the long journey home infested

The Long Journey Home review

A punishing resource and repair system gets in the way of the long journey home's characterful exploration., our verdict.

A savage, sometimes frustrating space exploration game that succeeds because of beautiful design and a compelling universe.

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What is it: A procedural space exploration and resource gathering game where everything will go wrong. Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment Developer Daedalic Studio West Reviewed on: Windows 10, 16GB RAM, Intel Core i7-7700, NVidia GeForce GTX 1070 Expect To Pay: £34 / $40 Multiplayer: No Link: Official site

One of my favourite moments in The Long Journey Home happens before I take off. I spend 15 minutes analysing the characters, picking the ones I’d tolerate being trapped with, trying to work out if there was a secret reason I should take a potted plant into the space. It didn’t matter. Three hours later they were all dead from burns and/or suffocation. This doesn’t mean that what came after was bad (apart from the deaths), but just that the game does a smart job of defining the gravitas of your mission. You’re going into space and, despite the name, you’re probably not coming back.

Your four adventurers are flung to the far side of universe and must navigate their way home by farming resources, maintaining their ship, and negotiating with a selection of distinct alien races. The journey is different each time, and their are loads of combinations of crew and craft, so there’s no ‘right’ way to play it. (Although I discovered multiple times there’s definitely a ‘wrong’ way.) The Long Journey Home largely delivers on the promise of grasping and desperate journey across space, but it’s deliberately tough. Your crew will die. Your equipment will break. Aliens will take your things. 

I went into the game expecting the difficulty to be high, but there are times when the balance feels off. You gather resources by dropping your lander onto planets, drilling for metals, and sucking up gases like a vacuum cleaner. You’re given a description of each planet before you land, so you don’t have to be reckless, but it’s always a risk. Any errant bumps and crashes can cause injuries to your pilot which can only be cured with expensive medpacks. Each excursion only takes a few minutes, but it’s still a gruelling, repetitive way of gathering essential resources, and it isn’t always fun. Variables such as convection, which blows your lander off course, only compound the frustration. I pimped my lander to reduce the effect of wind, but I started to dread the threat of landing on a planet’s surface. Sometimes, you have no choice but to brave the most difficult planets, and it often results in disaster.

Gathering essential resources can be a chore, but it’s not the only way to play the game. The Long Journey home is full of alien encounters, which feel like the heart of the game. You could push through by just collecting resources, but interacting with the aliens and completing tasks feels like the more rewarding route. I searched for lost artifacts, located stranded explorers, and helped religious zealots wipe out alien infestation. It felt more righteous than that reads. Each encounter feels different and the aliens are all different, so you get real sense of the universe being inhabited by creatures who were there before you. Being able to actually talk to the aliens helps, too—it’s precisely the thing I felt No Man’s Sky lacked, and it brings this universe to life. 

It’s a bright, interesting system to explore. Characters are crisply designed, and I got a strong sense of who everyone was just by looking at them. Planets are striking and varied. The music makes everything you do feel important—even asking a crewmate what they think about a medicinal slime takes on a cosmic significance. But it’s the story that stands out, adding definition and reason to a world that would otherwise seem soulless. It’s good enough, in fact, that sometimes I wished that I could enjoy it without all the broken bones, fuel ruptures, and suffocation. The unpredictability can feel punitive.

Likewise, some of the random, wear-and-tear problems your ship experiences feel mean-spirited. Mechanical failures are common, and they’re expensive to fix. There are also occasions where it feels like a solution should come quicker than it does. I foolishly accepted a gift from a suspiciously-friendly race of infectious plant monsters, because I didn’t want to seem rude—even in space, it’s important to remain civil—and I had to watch as my crew slowly became infested, aware of the issue but unable to fix it. Each playthrough is defined by the things that go wrong, which makes the game striking and memorable, but too often the resources needed to fix problems are too precious or too rare, and the game piles misery upon misery. 

Despite this, I like the game enough to keep coming back, and I’m ready to start my fifth (certainly doomed) attempt to get home. Each journey is a learning experience, and the vague promise of success is enough to keep me interested, even if half the missions end up with me screaming at my lander as it blows around like a duckling on a windy day. If nothing else, I won’t rest until I find out what that bloody plant does.

Disclosure: PC Gamer contributor Richard Cobbett worked on The Long Journey Home.

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Wot I Think: The Long Journey Home

Star Trekkin'

It's not all that long, the journey, but it is very busy. About six hours might do the trick, but you're likely to get distracted along the way. Part Star Trek Voyager and part The Odyssey, The Long Journey Home [ official site ] puts you in charge of a small crew who have been stranded far from Earth due to a tech malfunction, and must make their way home, making friends and enemies along the way. Though it's clearly inspired by the likes of Star Control and Captain Blood, I've found myself thinking of No Man's Sky as I play. Here's wot I think.

TLJH is one of those games that feels like lots of mini-games stitched together. There's some basic resource management, Thrust-like planetary landings, conversations with alien races, combat, and star system navigation. It's a game that could easily end up being less than the sum of its parts, but the structure of the journey itself ties everything together and makes each decision and challenge important. Whether you're figuring out if a diversion to save a plague-ridden planet is worthwhile or even a realistic possibility given how limited the essential resources needed to keep your ship running might be.

