Demo code provided, with many thanks to Kekik in the Bag
Dear Journey… is a card game that has rogue-lite elements to it. You play as a vacation package provider, and you need to come up with locations and itineraries for clients to do, to get the most out of their time off.
The Gameplay of the Dear Journey… Demo
Dear Journey… is a kind of odd game in that it doesn’t fit neatly into a specific category. It has some interesting concepts, and it does a lot of things well, so I think I will start by diving into the gameplay.
Dear Journey… plays like a simplified deckbuilder. You start with a customer, and that customer is looking for a travel experience that will give them a certain feeling, like Community, Relaxation, or Adventure. There are also sometimes modifiers on these that make selecting cards more difficult.
You then get to choose you hand. These are the only cards you will be able to use while building the customer’s travel itinerary; card draw is not a function in the Dear Journey… demo at least. So the sample below has a customer looking for creativity in their trip. The Activity cards I will have access to are the three cards on the top right; they are to Explore Local Caverns, a Local Field Hike, and Tea Meditation. Each has two different symbols for what sort of activity they are (none of them is Creativity, by the way, but I’ll discuss that later).
Location cards in Dear Journey… indicate where the activity will take place, and Extra cards just modify the Location and Activity cards to boost the number of points they give you. The symbols on the Location cards and Extra cards need to match the symbols on the Activity cards to give the bonuses.
You begin with a starting deck of cards, and you get new ones for successfully completing a customer’s request with three stars, and during other in-game events as well. There are several different kinds of cards, and each modifies the point values, the number of times cards count, the number of activities a customer can participate in, and other things like that.
If you don’t satisfy a customer, you have two more chances to try to reroll a hand that will make them happy. After three tries, Dear Journey… removes that customer, and you earn no points from it.
The Potential is There, But…
Dear Journey… is a surprisingly complicated game with a lot of different aspects to keep track of. You need to not only match moods, activities, and extras, but also the locations while balancing however, many customers are currently waiting for their trips to be perfected.
I like the concept behind Dear Journey… I think it’s a very interesting and unique concept, and the vibes are great. The sound design is great, the artwork is amazing, and a lot of the aspects of gameplay are amazing. I did, however, have a lot of issues with it.
As a huge fan of roguelite deckbuilders, I found Dear Journey… to be frustrating on a lot of levels. I think the most infuriating one was the complete lack of ability to change your deck. I tried clicking everywhere, but I could not figure out how to remove cards from my deck that were bad. You also can’t reject gifted cards from customers when you give them a good vacation, so you can’t curate your deck in that way either.
I think the idea of Pocket cards, or cards that are always available outside of your hand is a great way to kind of fix this a little, but there needs to be some way to tailor a deck and reject unwanted cards in order to tone down the extreme amounts of RNG you are subjected to while playing (RNG, if you are wondering, is just the randomness of game; it stands for Random Number Generation, which is a complex topic and fixed a massive historic problem in gaming. I could do a whole TED Talk on it).
The types of Activity cards in your deck are either a colored card, which is a card that points to a specific location like the Plains, Mountains, or others, or it is a “generic” card that has a white background. I found every single white card to be dead weight, completely useless and crowding my deck with cards that don’t give any points. Being unable to tailor my deck, if I got three or four white cards in a row as “gifts” from my happy customers, the deck became so bloated with useless nonsense that I would have to start over.
If there is a way to remove cards from your deck, I couldn’t figure it out, and there is no tutorial in the demo. All you get is a couple of texts from your boss, then they chuck you in the deep end without asking if you can swim.
Other Cons of Dear Journey…
I had a couple of other small issues with the Dear Journey… demo, but since this article is getting very long, I will just list them out briefly here:
- There is no way to skip the animations for tallying totals if you have already won, so you have to sit through it every time.
- The mood is not anywhere near as important for points as matching the locations of all your cards, and they make such a big deal of the moods that it seems counterintuitive.
- Keepsakes are not explained at all, and they were kind of hard to figure out at first.
- Merging is also not explained.
- If you give a customer a great vacation by just barely giving them enough points, it is counted as the same as giving them a trip with thousands of times more points than they needed. You are not rewarded or punished in any way for giving them more than they wanted.
- You can also blow the point total out of the water and still end up with a two-star review.
Final Thoughts
Dear Journey… is really cute, and I think the gameplay is interesting and has a lot of potential. I think if some work is done on the RNG, if you can modify your deck, and if you can reject incoming cards, Dear Journey… will become a very fun game. I look forward to the full release with baited breath.
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