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The Long Journey Home Review

by Alex Fuller · November 30, 2018

Are We Nearly There Yet?

Originally released for PC last year before making its way onto consoles this November, The Long Journey Home is a different title from what many have come to expect from Daedalic Entertainment, a developer and publisher more renowned for its various adventure titles. Tasking players with guiding a ship across the far reaches of space, The Long Journey Home never attempts to make its journey particularly thrilling, but the deliberate pacing combines well with its risk-versus-reward elements and the simple enjoyment of travelling the stars.

The Long Journey Home begins with players selecting the crew, spaceship, and universe seed for a mission to test a new faster-than-light drive. There are ten potential members to fill out the four available crew slots, each with their own item and skill set, as well as three spaceship and lander options providing different attributes in terms of speed, cargo space, and so forth. As the title alludes to, the test does not go quite as planned, and the crew find themselves and the ship far, far away from home. Left to their own devices, the crew must try and find the way home while dealing with dangerous locations, limited resources, and aliens of the friendly and not-so-friendly varieties.

The universe seed is the primary factor that will affect a playthrough of The Long Journey Home . It determines what players will be able to encounter, from the alien species present to the general makeup of the stars and galaxies they will be roaming in. This leads to a wide variety in difficulty between playthroughs, with certain seeds being far more welcoming to new players than others. However, there is always an element of luck to things, and even on an easier seed and with the game’s story difficulty setting, there will be many opportunities for the journey to end prematurely.

Successfully slinging the ship between planets is highly satisfactory.

The structure of the game has players jumping from star system to star system, stopping off at planets, space stations, and asteroid fields to find resources, investigate points of interest, or take on small jobs. Gravity plays a big part in travelling between locations in the star system, and players are heavily encouraged to make use of gravitational slingshots wherever they can to ensure they don’t needlessly waste fuel. Once players have successfully gone into orbit around a planet or moon, they can send the lander down to the surface, where it will have resource points that can be gathered and maybe other points of interest such as an alien settlement or set of ruins to explore. The structure is decently paced, with planetary stopovers always being a quick in-and-out, and it makes for an engaging journey where it can be easy and enjoyable to get sucked into a mindset of “just one more system…”.

The game’s controls are nice and straightforward, but one of the few annoyances comes with controlling the lander. Some planets are more hostile and difficult to land on than others, some having high gravity or winds, others prone to earthquakes or lightning storms, with players able buy and attach modules to the lander to help against these. However, the game always seems to enjoy throwing the lander down at high speed, so that even a lander that has in theory been modified to cope with the conditions will still be flung onto the surface despite the player’s best attempts. In these cases all players can do is hope the damage isn’t too severe and just carry on. It’s understandable that the game is promoting a sense of risk-versus-reward on using the lander, but it’s nevertheless frustrating, particularly given how much more enjoyable and comparatively friendly interplanetary travel is.

Combat encounters are not worth actively seeking out.

Though there are some interesting quests and pieces of lore to discover, there isn’t much of a narrative to The Long Journey Home . Part of this is because quests and jobs often require that players go out of their way to complete them, which is generally a high risk to take considering the limited resources available and the propensity of the ship to be damaged through wear and tear when it jumps. Even on the friendly seeds, money needed for repairs can be hard to come by and so time spent going back and forth in one sector can be very costly in the long run. There are very few named characters in the game, and those that are named generally appear for a single quest before they disappear and are never heard from again. The Long Journey Home is undeniably more about trying to survive the journey above anything else, but there’s some interesting variety to the alien species that can appear, with some enjoyable writing and inconsequential banter between the crew that appears from time to time.

Crew members don’t gain any new skills on top of those they come with; anything they can do to help depends on items picked up throughout the voyage. The main concern is keeping them alive, as various things such as radiation from stars and heavy lander impacts can cause injuries, five of which will cause that crew member’s death. Instead, any progress comes from what helpful items players are able to attain, and crew members can be help get these. For example, Ash is able to turn alien flora into medical items, used to heal aforementioned injuries. Meanwhile, players can also buy new modules for the ship or lander that will provide bonuses such as improved radiation shielding. It all follows the theme of survival above anything else.

