recent Etherborn in terms of a game which looks both amazing and ethereal, as well as the fact that there IS a backstory to both games, but I never really understood it in either case. Here, Chapter 1 starts with ‘birth’ and shows you statues of a mother, father and child, who often have blindfolds over their eyes. Are they experiencing some sort of war? I have no idea. However, I just stick to the puzzles, and try not to confuse myself too much.
I will admit, however, that at the time of posting this review, I’m around halfway through the puzzles and will continue on until the end, but as I make my way through it, I wanted you to know now, that this is certainly worthy of your time if you like this sort of puzzler.
In addition, if you exit the game at any time, you can return to the challenge you were attempting, or you can start again. I just wanted to replay chapter 1 (for capturing gameplay, now I knew the challenges and how to overcome them) BEFORE going through chapter 2, since the first chapter was fresh in the mind, but no, it wants me to go throgh ALL FOUR OF THEM before I can do this. Grrrr…. That’s my only main gripe about this game, though.
Overall Score: 7.5/10
The Sojourn is out now PC/Epic Games Store, plus PS4 and Xbox One from their respective online stores.
Important info:
- Developer: Shifting Tides
- Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
- Players: single-player
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.