This guide covers the limitations you may encounter when playing Journey on a system without a dedicated graphics card (e.g., with Intel HD Graphics). This situation is relatively common among users with office PCs, older laptops, mini-PCs, or low-budget systems that lack a dedicated GPU.

If your system falls below the game's minimum requirements, that doesn’t necessarily mean Journey won’t run — but certain mechanics and visual effects may not be rendered correctly. If you're willing to accept that, the game can still offer its magic even at 20–30 FPS — but only if you're not expecting precise controls or perfect movement sequences.

Players affected by this can find suggestions in this guide for how to enjoy Journey despite technical limitations. Others might use it to better understand why a companion may struggle to perform certain mechanics. Keep in mind: a companion may be highly experienced, but won't be able to execute Fancy Flight or Faceplant if their system doesn't support the necessary performance level.

I started Journey quite optimistically, expecting that my office PC (without a dedicated GPU), being newer than the game itself, would easily meet the requirements. I only gradually discovered the technical shortcomings. Despite the officially low system requirements, some parts of the game can experience significant performance drops.

These performance issues affect graphics (e.g., shaders, fog, water, lighting), but above all, the controls. You’ll likely encounter the following:

Your robe responds with delay and overcompensation. For example, I was barely able to cross the cloth bridges in Broken Bridge or the access to the bridge in the Snow level without my robe veering off in zigzags and repeatedly falling into the abyss due to missteps.

Precise control of both your robe and the camera is generally difficult. For instance, landing on a narrow ledge becomes extremely tricky. The camera behaves just as erratically as your robe, and you're constantly fighting to maintain your perspective — made worse by the fact that the game frequently takes over camera control at critical moments.

Even if you manage to progress despite these limitations, you’ll eventually struggle with advanced mechanics like Fancy Flight, Charge Boost, and Faceplant. These require a stable frame rate of 60 FPS to function correctly, due to the precise timing needed between movement and camera control. For comparison, my average FPS in Journey is 22.

You may also experience more frequent disconnections from companions when your FPS differs significantly from theirs — especially during the slide sections in Sunken City, where both companions absolutely need to wait for each other at the intermediate stops. However, this is not always the case: I’ve completed runs from Broken Bridge to Paradise with a companion without disconnects.

Taking screenshots or recording video can further reduce your frame rate.

• You can complete the game in its entirety.
  
• You can unlock the white robe and earn all Steam achievements.
  
• As an advanced player, you can reach and explore most out-of-bounds (OOB) areas, as long as they don't require Charge Boost.

You can compare your hardware to the game’s minimum requirements using your PC or laptop’s device specifications. If you're playing via Steam, you can enable the performance overlay:

Go to **Steam > Settings > In-Game > In-Game FPS Counter** (e.g., top right), and set the **Performance Overlay Level to "Detailed"** for full stats on FPS, CPU, GPU, and RAM.

This allows you to monitor your FPS in real time and test how different graphics settings affect performance.

The key to playing and enjoying the game despite technical limitations lies in the graphics settings. After launching the game, go to **Options > Graphics**.
You'll see the following settings — with recommendations based on what helped in my case:

• Auto-detect Quality Settings — leave as is
  
• Fullscreen — enabled
  
• VSync — enabled
  
• Screen Resolution — your native resolution (or lower, if needed)
  
• MSAA Level — 1 (lowest possible setting)
  
• FXAA — enabled → disable
  
• Dune Resolution — medium → low
  
• Sand Resolution — medium → low
  
• River Resolution — medium → low
  
• Cloth Interpolation — disable
  
• Anisotropic Filtering(*) — 4 → 1

*Anisotropic filtering improves texture sharpness at oblique angles. Lowering this setting saves performance — usually without a major visual downgrade. Try out the settings to see which combination gives you the best balance for your system.

Restart the game after changing the graphics options to ensure they are applied.


A German version of this guide is available here.
This English version was translated from German using ChatGPT.