Combat is not very interesting and more often than not best avoided. Combat will see the ship come up against another ship, usually bigger, which may itself spawn additional smaller ships. The ships then fly around each other, shooting in pre-defined directions — the default weapon has the player ship fire up to four projectiles directly port and starboard, with players able to buy upgrades from a very limited selection of weapons and shields — then recharging before firing again. If players win, they may be lucky enough to receive a paltry set of credits or resources that may just about cover any repairs. If players lose, then it’s time to rewind back to the start of the star system or start the entire journey anew. The combat itself is straightforward, but is rarely worth the time and effort.

Some planets have very pretty backdrops, but be prepared to see similar ones elsewhere in the galaxy.

There’s not too much to say about the audio in The Long Journey Home . The best thing to say is that the atmospheric music tracks do a nice job combined with the gravitational simulation to make the journeys between planets nice and chilled out. Sound effects are fine, but there’s no voice acting, though given the general lack of narrative in the game, there isn’t much to be gained even if it was present. Visuals also do the job well, with a nice and clear UI, but the positives reduce out over time. Some planets are pleasing to look at, but by the time players are through they will have seen all the templates multiple times. The same goes for the alien species, there is good variation between them, but just one design for each species and nothing to distinguish individual encounters.

The Long Journey Home doesn’t outstay its welcome. A successful journey should take most players around ten hours, which is a good length for those who just want to get home and enjoy the accomplishment while the gameplay cycle remains enjoyable. Meanwhile, the way the universe is generated with seeds means that those who are interested in seeing everything the game has to offer as well as find new challenges have many reasons to keep coming back. It never offers the most in-depth or exciting gameplay moments, but the overall experience of The Long Journey Home is an enjoyable one.

Good at sucking players into the journey

Using gravity is fun

Combat feels like an afterthought

Some lander annoyances

Tags: Daedalic Entertainment PS4 The Long Journey Home

Alex Fuller

Alex joined RPGamer in 2011 as a Previewer before moving onto Reviews, News Director, and Managing Editor. Became Acting Editor-in-Chief in 2018.

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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

There’s something already so hopeful in the musical score, even from the main menu. There’s a hope. There’s a dream of the stars in these notes. There’s something making my spirits soar when I hear it.

I assemble my crew. I can select only four of 10 potential crew members. These are the four IASA crew that will embark on humanity’s first interstellar jump to Alpha Centauri. So I choose Siobahn, an archeologist, someone with her heart and mind on earthly things. Then I choose Malcolm, a pilot, someone with his heart and mind on the skies. Third, I choose Kirsten, an astronaut, someone with her heart and mind on the stars. And finally, I choose Nikolay, a researcher, someone with his heart and mind in labs and books. I’m not having to choose between a balanced role-playing party of wizards, warriors, and thieves, but an impossible-to-balance party of brilliant minds and brave hearts.

My archaeologist looks like a nerdy Lara Croft, my pilot looks like a football coach, my astronaut looks like she’s chilling in a Mass Effect hoodie, and my researcher looks like Ernest Hemingway in a lab coat. I think I’m already in love with these guys.

Next, I get to—no, wait—I get to select from a row of ships? Good choice, letting me take ownership of this small aspect of Project Daedalus. I’m pleasantly surprised. There are three ships to choose from: The ISS Ulysses (I knew there’d be a reference to Homer’s Odyssey in here) is the game’s poster boy ship and a great all-rounder; the ISS Endurance (possibly named after the first trans-Antarctic expedition) is more of a tank, with thick skin and short jump range; and then the ISS Discovery (possibly named after the space shuttle Discovery, which launched and landed more missions than any other spacecraft to date), is an agile long jumper that probably can’t take a joke, let alone a laser blast.

Having no idea what I’m getting into—this being my first mission and all—I choose the Ulysses, knowing that I need a ship that can float somewhere in the middle. I flip through a selection of color choices, another nice customization, and settle on a blue, white, and charcoal palette that reminds me of the LEGO Cosmic Fleet Voyager box set I owned as a kid.

And a lander? I get to choose a lander, too? This is one of the best set of character-generation screens I’ve ever gone through. I quickly select the ISV Serenity just because. And by “just because” I mean “of course I’m going to choose anything paying homage to Firefly, the best sci-fi western of the 21st century.”

But they’re all going to die soon. And it’s going to be all my fault.