There are four things to consider. Your crew are a primary resource and as they pick up injuries, your journey becomes more perilous. Those injuries come from rough landings, risky flying, certain encounters and ship-to-ship combat. People are your most precious resource, and are irreplaceable, though they can be healed if you find the appropriate items.

The other three resources you'll need to trek across the stars can all be picked up along the way and the core loop of the game involves ensuring you gather enough of each at each stop along the route.

First of all, you'll need fuel to move within systems, and to send your single-seater lander craft down to the surface of planets. It's planetside where you'll find the gases, metals and minerals that are used for refuelling and repair, but you might also want to visit some planets as part of a quest chain, or on the off-chance there'll be some mystery to uncover. But, yes, fuel is of vital importance, and you'll use it to move between planets and find it on planets.

And then there's a second kind of fuel that lets you jump between systems. The ingredients for that are found on planets as well, and you'll always have a fairly good idea what you're going to find once you settle into orbit. A scan tells you what kind of resources to expect, and what quantities they might be found in, and information about inhabitants, atmosphere, weather and overall threat level.

If a planet has firestorms, high winds and scarce supplies, it's probably not worth risking your lander and crew. You can repair both your ship and lander, and that's where the third resource, metal, comes into play.

On one level, that's how The Long Journey Home works; you travel from place to place, gathering enough resources to ensure you can make the next jump, or survive the next tricky landing in order to get the fuel to make the jump. That's where it reminds me of my hours with No Man's Sky, a game in which I never cared for the journey so much as the destination. The lure of discovering new species and biomes was powerful, for a few days, and part of the attraction was knowing that everything I saw mine and mine alone. Discoveries born of code and procedural design.

There is randomisation in The Long Journey Home as well, but it affects the order of things rather than the things themselves. The systems you'll pass through on your way back to our solar system are different each time, but the things within them are hand-crafted. There are several species to encounter, all with their own stories, dialogues and quest chains. Those quests range from delightfully silly interstellar quiz shows and tests of strength to genocide and flirtations with transcendental beings. What they all have in common is a sense of mischievous wit in the writing, which is courtesy of RPS columnist Richard Cobbett, a man who has forgotten more about RPGs and their tropes than most of us have ever known.

The combination of resource-gathering and wordy adventures is an odd one, but it's mostly successful. At worst, the actual business of scooping up fuel and minerals becomes busywork, interrupting the flow of a quest, and the limited number of encounters means that you'll start to see repetition after a few playthroughs. Thankfully, running into aliens you've already met on a previous journey doesn't mean you're in for an identical story – some encounters have fairly predictable outcomes, but some branch and twist, and there are even emergent qualities to some stories, which can be derailed or unexpectedly collide with one another.

There's a lot to like in those encounters but it's hard to escape from the feeling that the actual machinery driving the game is simpler than I'd like it to be. If you come for the stories, you still have to do the work in between them, as if visiting a library with a byzantine membership system that requires you to sign up again every time you want to borrow a book.

Take the lander sections: they're beautiful and simple enough, rarely taking more than five minutes to complete, even if you actually explore the surface and have a mini text adventure rather than just scooping up resources before jetting away. But they're also repetitive and a couple of mistakes can make the cost of landing heavier than rewards. I'd describe The Long Journey Home as a difficult game, given how hard it is to get home, but it's an oddly pitched difficulty. I'm more likely to peter out than to explode in a blaze of glory or perish in a calamitous misadventure.

Simply put, getting home is hard work and even though there are loads of amazing adventures to be had along the way, you'll also be carrying out a lot of maintenance. Think of this more as a warning than a condemnation because I'm still enjoying the game after thirty-five hours of playing. There's something quite soothing about the repetition that puts Long Journey Home into my Podcast Pile – which is to say, the pile of games that I play while listening to podcasts. That's not a bad pile to be in given how many podcasts I listen to every day.

And, yes, it still reminds me of No Man's Sky, but with these discrete mini-games instead of the arduous walking and gathering and crafting and inventory juggling. It also feels like a successor to Digital Eel's Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, and a stronger one than the actual sequel. There's not quite enough here to win me over completely, but there's more than enough to make the numerous trips I've made worthwhile, and part of the charm is in never knowing if there's anything left to discover. The stars are strange and home to many mysteries and it's tempting to stick around until I've seen them all. But keep in mind that there's lots of work to do along the way.

The Long Journey Home is available now for Windows, via Steam and GOG .

Disclosure: Richard Cobbett wrote the words and has a regular column on RPS that I edit most weeks. The fact that I have to look at so many of his words as part of my day-job and actually enjoyed playing a game that was stuffed with even more of them could probably be seen as a compliment.

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The Long Journey Home is a game of great ambition — an ambition that pulled me in before I realized the limited scope of its mechanics.

If you watch a trailer for The Long Journey Home or read the description on its Steam store page, you’ll get a sense for what this game wants to be: a procedurally generated science-fiction universe; a coherent, emergent sci-fi odyssey that players can shape through diplomacy, craft and skill. It’s a tantalizing idea, and one that got me immediately excited to discover more.

