long journey home metacritic

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 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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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 (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.

• Author Profile

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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“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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The Long Journey Home Reviews

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

Read full review

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.

The Long Journey Home promises much more than its punishing gameplay can deliver on

Daedalic has created a very brave space roguelike that features strategy elements and a huge universe to keep us in front of our screens.

Review in Spanish | Read full review

The Long Journey Home has some great ideas. But ultimately it is a victim of its grand ambition. Repetitive, often frustrating gameplay further mar the experience.

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 Long Journey Home is bound to drift to the far left side of my Switch home screen, but I hope it’s not forever. I will keep my eyes peeled for an announcement promising “drastic changes.” In the meantime, I will dream of a better game.

The Long Journey Home is a roguelike that tries to do things differently but it still fails to become accessible enough to a wider audience. While there are some interesting mechanics and features, the bad controls for both ship and lander and the lack of precise information will put more than a few players off.

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.

The Long Journey Home is a nice spatial game that suffers repetition.

Review in French | Read full review

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.

The Long Journey Home is an interesting exploration game that succeeds in a lot of ways, but never really seems to shine.

Space the final frontier... this is the attempt to return from that frontier.

The space adventure of The Long Journey Home it's hard, a journey into the galaxies that requires a lot of patience. Not a bad game, but not for everyone.

Review in Italian | Read full review

More like Wasted Journey

I spent many moments cursing its name in frustrating due to consistently dying. However, the game has grown on me, and I am excited to take different paths and play different ways. Fairly priced, The Long Journey Home provides some comedic relief in a dire and stressful time. The game's atmosphere is beautiful and the exploration into the game provides a vast amount of space adventure.

It's slow moving, but that's mainly because you're trying to conserve fuel. If you're awful at resource management, then you'll find The Long Journey Home takes longer than it should. There's quite a bit to do and see, and kill, but if you want a time sink then this will be right up your alley.

The Long Journey Home is a painful war of attrition. It feels at odds with itself: it wants to incorporate randomization to encourage replayability, yet that randomization makes the critical resource-management components even more frustrating. It could have seriously benefitted from some restraint on the part of the developers; if fewer systems were left up to pure chance, this could have been an expansive, exciting new exploration game. Instead, it's an overpriced curiosity that buries some great ideas under a planet-sized mound of bad decisions.

If The Long Journey Home had focused gameplay and transitioned smoothly between its many elements, it would be a great game.

Recommending a game is a matter of taste and ... in the case of The Long Journey Home, it is to think about those gamers who like to explore, try new things, that the story or narrative is one of the key elements for it to conquer them a game, and for the curious who want to discover new procedural worlds.

Project Daedalus: The Long Journey Home - Review

Never tell me the odds..

The odds are stacked against you as highly as a Corellian freighter navigating an asteroid field.

These close encounters deliver The Long Journey Home's best moments, and the excellent writing involved helps lend it a storytelling strength seldom found in roguelikes. Often even the bad encounters left me smirking, such as when Dark Mistress Zacherraza of the Reeves responded to my refusal to sell a crewmate with a petulant "Fine, be that way." End transmission. These stories and the character art that accompanies them are more personal than the majority of what you’d find in the thematically similar FTL: Faster Than Light .

It feels like an interplanetary hole in one.

I had much more trouble mastering the annoying 2D lander minigame, in which it feels almost impossible to avoid damage to the craft on anything besides a planet with low gravity. For that matter, you almost always have to factor in elements in addition to gravity, whether it's winds, heat, or earthquakes. And then you're expected to land on a ridiculously precise section of a planet for drilling to extract resources, and drilling itself guzzles as much fuel as a boost on the ship.

Hull damage is far more harrowing, as it seems as though you'll never get enough supplies from the multiple different resources available to patch it up like new. Maybe the virtually unavoidable damage wouldn't be so annoying if you could avoid high-risk or high-gravity planets save in dire emergencies, but The Long Journey Home's stinginess means you'll want – or need – to mine almost every chance you get.

And then, if you've somehow managed to survive multiple landings, you'll still have to battle with scrappy alien ships in top-down battles that bear a passing resemblance to Star Control 2. You're only allowed to fire off broadside attacks, which would be manageable if there were a targeting reticule to show your line of fire. But having to eyeball the aim while you steer using the same glacial thrusts and boosts used for planetary orbits, and while the enemy craft spits out nimble fighter ships that pelt you relentlessly while you're still trying to turn around seems like a bit much. Like so much of The Long Journey Home, these fights are good in concept but maddening in practice.

The Verdict

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.

Project Daedalus: The Long Journey Home

The long journey home review.

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The Long Journey Home review

September 4, 2019.

There are some games that mollycoddle you, wrapping you in kid gloves for fear of you not understanding even their simplest mechanics. And at the other end of the spectrum, we have those games that give you the bare minimum to get by. They leave it up to the player to explore and understand how everything is supposed to work. Importantly, learning is part of the experience. The Long Journey Home sits very much in that second camp, by explaining as little of what is going on until it absolutely has to. This forms part of its unique charm, but it’s also its biggest frustration.