My four crew members engage the jump drives. They blast off toward Alpha Centauri. Then, mid jump, disaster strikes. The ship is getting wrecked. And instead of landing near Alpha Centauri, they’re shoved tens of thousands of astronomical units from Earth, on the far side of this procedurally generated roguelike galaxy. It’s going to be a long journey home.

To do so, I’ve got to harness my crew’s disparate talents, planet hop across star systems, lunar land my way onto planetary surfaces to collect resources, repair, refuel, and then make the next jump. There are well-established aliens wherever we go. Some of their advice helps. Some hinders. They barely like each other, let alone me, this unknown alien species that ended up in their neighborhood by accident.

So, I go about the nasty business of surviving. That’s going to require resources to refuel and patch up my ship, refuel and patch up my lander, and keep the jump drive operationally happy. Flying with a top-down view of each solar system makes it feel like I’m sailing across a galactic putting green. Gravity wells surround every heavenly body. Asteroids harbor a small amount of resources, as do planets, and, in a dangerous and ill-advised fuel-scooping process, so do the stars themselves.

Finding a good speed and trajectory to orbit around planets is tricky. You’re gauging your velocity, applying reverse thrust to slow down, tweaking your route around a planet’s gravitational pull, then locking in a steady orbit. You won’t be very good at it, at first. It takes some practice. If you’re me, you’ll bounce around a planet, knocking your crew around the inside of your ship like Altoids in a tin. It’s rough. You’ll get better at it. But not before breaking a few ribs and earning a few lacerations. You won’t have enough first-aid kits to go around either. This is how your first attempt at The Long Journey Home begins to end.

Once you pull off a steady orbit, then it’s time to take the lander down. You assign a pilot and send that person to the surface. It’ll be any number of randomized locations, but it’ll feel like half of them are a volcanic hellscape of gale force winds and unlandable mountain peaks. This, of course, is not true. There are plenty of low-risk, very landable planets. But it won’t feel like it at first. You’ll cringe when your lander hits the ground at reentry speeds. You’ll noticeably clinch your teeth when your lander pilot registers a concussion. Then you’ll hopefully inch your way, carefully, to a marked location with precious few resources to harvest. There won’t be enough resources to refuel and repair everything. There never is. You’ll get a fuel warning. The lander is down to 15 percent or less in its fuel tank. You’re not going to make it back to that third location. So, you shoot back up and out of the atmosphere, returning to the main ship. The scrape for survival has begun.

The game doesn’t want to formally introduce me to the many screens it has. Tabs on tabs on tabs, yet I’m expected to go in there, poke around, and wonder why nothing’s happening when I do poke around. To explain, The Long Journey home is a roguelike, but you don’t get a “new game plus” with a new piece of gear to help you on your next run. The “loot” is the knowledge you gain along the way. You learn this screen does this, that resource does that, and this alien really doesn’t appreciate it when I compliment/insult/approach them/myself/that other alien race they share the galaxy with, especially when I have the saving solution/genocidal formula/deus ex machina in my cargo hold.

The game can’t, and won't, teach you everything in tutorial after tutorial. Thank goodness. Were that the case, you’d never get started on your doomed mission. But you’ll have to be patient with yourself. You know so little going into this. You’re going to die, sometimes horribly, often unceremoniously, many times before you get the hang of any of this. It feels like you’re getting nowhere. It feels like you’re shaking your head in disbelief that you’ve reached the end of your fuel reserves, again, and your only backup solution is to do an EM scoop around a radiation-happy star that’s no doubt, 100 percent, going to give one, if not two, of your crew members some severe burns.

My first mission log went something like this:

Nikolay Lebedev got some broken ribs on his first planetary landing. It was rough going with the lander on a high-gravity planet. He died on the next planet, however, which was a fiery hell wracked with gale force winds. Malcolm Winters, my certified Air Force pilot, died the very next day, the lander blowing up with him. Again, I seem to only run into planets with Hurricane Katrina already whipping through. So I returned to the Entrope Harvester—a massive space station run by a robotic race—to craft another lander from blueprints. No button I pushed, no conversational tree I pursued, would get that lander built. No idea what I’m missing. [ I missed a button. -Ed ] I tried jumping in and out of the system again, hoping it would reset my “timed out” conversations with the robotic Entrope. But I ran out of fuel, attempted a fuel-scooping maneuver around the local star, then burned up when I hit the surface, but only after taking severe radiation damage from the whole Wile E. Coyote maneuver.

