Journey's robed traveller has a scarf that responds to wind, momentum, and environmental conditions in real time. Thatgamecompany did not hand-animate that scarf for every scenario. They built a procedural cloth simulation that ran dynamically, meaning the scarf behaved differently depending on what the player was doing and where they were on the mountain. It was a small team making a deliberate technical choice to avoid an animation workload that would have been unsustainable.
For freelance animators, this is worth studying because it represents an honest trade-off. Procedural cloth looks physically plausible but gives you less artistic control than hand-keyed secondary animation. In Journey's case, that trade-off worked because the scarf was expressive enough to carry emotional weight without needing precise choreography. A combat game where a character's cape needs to move on specific frames during an attack would need a different approach.
Modern game engines handle cloth simulation natively. Unreal Engine's Chaos Cloth and Unity's cloth component both let you set up basic simulations without custom code. As a freelancer, you can deliver a cloth-simulated asset with documented settings rather than baking animation, which saves time on both sides of the contract.
The decision point is always the same: does the cloth need to hit specific poses, or does plausible physical behaviour serve the brief? Ask that question before you quote. Journey answered it one way in 2012, and the game is still cited as a reference for elegant character presentation on limited production resources.