This review contains spoilers. For a spoiler-free review of Journey, you can read our original review here.

It was my eighth playthrough and the tears still streamed, almost inexplicably; Journey is a song without words, reliant on its rapturous presentation and liberating movement to stir your mind and move your heart. With many games, I have wished that I could play them again for the first time–to experience that buzz that inevitably diminishes with each return visit. I will never need to waste this wish on Journey, however: each pilgrimage is as bittersweet as the last. How appropriate, given the game’s theme of death and rebirth, that it feels so sorrowful, so joyous, and so true, each and every time.

“Journey would be just as effective as a movie,” a friend once told me, but I must contradict her. Not that I can argue against the game’s sumptuous environments and its sublime musical score, which earned masterpiece status the moment Jou…