The reality is a lot less appealing than the pitch. The Long Journey Home contains some colorful ideas, but it’s dragged down by an overwhelming dependence on repetitive, discouraging tests of mechanical patience and skill.

The Long Journey Home stylizes itself as a more scientific, literary roguelike. You play as the guiding hand behind an expedition to test humanity's first jump drive. It malfunctions, of course, and deposits you on the other side of the galaxy, around a hundred jumps away from Earth. To get back, you'll have to meet alien races, conquer hostile terrain and upgrade your ship. At least, that's the framing idea.

The vast majority of my time with The Long Journey Home was spent controlling the velocity of a fragile spacecraft as I harvested resources from procedurally generated planets. On the primary star map, gravity is represented as a grid, folding and dipping as planets, moons and stars leave their gravitational indentations. And then there's the shuttle landing minigame, where you have to settle your lander down on a resource while managing approach vector, wind speed and escape velocity.

These are the overwhelmingly primary mechanics of the game. No matter what the page on the Steam store promises about diplomacy, trading and surprise encounters, eighty percent of the actual game is trying not to smash into the ground during these frustrating sequences.

It's extraordinarily difficult to navigate around mountains, planets and meteorites in The Long Journey Home . A small miscalculation of velocity when you're trying to achieve stable orbit, and you bounce off the atmosphere, damaging your ship, injuring your crew and forcing you to try again. Even after over a dozen hours familiarizing myself with the game and its controls, I found myself approaching each new planet three or four times, swinging wide, coming up short, too fast, too shallow.

The lander sequences are even more unforgiving and awkward. I routinely shaved off over half the lander's health just trying to perch it atop the meager resources the planet offers. Generally speaking, I did more damage to my lander trying to collect metal than I could ever repair with the metal harvested. Not to mention that bouncing your lander off the surface will seriously injure your pilot. A simple mistake can cause two or three semi-permanent damage conditions that you'll have to spend precious (and rare) items to repair.

The Long Journey Home is a game dependent on extremely miserly resource management, and any kind of deep progress is only made possible by planning your expeditions with care. The game gives you an impression like you don't have to land on dangerous planets, that you can pick and choose to only make dangerous landings in emergencies, but the math just never added up that way. It can take over five individual metal nodes to fix your ship, and a single mineral resource is almost never enough to allow a system-to-system jump. Being imprecise with velocity and skimming off a planet's atmosphere can give you a 30 percent penalty to filling up your jump drive, which can quickly leave you stranded.

So you have to hoover up everything you see to survive. But there are so many serious, long-lasting, deeply impactful penalties for even the simplest of navigation errors in the simplest conditions that it's hard to come out ahead. I routinely quit back to the main menu and reloaded over and over to ensure that I would pull off successful resource runs with minimal damage to my lander. The most intriguing elements of The Long Journey Home are the ones teased as being in the late game: discovering ancient relics, resolving major interstellar conflicts, grand arcs of plot that are only suggested in the early game. But the whole thing is so mechanically punitive, so quick to mire you in the simplest, least engaging mechanics, that actually arriving at those most complex levels seems as distant as Earth itself.

Combat adds a whole new dimension of pain to the experience: Your ship, at least to start, is only capable of firing broadsides. These sequences play out like top-down naval engagements where your puny human vessel, firing and moving as agonizingly slowly as a Spanish galleon, must spar off against alien ships with homing missiles and defensive fighters. After dozens of fights, I still couldn't pin down proper aiming technique. My only workable tactic was to ram the enemy vessel, hook on the geometry of their ship, and fire point-blank. Combat can be expected about once per star system after the first star cluster, with some systems holding a half dozen enemy ships who all ask for Blood or Coin.

The aggressive pace of the combat encounters further gates the narrative content behind a skill wall. There are complicated systems of allegiance with the aliens you meet, and they respond in complex ways to prompts and quests. For example, I accidently showed the leader of a pirate base the head of one of his lieutenants, whose ship I destroyed when they tried to rob me. At first, he screamed at the insult, then immediately offered me a job as a pirate for my bloodthirsty gall. Or consider an over-friendly race who offer helpful items, leaving you to realize too late that the items give your crew an infestation. Narratively speaking, this is engaging. But mechanically, it’s infuriating: insult on top of injury. The excitement of being offered a piracy job is dulled when you consider that it means you have to spend more time with the combat minigame.

I can tell that The Long Journey is a complicated game, but the narrative is the least complex thing about it. That's the fundamental frustration of the game: It's marketed to people exactly like me, sci-fi fans who want a video game that's grounded in the optimism and curiosity of the science fiction novels of yesteryear. Artistically, thematically, the game follows in those footsteps. But don't get the impression that it's a casual game by any means. It's a cruel and finicky physics puzzler. It requires absolute attention be paid to each one of its many mechanical systems, even on the easiest difficulty. It supposes the power of your imagination is enough to make micromanaging the curve and flight velocity of a cursor on a screen exciting.

