Bishops currently attending their Plenary Assembly at the Pope Pius XII Catholic Center in Paco, Manila will each receive a surprising gift Friday, a copy of a Church video game.

But the video game is not just any ordinary game because the game called Paolo’s Journey was developed by a Filipino Catholic priest with the aim of evangelizing the youth.

“We are giving copies of the video game to our bishops hoping that they will pass the game,” Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas said during Friday’s launching of the game at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the  Philippines (CBCP) office in Intramuros, Manila.

The bishops, he said, will receive 10 copies each for them to disseminate in the different public schools in their respective dioceses.

Villegas said he sent Fr. Maximo Villanueva Jr. of the Diocese of Balanga in Bataan to New York City to study computer animation at the New York Film Academy with the purpose of bringing back to the Philippines a technology for new evangelization.

“We should explore new horizons if it would mean bringing the Gospel to our young people,” he said.

The 3D video game was a product of Villanueva’s hard work with the help of his friends from the Studio of Secrets, Inc.

Villegas, meantime, explained that Paolo’s Journey actually represents the journey of young people who are in search of meaning in their lives.

“Paolo’s Journey is representative of the search, journey of our young people for greater meaning in their lives. We want to say to our young people that the only meaning that they can find in life that is lasting is their friendship with Jesus. All the others will pale in comparison to the friendship of Jesus which is the only meaning in our lives,” he said.

“We pray that through Paolo’s Journey they will discover Jesus as a friend, they will discover the church as a mother and this friendship with Jesus and this mother child relationship with the church will be their aid as they mature in age,” added Villegas.

Based on Pope Benedict XVI’s Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paolo’s Journey is about an adventure of a young boy who gets lost in the forest while chasing his kitten, then is trapped in a mysterious cave.

In order to escape the cave and finish the game, the player has to collect scrolls around the level which contain possible answers and give the player strength to the questions given at the exit of the level.

The questions on each cave represent Easy, Medium and Difficult levels based on the Sacraments, the Ten Commandments and Christian Living.

For each correct answer, a piece of land will be shown to form a bridge where the player can move on to retrieve the three keys. It is only after retrieving the keys that the path to exit the level will be available.