What have I gotten myself into?
Picking up where I left off with my last mobile gaming post, I had tried a bunch of different mobile games with different gameplay, and the only one that I wound up keeping was the "mystery hidden object game" June's Journey. I liked that I could go at my own pace, ad interruptions weren't mandatory to progress, and I enjoyed the gameplay. The seek and find picture mechanics are very well done, and playing them oddly gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I'm tidying up the cluttered spaces.
However, if you want to speed up the pace of the gameplay, get competitive, and get better rewards, June's Journey is an expertly engineered timesink. Like most free-to-play games, the amount you can play is limited by in-game currency connected to a timer. In this case, if you run out of little yellow lightning bolts, you have to wait for them to regenerate - at a rate of two minutes a bolt, and 14 bolts to play a game. You can make them last longer by watching ads, reducing the rate to 10 bolts a game. You can win more by participating in side games and receiving prizes.
Of course, that just covers the ability to play. In order to access more levels, you also have to decorate. More specifically, you have to convert your winnings from each round of play, measured in coins, into buildings, trees, roads, and other decor for your very own digital Orchid Island. Each decoration is connected to another currency, measured in pink flowers. In order to move on to the next level, you need to hit a certain flower benchmark. Of course, the decorations also have built-in timers, and the time between a purchase and actually getting the flower value of the item can be multiple days. You can bypass this by spending another form of currency, the purple gemstones. Coins, flowers, gemstones, and lightning bolts are prizes from a variety of different mini-games and side quests in June's Journey, often with their own currencies to keep track of. At one point I was juggling gold bars, keys, tokens, tickets, cards, coins, gems, bolts, compasses, cups of coffee, flowers, bushes, building materials and more. And of course there are randomized prize boxes and card packets in the mix to keep things interesting.
The decorating part of the game is fun, even if you don't care for the cutesy design sensibilities of the game. Because all the decorations have different flower values, and building space is limited (controlled by yet another currency!) you have to figure out how to best maximize your flower value while not making your island look like too much of an eyesore. I buy a lot of trees, because they're easier to keep in scale, and good for hiding anything especially garish that comes out of one of the prize boxes. June's Journey is obviously aimed at female players, with a storyline that takes place in 1927, following the adventures of a mystery-solving adventuress and socialite, June Parker. Orchid Island is a perpetually sunny, well-kept paradise of parties and holidays, where something is always under renovation. The storylines are basic romance novel fodder, and I don't get much out of them, but I do appreciate that the cast of characters is diverse and there's a good variety of different environments.
I haven't even gotten into the social aspects of the game, where you can join teams and play group challenges against each other for bigger prizes. Some of the competitive teams are pretty hardcore, requiring resource pooling and scoring benchmarks I have no hope of getting anywhere near. Some players have been playing for years and have multiple islands, all decorated to the teeth. Roughly two months in, I'm trying to keep my own playing casual, but it is very easy to get sucked into all the side quests and mini-games, which are frequently more intense and require much more time commitment.
There's an extensive community around June's Journey, and this is one of the only games I've found where none of the other players appear to be bots. That speaks well to the game being able to retain my interest. I'm just worried it may be able to retain it a little too well. To be continued…
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