The Long Journey Home may hold many secrets and wonders, but it's hard to hold on to the promise of them when the game's more likely to break both your legs as soon as you step off the front porch. The promise of a truly narrative-driven roguelike is tantalizing, but this isn’t that game. It's just as tied to your skill with the controller as any bullet hell — more so, really, because you carry the consequences of even the slightest mistake a long ways before finally seeing the game over screen. It promises to be a game about the wonder of unbound space; instead, it’s more about the infuriating heartbreak of high wind speeds in a low gravity environment.

The Long Journey Home was reviewed using a pre-release final Steam code provided by Daedalic Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here .

The Long Journey Home Review

Never tell me the odds..

According to one of my playthroughs of the roguelike The Long Journey Home, humanity's first meeting with an alien species took place between the crew of our first interstellar vessel and a squat little glukkt trader named Mendarch. Here it was: the chance of enlightenment and the promise of advances in science beyond our wildest dreams. There was a whole unspoken history in his calling our place the galaxy the "prohibited sector." And what were the fruits of that first mission? He offered to loan me 600 galactic credits and only told me that he expected 200 credits in interest after we finished the transaction. Aliens will be human, I guess.

The Long Journey Home Screens

Unfortunately, those interactions turn out to be a fairly small part of The Long Journey Home. The vast majority of a playthrough involves either easing the ship into a planet's orbit or sending the lander down to a planet's surface to scrounge for gases and metals needed to refuel or repair the craft, or to pick up the "exotic" matter needed to power the jump drive when I wanted to port to a neighboring star. Both minigames are 2D and factor in a given planet's gravity, which appeals to the science nerd inside me in a simplified Kerbal Space Program sort of way. Both require a careful dance of the left and right mouse buttons; in space you use the left button to fire off lightweight "thrusts" for precision maneuvering and the right for "boosts" that guzzle fuel and propel you from a big planet's orbit. When you visit a planet with the lander, you use the left mouse button to thrust upward and the right to thrust downward.

The bumps and bruises you get from botched attempts aren't mere "aw, shucks" moments. They're life-threatening, damaging not only your craft but often breaking the bones of your crewmembers in the process. Upgrades you can pick up from quests of vendor help, yes, but it's always challenging. (And using a controller is far worse as far as I'm concerned, though I've also heard people say the opposite.)

When The Long Journey Home focuses on interactions with a diverse and entertaining cast of aliens across its procedurally generated star systems, it's possible to find a degree of wonder and personality that many roguelike seldom achieve. Unfortunately, such interactions take a back seat to a barrage of frustrating minigames with rewards that rarely match the risks. The experience as a whole suffers for it.

In This Article

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Ign recommends.

The Long Journey Home Review (Switch eShop)

Homeward bound

Version Reviewed: European

• review by Dom Reseigh-Lincoln Fri 6th Sep 2019

The randomised yet finely-crafted adventures found within The Long Journey Home are filled with wonder. Manoeuvring your ship through vast and numerous solar systems, navigating unexplored planets and meeting strange and wonderful alien species – it's all good stuff. But the coin is always flipping in the vacuum of space; the cosmos is unforgivable as it is beguiling. Hostile environments might cause your crew to suffer everything from whiplash to ruptured organs, while winds buffet your lander into sheer rock faces, crippling its thrusters or breaching its hull. Aliens that once seemed friendly might suddenly turn hostile, or inadvertently infect your people with a potentially incurable contagion. You're constantly in awe and in danger.

As an interactive experience, unsurprisingly, this procedurally-generated indie title offers engaging moments of systemic excitement as you stumble on random encounters and strange constructs, tempered with mercilessly brutal periods of punishment, malfunction and death. The Long Journey Home wants you to take in the abject joy of exploring hitherto unexplored corners of space, but it makes it clear you’re unlikely to make it home, despite the promise of its title. It’s both the carrot on the stick and the foreboding warning that you’ll have a run of luck with your resource collecting, then see it all fall apart as an unexpected malfunction jettisons all your fuel or suffocates your entire crew.

In practice, The Long Journey Home plays like a cross between FTL: Faster Than Light and Out There: Ω The Alliance with a sprinkling of The Outer Wilds . As the crew of a ship whose test of humanity’s first faster-than-light engine sends them hurtling across space to regions unknown, it’s up to you to guide your sailors back to the warm space docks of home. Every time you jump to a new system, you never know where you might end up next. It’s one of the game’s biggest allures; a Battlestar Galactica -esque proposition that ties into its procedurally-generated destinations.

Boil down all the references and familiar ideas and what your left with is a rogue-like that’s happy to take things at a narrative pace more akin to a hard science fiction novel, a la The Expanse or Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space saga than, say, the fast-paced space opera of a game such as Mass Effect . Play is split between moving between planets (where your ship is represented by an arrow on a star map), a top-down view showing more detailed space exploration and a side-scrolling perspective when you land on a planet. Flung across the stars, resource management becomes a vital part of your existence. In order to keep your crew of four (available from a set of 10 you choose a the start of the game, each with their own unique traits) you’ll need to mine raw materials to keep your boat afloat.

