Passage isn't much of a game but as a work of art it stands tall.
The game is prevented in 8-bit style art. The player can only see a narrow horizontal strip of the world and from there is free to wonder around or not wander around at will. No matter what, you neither win nor lose but there is a score and the score is where things get interesting.
You get points for either wandering to the right or finding various treasure chests. You can get the farther right if you just travel straight but all the treasure chests are located towards the bottom of the world where there are many obstacles preventing your travel. The one major decision in the game is whether to pick up a wife who's waiting in the first screen. Getting married, earns you more points for traveling right but having your wife w/ you makes it impossible to get to some areas of the map.
That to me is the magic of Passage: it's balance. You can take an easy trip but you miss out on rewards by doing so. Of course, by going after the greater rewards, you take a risk that you are wasting time and missing out by what you would get by just staying the course. Having a wife makes wandering for the sake of it more worthwhile but also prevents your from attaining some rewards you could easily get otherwise. In short, everything you chose to do prevents you from doing something else that could have been equally good or even better. You can go and try to get the highest score or just wander around and you wind up dying in the end one way or the other. All of this feels an awful lot like real life to me.
Passage is beautifully, subtly and effectively presented. There is really not much more than an hours worth of replay value here tops but this is also not a game that's trying to be expansive or time consuming. It is an interactive and abstracted simulated lifetime and it works on every level that it tries to.