Extreme difficulty enough to put anybody off
NEVER has a game illuminated the rift between good ideas on paper and shoddy execution so much as The Long Journey Home. The premise is wonderful; you are in a spacecraft that has suffered a malfunction, causing you to be sent to the other side of the galaxy. Your mission is to make it back home to Earth.
To say the odds are stacked against you would be a gross understatement. Between the next-to-impossible mini-games, ship components that randomly break without warning, a complete lack of resources to fix said components and the malevolent intervention of alien species, I can safely say that you probably won’t make it back to Earth - I know I never did (though I did come close).
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. 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 stuff.
The Long Journey Home is supposed to be difficult, but there were many, many times where I felt that the balance was too far in favour of the house. 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. 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.
The Long Journey Home is ambitious for an Indie game and it certainly shows. While it isn’t necessarily a bad title, the extreme difficulty is enough to put anybody off. Only the most masochistic of space enthuasiasts should dare pick this one up.