Learning how to accurately use thrust and boost to move between planets takes a while to master, but once you get the hang of using gravity wells to affect your trajectory (so you can eventually enter a geosynchronous orbit) it adds an invigorating agency that's often ignored by space exploration simulators. In fact, most of The Long Journey Home's systems are all about getting your head around the importance of doing everything manually. There are no training wheels here. You'll need to learn to accurately control the lander you send to mine resources on each new planet, because one false move can send it crashing into the ground. Environmental changes such as storms can really affect an already unwieldy control model that reacts to the slightest misjudgement in thrust or rotation. Once you land, you'll get to scan certain points of interest (such as the giant bones of long-dead leviathans), but the damage you'll take to get there doesn't often warrant the trip itself.

Everything from the integrity of your hull to the reliability of your life support systems need to be carefully managed and topped up. Causing damage to your ship is incredibly easy, as you’ll soon discover, so you’re constantly locked in a cycle of mining and refining. And it’s so easy to damage your ship, and the lander you use to visit planets. A little too easy, if we’re honest. Fly too close to a star and you’ll risk irradiating your vessel. End up a field of debris and you’ll be torn to ribbons. Misjudge a landing and you’ll pulverise the occupants of your lander. The thing is, you have to keep gathering resources – especially the energy needed to power your FTL drive – so you're constantly courting disaster.

Lander controls and the variables that affect its handling are a little too unpredictable, though. We often reminisce fondly on the sedate mechanics of Mass Effect 2 ’s mining mini-game, but where filling up your tanks with minerals and metals was a fun side job in that entry, resource gathering too often becomes the main crux of your existence. It turns The Long Journey Home into more of a survival simulator, and it’s at these times that the game becomes laborious and less engaging. It’s at odds with the creativity poured into the other aspects of the game, namely the randomness of exploration and diplomacy. Because it’s here that this science fiction odyssey is at its most memorable.

You might stray across a roving transponder, pointing you in the direction of a stranded alien species. You might stumble upon an ancient space station constructed by a long lost civilisation. You’ll collect artefacts, gather samples of brand new fauna and fill your data banks with information on far-flung cultures. Not every species you meet is friendly, and if you’re not infected, infested or eaten alive, you’ll need to fire up your weapon systems and defend your crew from destruction. The random nature of The Long Journey Home works really well as a canvas for its cosmic story with twists and turns aplenty, but it’s a concept that's undermined by seemingly random malfunctions and issues that can completely destroy your good fortune and force you to restart a new run.

Playing The Long Journey Home can often be rewarding as it is frustrating. The creativity of the writing, the whimsy of the soundtrack and vast number of cosmic variations you’ll encounter makes each new jump a leap into the unknown. But it too often airs on the unfair, with a careful and calculated set of jumps undone by a sudden and unpredictable calamity or a trip to a planet that cripples your lander, effectively ending your game. The resource management aspect really is a drag, but push past the constant need to spin those plates and there are some really wonderful moments to experience. The procedurally-generated nature of each jump warrants countless replays – you’ll just have to deal with a game that’s often doing its best to scupper its own best characteristics.

About Dom Reseigh-Lincoln

Dom kicked off his games writing career first as a production assistant at Future, then as Production Editor for Official PlayStation Magazine UK. He became Editor at Nintendo Life in December 2017 before pivoting into a career in marketing.

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Comments 12

• Fri 6th Sep 2019

Sounds like the RNG is strong with this one.

I think the best rogue-lites/likes use RNG to unexpectedly throttle the level of challenges — while still making nearly all challenges surmountable, given sufficient skill and planning. I fear this balance might not have been well-calibrated in this case, given what I’ve read here & in Steam reviews.

@sfb Thankfully it sounds like an issue that should be easily patchable.

@sfb I certainly hope they pay attention to this and fine-tune it to be a little more forgiving. I totally agree that the RNG should be there to dictate pacing, not doom a playthrough outright. It's hard to get into a game where you can do everything right, yet still have zero chances of success is the RNG's aren't favorable.

I hope they get this sorted out, because the premise, visuals, and audio tracks are just begging me to pull the trigger.

Yeah, if they tweak this a bit I’m down.

If they add some way to customize the difficulty I’d buy it.

• Sat 7th Sep 2019

Since the PC release was last updated in 2017, I would not hold my breath for any design tweaks in the near future.

I was eyeing this as it sounded right up my alley. I thought this would be the space sim "Oregon Trail" I've been waiting for but that RNG... Ugh. I still intrigued, but I'll wait for now.

• Tempestryke

Sounds like a normal day on planet earth XD

• 120frames-please

Interesting review. I'm more interested in this one now, just not sure if I'll give it a try. Could they patch the mining bits? Maybe create and easy mode so one could enjoy the creative aspects more? I don't know...

• JasmineDragon

This sounds amazing. Random fatalities are part of roguelikes. You're gonna die from RNG in this genre. It's part of its DNA.

• Mon 9th Sep 2019

@JasmineDragon Usually random events and enemies in roguelikes can be either at least very difficult, or avoidable. Randomly dying through no fault of your own whatsoever is taking it a bit too far even for roguelikes.