I’ve figured out a thing or two since then. But yeah, that first mission didn’t go so well. It won’t go well for you either. Just learn what you can. Take that knowledge with you. You won’t make it home on your first try. Probably not on your second either. If you’re like me, then seven or eight attempts won't be enough to ever see Earth again. Enjoy it.

Communicating with aliens is simple. Not that their reactions are predictable, though. Like when I spoke with the very mean and generally unfair Ilitza people. They called my ship a garbage scow and thought my meeting with them was, at best, “inevitable.” So I praised them. They told me to keep my praises. So I insulted them. They told me to get out of their house.

Extraterrestrials, am I right?

The story vignettes are a highpoint. Planetary surfaces house valuable gasses and minerals, but they house even more valuable sci-fi story bits. Your lander pilot, through text-adventure-style communications, will delve into alien ruins, carve their way through alien jungles, and find artifacts, parasites, or, sometimes, nothing at all. The conversations with extraterrestrials are informative and occasionally tiresome—even they think so and will frequently cut you off—but the Arthur C. Clarke School of Exploration is money well spent on the game’s writers.

The Long Journey Home, however, could use a little more consistency in key mapping. Push W to open map; push E to close it. Tab to open ship menus; both Tab and E to close them. There’s an entire screen to assess the condition of your lander, a second screen to repair it, and yet a third screen to assign a pilot. The game is intent on keeping each screen simple. That, however, means there are too many screens to do what you need to do.

The Long Journey Home isn’t always fun. I don’t think it’s meant to be. Its musical score soars with hope. Its crew keeps its chin up pretty well. And yet, getting better at this game isn’t always as rewarding as I’d like it to be. Reloading saves and generally gaining in knowledge and ability is comforting, but it’s getting harder and harder to put a smile on my face while making the trudge home. Yes, I’m better at landing, better at navigating, and better at fighting. But instead of insisting on finding my way back to Earth, I’m a lot like my ship, constantly running out of fuel.

The Long Journey Home is a roguelike sci-fi survival simulator fueled on hope and hopelessness. Bring them home, commander. But be ready to die a hundred deaths before that ever happens.

Rating: 8 Good

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.

About Author

Randy gravitates toward anything open world, open ended, and open to interpretation. He prefers strategy over shooting, introspection over action, and stealth and survival over looting and grinding. He's been a gamer since 1982 and writing critically about video games for over 15 years. A few of his favorites are Skyrim, Elite Dangerous, and Red Dead Redemption. He lives with his wife and daughter in Oregon.

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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The Long Journey Home

• VisualEditor

From the bridge of your ship, you see a million points of light. Only one of them matters. Home.

It was only supposed to be a short trip. But when your jump drive malfunctions, you and a mismatched crew of specialists along for the ride find yourselves trapped and alone on the wrong side of the galaxy. The only way back is through. Forge alliances with strange Alien Races . Explore distant Planets for the Ruins , Artifacts and Resources they hide. Harness your crew’s Skills , from archeology to diplomacy. Make deals and moral decisions that change the universe. Do whatever it takes to survive.

Enter a new galaxy every game. Will you find yourself welcomed by Traders and noble warrior knights... or surrounded by Pirates , psychopaths, and an unspeakable cosmic horror that threatens to snuff out the stars themselves. One destination. Endless adventures. Where will your Journey take you?

Game Features [ | ]

• 2 Resources

The Long Journey Home Review

Star control to major tom.

HIGH Learning more about each alien race.

LOW Landing on literally any planet that isn’t harmless.

WTF In this game, Farscape is more dangerous to live in than Andromeda.

There were moments during my time with  The Long Journey Home  when I was laughing, moments when I felt introspective, and moments when I wanted to throw my controller at the wall. It all felt appropriate, given that it draws much inspiration from ’80s and ’90s space games like Star Control and Elite,  a genre that I dabbled with many years after its heyday and struggled with, both cognitively and technically.

The setup is that the player picks four crew members from an assortment, and then pops them into an experimental ship that encounters difficulties and accidentally takes them hurtling across the universe into a completely unknown galaxy. They encounter a strange artifact upon arrival, and then try and make their way back to Earth.

