One of the things I love most about Journey is the way it communicates it's mechanics. It doesn't have long verbose pop up messages telling you how to do things. It shows you commands and you experiment with those commands. It gives you a sandbox to experiment with the mechanic it just showed.

It reminds me of the original Metroid. Metroid showed you that you could go from right to left in the beginning of the game by putting an impassable object in your way to the right. Back then a lot of games had you going from left to right so they wanted to demonstrate that you could move in any direction. Once you do go left, you immediately pick up a power up (the round ball) that allows you to continue where you could not previously go. Those two lessons are taught at the beginning of the game with little to no text, just experimentation. I love this kind of tutorial and wish all games did it this way.