• Thu 29th Dec 2022

I gotta say that I got this in the sale for £1.80 or something and I've played it for about 2 hours or so now and not like I expected. I was a bit dubious coz it's right on the edge of what normally like to play but actually it's been a good way to pass the time. "Not Bad" is bang on the money. I've not died (yet) and I have no idea if I'll restart if I do but for under £2 it's all good.

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REVIEW: The Long Journey Home

The long journey home is a space adventure with rogue-like elements. can you survive the journey home not on your first try, i’d wager..

Introduction

The Long Journey Home is a space exploration game with rogue-like elements and is the first game from developers, Daedalic Studio West.

In the Long Journey Home, you take control of a crew of four people on the maiden journey of a star ship fitted with prototype technology: the faster-than-light jump drive. Your journey is supposed to be to Alpha Centauri, but the first use of the drive damages the ship and sends it careening through interdimensional space to arrive in a debris field surrounding a strange metallic sphere orbiting a planet in a very distant star system from Sol.

Exploring the sphere and then the planets of its star system, and then the surrounding star systems, you quickly discover where you are and that you’re not alone; the universe is inhabited with all manner of aliens: friend, foe and otherwise. Can you elicit their help — or at least avoid their wrath — for long enough to escape the galaxy and begin your long journey home?

Gameplay Video

The Long Journey Home’s graphics are very well produced and of high quality, but differ immensely in complexity and presentation. There are essentially four distinct graphical modes, which for want of better names I’ll call on-board, interplanetary travel, local area, and lander.

The ship’s on-board systems are presented in a tab-based format, with text and graphical displays. The interface is smooth and works well with mouse or controller, and in the background of many of the screens you’ll sometimes see crew or your occasional passengers lounging around. These little touches are great, bringing life to the ship. There’s a communications screen, too, showing video of any aliens you encounter.

Interplanetary travel has your ship represented by an arrow with a small thruster when accelerating. It shows your current solar system as a plane in three dimensions, with a grid shown over the background star field, and a simple curved line representing your current path across the plane. The grid dips based on the gravity wells of the stellar objects in the system, and it works exceptionally well as an aid to piloting your ship.

Local area mode starts when you encounter an alien craft or enter an asteroid belt or other non-planetary object. This shows a zoomed-in top-down view of your craft, with you taking direct control over the forward and side thrusters. Objects are rendered in 3D and are, for the most part, very pretty, though I find most asteroids to look rather more shiny than I’d expect.

Finally, the lander mode is shown when you choose to land on a planet. This shows a brief and very well rendered cut scene of your lander detaching from your ship, and then displays a side-on view of the lander and surface of the planet, Lunar Lander style. The graphics here, too, are exceptional, with different planets having different atmospheres, lighting, surfaces, and other objects. It’s just a shame you can’t zoom in to get a better view of your lander once you’ve touched down.

Overall the graphics are truly excellent, and the different modes work well together. There’s a handful of detail and performance-related options, allowing you to customise for your PC as required. I played on a GTX1070 and experienced no slowdown with everything set to maximum.

The music is brilliant: some of the best I’ve heard in a computer game. From dramatic, heart-pounding scores when you’re close to death, piloting your lander through the clouds of a gas giant in a last-ditch attempt to gather some fuel, or to the beautiful and emotion-charged uplifting title screen track, I love it all.

Sound effects are good, with nice landing thruster sounds and cool weapon-charging beeps. It’s just a shame there are no voices or alien communication sounds.

The Long Journey Home tells a grand story of four people on an epic journey through unexplored space, on a ship that’s slowly deteriorating, doing what they can to survive. The game as a whole is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before, with traditional Newtonian physics for space flight and landing, and rogue-like elements to ensure replayability and variation. Its various components most definitely add up to a game that is more than the sum of its parts.

People have suggested that The Long Journey Home is basically just a graphical update for Lunar Lander. I guess you could look at it that way, but that’s a bit like saying that Grand Theft Auto V is just a graphical update for Road Race. Yes, the landing stages play a lot like Lunar Lander, but they make up only one part of the game.

The game begins with you selecting your crew of four out of 10 applicants. You then select your ship, from a choice of three, and lander, also from three. And you specify a random-number generator seed by typing in a short character string. This is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s also more than that; you see, it allows you to replay with a seed that you particularly like, or share the seed with others to compare performance. It’s a great addition to the genre; I hope we see more procedural generation games allowing manual seed input.

After the introductory piece, the remainder of the game is all about survival. You explore each system, landing on planets to harvest resources in order to proceed to the next system and, eventually, to Sol and the Earth. Interplanetary travel is quite calming, with a good degree of patience required to use gravity wells and orbit efficiently, so as to reduce your fuel burn. Landing can be frustrating, and even after watching the various videos available I feel as though I’m still missing something, as I often seem to take a lot of damage mining or collecting gas, for very little gain. Alien encounters are varied and interesting, and seem to usually offer at least two alternative results.

The odds against your crew succeeding are astronomical (heh), and I’d suggest success will take both luck and skill, especially at the highest difficulty level. The game apparently includes eight main alien races, with each seed only including four of them, leading to many of the quests being different with each game. There are other minor races, too, who appear in every game.