A group of astronauts find themselves thousands of parsecs from Earth and must try and return home – a Long Journey Home, if you will. Your role in this is to not only choose your initial astronauts, complete with their various traits and perks that you can use to your advantage but also navigate them through the vastness of space, with the finite resources that you have at your disposal.

Gameplay is made up of two distinctly different types. The first is traditional menu-based navigation. Whether it be managing resources you’ve obtained, or checking in on the crew, you’ll be scrolling through various menus, checking everything is in order. You’ll also encounter various alien beings on your travels which you can communicate with. Because these aliens speak different languages, your choices are limited to various topics and approaches. You may choose to “insult” or “praise” something to them. You can ask certain questions regarding something you’ve encountered or indulge in general chit chat. Everything here is selected through drop-down menus, and their responses differ depending on your choices.

The slightly more interactive part of the game is in the spacecraft flight. The main objective is to land on a planet, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to manage momentum, gravity, and thrust. You’ll need a balance between reaching planets, but then gently orbiting close to them without crashing. There’s a brief tutorial for those new to the game on how it works and comes with a bit of practice required to get a feel for it.

The secondary part of flight mode is controlling the lander on planets you want to explore. This time gravity is constantly pulling you downwards towards the planet’s surface. As before you need to utilise momentum and thrust to land correctly. Landing on particular spots means you can interact with areas of interest or mine for valuable resources. These resources can either be used to patch up or refuel your ship, or alternatively sold to make money for you to enhance your ship further for your adventure.

Progress is slow and repetitive. You space jump between star systems, with the aim of getting progressively closer to home. But to do this you need to ensure you keep on top of your fuel through either harvesting resources or trading. Furthermore, you need to ensure the well-being of your ship and crew. You do this by alternating between ship and lander navigation, but it never really changes beyond these simple flight concepts. And to make matters worse, the lander control can be very fiddly and frustrating. Gravity and other weather conditions can make landing difficult. Sometimes a simple landing mission can result in serious damage and harm to your crew. This is a far cry from the intention of gathering resources and improve your current situation.

The Long Journey Home takes a relatively hands-off approach to support you through some of its complicated menus and methods of progression. There are brief tutorial messages that pop up, but these are often succinct, giving you the minimum information rather than elaborating on various mechanics. It took me far too long, for example, to understand how I went about trading my resources for money. Such a barrier to entry is off-putting, especially when the controls can be fiddly. In fact, the best thing that happened to me was a couple of hours into my first playthrough. I accidentally managed to run out of fuel, and decimate my entire crew through suffocation. It meant I had to start again from the beginning and was actually a blessing in disguise. I went into my second adventure with more knowledge about how the basics worked. I had a bit more of a clue about what I should be doing, which made the game more fun.

And that’s important to note: The Long Journey Home encourages multiple playthroughs and learning as you go. Not least because right from the outset, your choice of crew helps create different adventures. But also because everything you will encounter in this game is randomly generated. From the planets you visit, to the aliens and their opinions and interactions. Your adventure will change each time, and that does create a new experience each time. That uniqueness that does go hand in hand with the impetus being on you to explore and learn as you play. Replaying the same linear system would become tiresome admittedly. However, the random nature of the star systems, means sometimes your progress can be down to your luck rather than judgement. More hostile aliens, or less hospitable planets to explore, can make your journey more difficult if you’re unlucky with your RNG.

That lack of control both in terms of what to expect, and indeed the control of that ruddy lander sometimes, mars The Long Journey Home. It’s clear the ambition here was of a grand scale, akin to the vastness of space you are travelling through. Daedalic clearly had aspirations of a large, ever-changing experience. And truthfully, there’s a lot of fun to be had interacting with some of the more quirky alien races. Not to mention the sense of pride in your nudging ever closer to your elusive goal of getting back to Earth. But the random nature works against the experience and sometimes frustrates an already repetitive and potentially annoying set of gameplay parts. Those that persevere will likely find a lot to like here, but the majority of those who take up the challenge will likely find themselves far too frustrated before the fun kicks in. Either confusion, a lack of control, or bad luck will likely catch you first. Which is a shame because the ideas here aren’t terrible, but they feel spread too thin. A slightly less random, and tighter experience would find a bigger audience ready to take up its interstellar challenge.

A grand adventure Unique experience each time Quirky alien interactions

Confusing, poorly explained mechanics Frustrating lander controls Randomness often requires luck to succeed

The Long Journey Home has some great ideas. But ultimately it is a victim of its grand ambition. Repetitive, often frustrating gameplay further mar the experience.

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The Long Journey Home (Switch) Review – Doesn’t Quite Meet Its Destination

The long journey home (switch) review.

