Galaxies away from home, Alien’s with their own agenda, a plethora of worlds to explore, artifacts to uncover and four of the best people to help you on that journey. Gotta get back, back home, begin The Long Journey Home. Procedurally generated worlds, planets to loot, aliens to deal with and a lot of landing and flying around, The Long Journey Home is not for those who are impatient.
The Long Journey Home has a lot of Rogue-lite elements like Procedurally generated worlds, perma death and RNG. This is mixed in with exploration of planets to get resources that fuel your ship, help repair your ship or fuel for a jump drive. These resources can also be used for trading when you encounter a merchant. The game has two core mechanics, the first is do to with your Lander, using it to land on planets to gather resources. The other mechanic is flying your ship in the galaxy, avoiding asteroids, making star jumps and most importantly finding the perfect angle and velocity to get your ship into a planets atmosphere so that you can orbit it and then land. The gravity is shown with square grids and coloured to show how intense the gravitational pull is at that place.
These two mechanics get tiring very soon and feel like a chore, however mastering these mechanics isn’t easy either. Your lander will crash a lot on Easy difficulty, you might mess you getting into a planet’s orbit and just go straight into it which will damage your ship. In the beginning it seems alright, because you’re new and need to master this mechanic but after a while it does just get annoying. Especially after you start encountering other aliens and actually get information about the world, which was far and few for me. There’s also ship battles which tned
There is a lot of story and lore and information to be gathered in the game. Aliens with their own agendas, some seem friendly and offer you gifts but are actually quite malevolent as I soon found it as using their gifts infected my Crew Member. Some species are outright pricks from the moment you meet them, but it’s still interesting to see you they react to the way you react to them. This one time I pissed off this alien race and had to battle them but that didn’t go too well because my ship stood no chance against theirs. The other time I accidentally agreed to give them one of my crew members as a slave. Yes, I’m a horrible human being, I know.
But let’s talk about the Crew Members. At the beginning of the game you don’t know much about them but slowly, as the story goes on and as you complete objectives and make progress, you get to know more about your Crew Members. Things they miss, their insecurities, their fears, things they love. You can feel that sense of dread with a small sliver of hope, the fear of the unknown that sits in the back of their mind that scares them into thinking whether or not they’ll ever go back home, to their loved one. They feel so human in that sense. But all this is far and few because of the “minigames” of flying around and landing that would frustrate me.
While landing, you need to consider factors like gravity, winds and more, and there’s almost no way to avoid taking damage. Landing itself is a calculated and precise task, as you need to land on the specific area you want to drill, and then drilling itself uses the same fuel that you use for boosting the ship. There’s bit of management involved and it can become slow going at times.
Once you land you also need to brave the planet’s various conditions and extremities, while also evaluating the damage both your ship and crew took while landing. The damage taken can be mission critical and even fatal, though some of this can be later alleviated by using upgrades. All of these issues are then compounded by the fact that most planets don’t give out all that many resources, and when you’re ready top lift off, you feel like you’re barely better off that when you landed. Like I mentioned earlier, the game demands a lot of patience.
There are small combat encounters with other alien ships, but most of them are not all that memorable. These are top down battles, that don’t add much to the overall gameplay, but simply adds a bit of padding in between.
The Long Journey Home has some really amazing parts to it. The interactions with alien species can be really engaging and surprising, and often lead to interesting choices. The procedural generation surely adds to this element of surprise, and mostly delivers an enjoyable experience. Even with some of the annoyances with the gameplay, The Long Journey Home is a game that I had a really good time with. The only reason I complain is because it could be so much better. There’s a real sense of wonder and a desperate struggle for survival, and that is what kept me hooked for all the hours that I played the game.
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