The game does have a few problems, though. Lander sequences seem to be based on attrition, with luck determining whether you’ll successfully mine enough components to counter the damage your lander will take from mining. There also seems to be no way to use relative controls for interplanetary travel, though they work fine in lander and local area modes. The in-game information for beginners is quite limited, with a title-screen link taking players to youtube videos for tutorials, and the loading times really are pretty terrible, and far too frequent. Cash is hard to come by, and I also have to wonder why my ship has a top speed of 6 AU/h in interplanetary space, no matter how much I accelerate. Oh, and it does need to be said: the game is rather expensive.

Pros and Cons

Pros: + Lovely musical score + Excellent graphics throughout + Very engaging + Rogue-like elements are very well done + Steam Achievements

Cons: – Resource collection can be frustrating – Weird controls – Long loading times – Very expensive

The Long Journey Home is a strange game and not at all what I expected. But that’s not a bad thing. The rogue-like elements are expertly intertwined, making what might otherwise have been a rather repetitive and boring game instead attention grabbing and addictive. The developers have done a superb job of turning relatively basic gameplay into an epic journey in which you actually feel for the characters and want them to succeed. In spite of its frustrations, I have been thoroughly enjoying playing this game.

I've been playing computer games for over 30 years. I like most game genres and I'm happy to give anything a chance.

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Further reading

REVIEW: Unlock The King 3

REVIEW: Rune Factory 4 Special

PREVIEW: Len’s Island

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REVIEW: Blacksad: Under the Skin

REVIEW: Timelie

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Summary Explore an endlessly shifting universe. Forge alliances with powerful alien races. Harness your crew’s skills, from research to archaeology to space combat. Do whatever it takes to get Home.

• PlayStation 4
• Nintendo Switch
• Daedalic Studio West
• Action Adventure

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“The way it moves between moments of wonder, humour and tragedy makes The Long Journey Home a rare pleasure among science fiction games.” Kotaku “Interacting with different alien races makes the universe in the game feel vivid and alive – that’s something The Long Journey Home does way better than other games in the past.” 90% – Gamereactor “The game can’t teach you everything in tutorial after tutorial. Thank goodness. You’d never start your doomed mission. But you’ll have to be patient with yourself. You know so little going into this.” 80% – GamingNexus

About This Game

System requirements.

• OS *: Win 7, 8, 10, 64-bit
• Processor: 3 GHz Dual Core CPU
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 650 Ti / AMD Radeon HD 7790
• DirectX: Version 11
• Storage: 16 GB available space
• Sound Card: DirectX 11 compatible sound card with latest drivers
• Processor: 3GHz Quad Core CPU
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 970 / AMD Radeon R9 380
• Processor: i5 3GHz
• Graphics: AMD R9 M380X
• Storage: 15 GB available space
• Additional Notes: SSD and Controller recommended
• Graphics: AMD Radeon Pro 560

© Copyright 2017 Daedalic Entertainment Studio West GmbH and Daedalic Entertainment GmbH. The Long Journey Home is a trademark of Daedalic Entertainment Studio West GmbH. Daedalic and the Daedalic logo are trademarks of Daedalic Entertainment GmbH. All rights reserved.

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Articles Blog

Vladimir okhotnikov found out what alexei navalny said before his death.

Vladimir Okhotnikov: A Lifelong Protest of Alexey Navalny

Alexei Navalny until recently remained the leader of the Russian opposition. He founded the Anti-Corruption Foundation, ran popular YouTube channels, and was the main contender in the Moscow mayoral elections in 2013. At 47, Alexey survived an assassination attempt and spent years in Russian prisons after his team uncovered numerous cases of corruption.

Alexei Navalny was one of the most prominent people in modern Russia. They learned about it thanks to high-profile investigations among officials and state companies. And, despite the tightening of the political regime, imprisonment, assassination attempt, Navalny still managed to rally like-minded people around him.

The oppositionist was born in 1976 in a village called Obninsk, west of the Russian capital. In the late 90s he graduated from the Faculty of Law of the RUDN University, and only 10 years later he began to gain strength in politics as a fighter against corruption.

Alexey became famous for actively exposing alleged figures involved in theft in some large state-owned companies. Among those on his list were Alisher Usmanov, the head of several large companies; Leonid Mikhelson, shareholder of NOVATEK, Sibur, Dar fund; Mikhail Abyzov, Minister of Open Government Affairs, co-owner of Sibeko, Ru-com, Anduril Enterprises limited, Fresko Financial Limited and others.

My main message is simple: the party is infested with scammers and thieves – Alexei Navalny

Long before his death, Navalny became famous for a documentary in which he tried to expose corruption in the highest echelons of power.

Navalny dedicated an almost two-hour journalistic investigation in which the head of state was allegedly involved in the story of the biggest bribe. Alexey was remembered in the video for his wit and charisma.

“… He opposed excessive centralization of power and its consolidation in the hands of one person. He was not opposed to the people, but sought to bring unscrupulous officials to justice. And it’s not so much about his personality, which many consider controversial …”, a short excerpt from an interview with Vladimir Okhotnikov.