The story is light in terms of characterization — light banter between crew members provides some color, that’s about it. Each of the crew are spread across broad stereotypes like the asshole company man, quirky tech geek, borderline-sociopath scientist, honorable ship captain, and so on. None of it is ever essential, but it gave me just enough to care about.

A more significant part of the story development comes from encountering alien races. Each race fits some obvious trope (the ultra-religious, the ultra-capitalists) and some less-obvious (a race that hangs out around black holes and talks conspiracy theories). The most fascinating of these races — and to be honest it was hard to choose — are a group of higher beings that don’t directly cause harm, but like to play judge in intergalactic affairs and then pay humans to act as executioners.

The joy (and mystery) of meeting these new species was figuring out how much of what they were telling me was real and how much was a product of language barriers. This process is done through an elaborate multiple-choice conversation system where saying certain things unlocks more dialogue options that then allowed for learning more. For example, the first requests seemed relatively harmless until I realized I was being tasked with genocide. Admittedly, it was the genocide of a plant creature that assimilates whole planets and infected my crew, but it still made me uncomfortable to wipe them off the face of the universe.

There are stories like this one for all the races, and exploring them is what constitutes the best part of  The Long Journey   Home.  Unfortunately, the problem is getting to them.

Mechanically, travel through solar systems is presented as 2D top-down representation of galaxies and solar systems, and the player’s ship is basically a cursor that must deal with gravity and thrust. Meeting aliens and space battles also happen here. There are also interludes where the player must take control of a lander and make trips down to planets in order to collect resources.

The game is simple enough as described so far, but keeping the crew alive and the necessary resources stocked is where the challenge and frustration comes in. Collecting any of the supplies needed (thrust fuel, hyperdrive fuel, metal for hull repairs, and so on) is done by dangerously orbiting a star and scooping up matter, entering an asteroid field and attempting to mine rocks, landing on planets and harvesting gas, or trading with the other races. While attempting any of these things, crew members will randomly receive injuries and parts of the ship or lander will be damaged. Death and failure are always around the corner since simply travelling can hurt, landing on planets will most likely hurt, and picking the wrong dialogue choice with an alien can be perilous.

It’s also important to note that the starmap and events are randomly generated when players begin a new game — sometimes I crashed out early on due to poor circumstances like a series of aggressively difficult planets that destroyed my lander, or systems that simply had no gases to use for fuel. Worse, sometimes my failure would be a slow burn with things piling on bit after bit in insurmountable fashion – one thing after another and then before I knew it, my crew would start going down and my ship would end up floating through space with no hope of seeing Earth. And the absolute worst? Moments when it all goes wrong because of a poor decision made hours earlier — something like selling an innocuous item that turned out to be key, or spending crucial money on an upgrade that I ultimately didn’t need.

Essentially all of these failures aren’t bad things — the next run in a fresh universe allowed for meeting the races in a different context, and I’d say that this is the game’s meta, and a reason for replay. However, the problem is that the resource management is so frequent and unavoidable that it gets in the way of the stories and exploration. Many modern roguelikes build in persistent upgrades or unlocks that carry over between attempts, but  The Long Journey  eschews that approach and is worse for it. Each new attempt at reaching Earth can be equally punishing, even when the basics are mastered. To spend  hours  trying to get to the last solar system, only to die horribly and then have nothing to show for it is hugely demotivating.

So, is  The Long Journey Home  worth it? Overall I’d say yes, the moments of discovery and dealing with alien races makes the experience worth engaging in. My only hope is that the developers introduce a difficulty setting that allows players to dial back the drudgery of resource collection. The good outweighs the bad here, but there’s a much better experience waiting to be discovered underneath the busywork and failure. Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Daedalic Entertainment West and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It is currently available on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One and PS4.  This copy of the game was obtained via Publisher  and reviewed on the XBO-X.  Approximately  18 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed . There are no multiplayer modes.  

