Daedalic Entertainment’s The Long Journey Home is a surprisingly difficult experience to wrap one’s head around. It’s simple on paper – you are a team of four space adventurers accidentally ejected to the far side of the universe and you must somehow find your way back to Earth. Along the journey is where you write your very own space odyssey, through various actions like negotiating with aliens, mining resources and occasionally fighting your way through.
The game revolves around this struggle and beautifully captures the desperation that must be felt in order to successfully traverse light years to get back to that steaming hot cup of coffee back home. However, just like it should be in real life, it is incredibly tough.
There are various obstacles in your way, the least of which is the limited resources you have to work with. With your lander, you can enter the orbit of a planet in order to extract resources from it. These minerals, gases and metals are then used to sustain your travel.
Gathering these resources on a planet’s surface is an unnecessarily painful chore, solely due to the skill-based mechanics required. Your lander has to be carefully placed on top of the resources and then extracted. There are a ton of variables that determine the difficulty of each excursion, like convection, wind, gravity and even radiation levels. Each time I accidentally bumped into a mountain, my crew suffered bumps and bruises, broken bones and even splitting headaches. This can be incredibly frustrating and can take a couple of hours of practice to get right.
Apart from gathering essential resources from planets and asteroids, there are also random alien encounters, which is my favorite part of the game. Alien races in the game are based on certain characteristics, like the warring races and the merchant tribes. In my first run, I made the mistake of taking a loan from an alien, who started following me around the galaxy bugging me to pay off the debt. When I couldn’t do so, he immediately started firing upon me.
These encounters bring out the best in The Long Journey Home along with the exploration aspect. The solar systems, you travel to, brimming with fascinating planets, space stations and ancient ruins. Each phase of your journey is fulfilling to some degree and pushes a strong sense of anticipation each time you engage your hyper drive.
In my first run, I made the mistake of taking a loan from an alien, who started following me around the galaxy bugging me to pay off the debt.
The game uses amazing textures and designs to pull you in and a brilliant soundtrack to base your space exploration fantasies on. Your crew members each have their own colorful personality and story to add to the experience. I still can’t say which characters are the best to select at the start of each game, but I’ve come to enjoy the banter and comments they add to every item I collect on my ship. Despite being the vulnerable and disappointing pilots of my escapades, they seem to handle adversity with a pinch of space salt. And I can respect that, as I race them towards their inevitable end.
Now that I cite the positives, here is what’s wrong. The Long Journey Home is a game that is delightful in its story and design, but is crippled by its repetitive challenges to your mechanical skill and aggressive strain on your patience. It feels like the technology behind the game just couldn’t catch up to its imagination. Most of the time I spent was used up by the awkward lander sequences where every small mistake has the potential to ruin the game. Every miscalculation you make leads to life-threatening ailments for your crew members, which are also expensive to fix.
I found myself resetting the game often to make sure I didn’t suffer too much damage after a resource run. It definitely takes a while to even get used to basic mechanics. So much so that it might put off the more casual players who are looking forward to the more interesting features mentioned in the game’s trailers.
The Long Journey Home is a game that is delightful in its story and design, but is crippled by its repetitive challenges to your mechanical skill and aggressive strain on your patience.
And then there’s the space ship combat that is straight up painful when you start off. Combat procedures are high-risk, high-reward at most and are complicated to execute. You need multiple upgrades before you can be confident in your ability to face off against random aggressive alien encounters.
All things considered, The Long Journey Home is a game that enforces skills to be developed and complex mechanics to be understood. Otherwise you just end up ramming your ship headfirst into a black hole. This is a game that is meant for hardcore fanatics of rouge-like, space exploration, science fiction genres rather than the casual gaming audience.
The game is artistic and heavily deployed in its story, but at times feels like a cheap puzzle game with infuriating mechanics. You are required to pay absolute attention to every small resource you collect and plan far ahead in the journey. That is, if you even want to find your way back home.
The Long Journey Home was reviewed on the PC, on the Steam platform.