Vladimir is a person who not only has deep knowledge in the field of cryptocurrencies. They are an ardent defender of individual freedom and independence. His analytical skills allow him to deeply understand the technological and economic aspects of the financial sector, and his libertarian views make him a supporter of decentralization.

“ For me he was not a clear-cut figure. There are things for which Alexey can be criticized. But the main thing is that he fought against corruption and lawlessness, and stood for justice and openness of power. And these are fundamental things that are important for everyone who supports libertarianism ,” Vladimir briefly summarized.

Vladimir Okhotnikov considers Alexei Navalny a symbol of freedom, which the majority in the world, not to mention the Russians themselves, actually strive for. And the propaganda that sounded from the mouths of famous politicians did not seem to fit into the ideals of the opposition.

“ In fact, Navalny was against specific violations of law and justice, and not against the citizens of his country. He defended the values of freedom, truth and the rule of law, which are important for everyone ,” this is how Vladimir described Alexei Navalny.

The desire for freedom – beyond nationality, beyond race

The interview, in which Navalny was asked what he would advise people if something happened to him, was covered by many media outlets. When asked what to do if he was killed, Alexei replied “ continue the fight for freedom .”

Alexey urged his supporters not to stop at repression, but to go further along the path of upholding democratic values and human rights. According to him, even if something happens to him, this fight must continue. This is how Navalny expressed his readiness to make any sacrifices in the name of the ideals of freedom and justice.

While in prison, the oppositionist regularly sent messages through his lawyers, which were published on social networks. In them, he talked about the difficult conditions of detention and the forced struggle for even the most basic rights and opportunities.

In one of the messages, Alexey said that he sued the prison administration. The reason was the refusal to provide him with winter shoes for outdoor walks, which he was allowed to do. Without suitable footwear, Navalny was forced to choose between the risk of getting sick in the cold or giving up these short walks altogether.

Navalny noted that this situation puts him at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – we are talking about basic physiological needs. He had to defend even the most basic rights: to warm shoes, clothes.

Link across thousands of kilometers: Satoshi Nakamoto and Alexei Navalny are symbols of libertarianism – Vladimir Okhotnikov

It may seem unusual, but there are some similarities between the personalities of Alexei Navalny and Satoshi Nakamoto – although they are not meant to be similar in appearance.

Here it is appropriate to say that both went against the system. Navalny fought to the end, despite the risks. No one but him can explain why he returned to Russia after rehabilitation in Germany.

Everyone remembers the story of poisoning with the chemical warfare agent Novichok. So, after successful treatment, on January 17, 2021, immediately upon arrival at the Moscow airport, Navalny was arrested for violating his probation. This was the last day of his freedom – he did not yet know that he would never see her again.

Only now it becomes clear that if Satoshi had revealed his identity, he would have faced even greater pressure. No, he would not have been killed, but he would have been made an example for those who would like to oppose the system and create alternative decentralized finance.

“ Satoshi Nakamoto is the biggest mystery of our time. Nobody knows who really is hiding behind this pseudonym. There are only assumptions. Apparently, this crypto enthusiast has calculated everything in advance …”, this opinion was expressed by Vladimir Okhotnikov.

“ It is unknown whether Alexey knew about the problems that would begin for him after a series of high-profile investigations. It will remain a mystery. It is unlikely that a person with such intelligence could make such a mistake. Most likely, he had other motives that only he himself knew about ,” the analyst emphasized.

In fact, it takes a lot of courage and strength of character to challenge the system. Navalny, Nakamoto, Khan, Trump, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Castillo – this is not a complete list of those who went against the generally accepted.

Who’s next – Musk, Viktor Orban? These people have to walk on thin ice, where there is no room for error. 

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A list of Modules , that can be installed in the ship or the lander.

Modules can be damaged and have defects .

• 1.1 Fixed modules
• 1.2 Custom modules
• 2.1 Fixed modules
• 2.2.1 Weapons
• 2.2.2 Shields

Lander [ | ]

Fixed modules [ | ].

Custom modules [ | ]

In the beginning of the game the Pilot Ejector is installed in the lander. All custom modules can be destroyed to make space for other modules or to avoid repair costs, if buying a new one is cheaper.

The Pilot Ejector is exclusively sold at Reeve planets.

All custom modules can be destroyed to make space for other modules or to avoid repair costs, if buying a new one is cheaper.

There are modules that show up in the code, but can probably not be obtained:

Weapons [ | ]

Starbases do not sell weapons.

Shields [ | ]

A shield has two recharge times, an active and a broken recharge. If a shield is broken, the recharge rate is slowed down to a crawl and forces the player to abandon one side for a time. Try to rotate your ship to distribute damage evenly. Since the earliest shields often break by one barrage, this can hardly be avoided. Later shields like 'Phased Crystal Shielding' recharge extremely fast, but also suffer from total breakdowns. If used smart, the PCS can carry you through all 'minor' battles due to quick recharge in its active mode.

Starbases do not sell shields.

The Long Journey Home

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