Parents: According to the ESRB , this game is rated M for Mature and contains Sexual Themes  and Strong Language . The game is not particularly gory, but more than earns its rating — mature themes like genocide, suicide, and murder are portrayed. Although never graphic, it can be disturbing. The difficulty level is also very high, so overall this is not recommend for pre-teens.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options. I struggled with some objectives given the tiny icons combined with my mild colour blindness.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no voiceovers, so everything is conveyed by text. Some of the communications are hard to parse from the interface (the minimap is confusing with or without sound) but otherwise the game is fully playable without audio cues. It is not possible to alter the size of the text.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable . There is no control diagram. During space flight the right stick steers the ship, the A button uses the thrusters to alter course, and pressing down the right trigger and the A button will initiate a warp. During the lander sections, the right stick is used to alternate orientation, the A button does up thrust, the right trigger does down thrust and the left trigger mines/collects resources. During mining and combat sections, the right stick steers while the A button boosts, holding the X button initiates combat mode and then the right trigger does a small dash while the left Trigger fires the weapons.  The D-pad is, inexplicably, used for most option selections.

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The Long Journey Home Review

It’s tough to hang out and have a latte in space. Every time you wake up you find yourself facing radiation poisoning, suffocation from lack of life support, or just complete and utter devastation where everyone you’ve ever loved dies in front of your eyes. If you’re looking for your next holiday try Ibiza, or Skegness… just not space. But we can’t resist it, can we?

We all want to boldly go where no man or woman has ever gone before, and The Long Journey Home is no different, taking us on to an adventure into the unknown. But is it the new Star Trek or does it come across more like some Pigs in Space?

You start The Long Journey Home with a heavy decision to make; one of choice. I hate having to make choices in real life, let alone in games as it makes me feel queasy and here it is no different – who do you take with you on your fantastic voyage? Do you take a pilot, a botanist, a philosopher or even the intern? Personally, when it’s time for an intern to head to the unknown, then you know the human race is in trouble. Each of these 10 characters have different attributes and thoughts on space travel though, and you may well find that some will be able to help you on the journey ahead. You’ll need to choose wisely.

It is from here where you leave for the great journey into the unknown. The first part of the gameplay sees you controlling a small ship out in the wide expanses of space, leaving you to accelerate and steer into the orbit of an interesting planet, allowing you to then land. Once down on terra firma the next part of the gameplay employs you with attempting to pilot an orbital lander vehicle successfully onto mining spots, possible locations for exploration, or the chance to meet exotic species.

Without a word of a lie, both of the gameplay sections found in The Long Journey Home can be tricky to action, but it is the second – that of piloting the orbital lander – which will make you want to scream and throw yourself out of an airlock. But in the same breath, that is part of the draw with the game; space travel is not meant to be easy. I just wish it could be a bit more enjoyable.

The story that accompanies this is, frankly, brilliant and involves you travelling to Mars after leaving Earth to test a new scientific jump system – or something more technical than I’m describing. It, of course, all goes pear-shaped and you find yourself light years away across the universe, attempting to action the long journey home.

The good thing is that each journey you make is different, delivering a multitude of personal stories, some great encounters with the strange, discoveration of aliens or the usual “oh my god, we’re all going to die” scenarios. Alien encounters are really interesting in fact and there are some nicely written scenes on offer here, leaving you to try and work with the best choices. This is the highlight of the game for me and I love the premise and the possibilities on offer.

Away from that though and the rest of The Long Journey Home is intentionally hard as nails and the two little game types that make up the action will see you battling constant fuel problems, crew injury, and bloody hull damage. It’s a nightmare and you will wish you’d never heard of words like ‘space’, ‘ships’ or ‘critical’ ever again. I have destroyed my crew countless times, but there is something about the game that makes you want to go back to try again and again. I guess it’s the lure of exploration that keeps you coming back for more.

It also comes with a nice visual tone that sets the scene well. I love the first take-off, the cities in the background, and the simple asteroid-type ship navigating across the galaxy. The character designs are great and there are some nice touches throughout. It does get a bit samey after a while, but overall it brings a cool and sharp vibe throughout.  

This all sees The Long Journey Home become a game that, at times, is easy to love; scope, energy and innovation come to the fore. I really dig the visual design and the way it has tried to do many different things in its execution. The problem though is that it is, firstly too expensive, and secondly, very hard and getting through the landing section, drilling and getting out again without killing the crew is at times impossible. But that said, there are no doubt many gamers out there who love a challenge, looking forward to the task in front of them.

If you’re looking for an strange little alternative to No Man’s Sky then look no further than The Long Journey Home.

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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

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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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