I can’t remember the last time I was as torn about a game as I am about Long Journey Home . The story, the characters, the look of it, the sound, the music, all add up to a game that’s unlike any other. But in the mundane moments of regular gameplay, you start to notice the cracks, and before long those cracks have turned into a breaking point. Then the game becomes impossible. Or, if not impossible, just not very fun. But then it’s also so beautiful and compelling. Let’s try to solve the riddle that is The Long Journey Home.

I’ve seen genre descriptors attached to Long Journey Home that are sort of correct but forget about those. It isn’t really a roguelike, or a management game, or a space combat game, not in any way you’re used to. Long Journey Home is about a space mission gone wrong. A group of four astronauts tests an experimental jump drive, but instead of jumping to nearby Alpha Centauri, they jump themselves to the far end of the galaxy. Thus begins the titular The Long Journey Home, as they attempt to slowly make their way back to Earth. A classic sci-fi story! That’s the premise of Lost in Space , and also Star Trek Voyager , and in a way, it’s also Farscape . Because the far side of the universe is filled with weird aliens to discover, and talk to, trade with, race, or fight. I love all of this. I love putting together the crew of well-written astronauts, all of whom play off of each other in different combinations. I love the conversation system, which feels like it belongs in a classic old school text-based game, or a clunky MMORPG. It’s surprising and charming.

Born to Fly

Then there’s the piloting. You’ve got two ships: your main vessel, and a landing craft. Your big ship is piloted in two dimensions by calculating thrust and momentum, while also taking gravity into account. And the way this is portrayed is brilliant, a tight grid that dips and curves next to stellar bodies, just like a real chart of gravity would. The lander is also piloted in 2D, from a side-on perspective. It’s like one of those old moon lander games. You need to take into account gravity, atmosphere, and wind. The information is a little overwhelming, but in a good way. As you figure out how to read it, you’ll feel like a genuine rocket science genius. Remember those cracks I mentioned? Navigation is one of those places where they start to show. You need materials to operate your ships, and you get materials through a simple procedure. You’ve got to get into orbit around a likely planet, send down your lander, mine for resources, and carry them back up. This is the core gameplay loop!, which needs to be strong. While The Long Journey Home it has its appeal, the margin of error is so small that the game feel punishing in the extreme.

Sometimes the way you figure out the optimal speed and angle for your lander is a matter of trial and error. But if you don’t bring it down perfectly, you’ll end up damaging the hull, which needs metal to be repaired. So you collect the metal and bring everything back up. You damaged your hull about 38%. All that metal your brought back? It’ll repair less than 10% damage. The numbers just don’t add up.Same goes for calculating orbital trajectories. You try to slingshot your ship around a star to get close enough to a planet that it will slow you down and allow you to lock in an orbit around a moon. But if you miscalculate even a bit, maybe you built up too much acceleration, you’ll be burning fuel to slow, to turn, and to speed back up. I found myself overshooting planets 3 or 4 times, burning off tons of fuel, which my lander could only refill in paltry increments.

Sure, NASA scientists don’t get to launch rockets by trial and error. If they shoot too hard towards the moon, they’ll lose billions of dollars of equipment. But that’s why they have teams of experts calculating and peers reviewing each others’ work. That’s why rockets aren’t piloted with a Nintendo Switch. And while The Long Journey Home   is crunchier than most space games you might find, it’s not a simulation. There are plant alien people, and beauty contests, cosmic mysteries to solve, and battles to fight. It’s supposed to be something of a fun adventure. But as it stands, it’s mostly an exercise in frustration. I don’t know what it would take to get me to return to The Long Journey Home. I very much want to. I love the animations of the ship landing in an alien structure, and the dialogue between the astronauts as you drift through space. The music creates a lovely atmosphere. The quests are mysterious and intriguing. But the core gameplay just isn’t there, and that discourages me from coming back. The Long Journey Home   is bound to drift to the far left side of my Switch home screen, but I hope it’s not forever. I will keep my eyes peeled for an announcement promising “drastic changes.” In the meantime, I will dream of a better game.

***Switch code was provided by the publisher for review***

• Vivid universe
• Makes you occasionally feel like a genius
• Boring core loop
• Gets repetitive quick

Developer: Daedalic Entertainment GmbH

Publisher: Daedalic GmbH

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• The Long Journey Home

The Long Journey Home Review

If you could sum up my experience with The Long Journey Home in one word, it would easily be “frustrating.” Underneath the frustrating exterior is an interesting idea: a game about exploration, optimism, and every other theme we love in our science fiction. The promise of exploration, diplomacy, crafting and just a bit of skill is intriguing. However, those interactions are completely mired by the frustrating, repetitive, and incredibly futile tests of skill – and ultimately your patience. This is our review of The Long Journey Home .

The Long Journey Home is a sci-fi, rouge-like exploration game where you are tasked with testing mankind’s first ever jump drive. As luck (or plot device) would have it, your jump drive malfunctions and you’re flung across the Milky Way galaxy, unable to get home. What opens up in front of you is immediately intriguing: a vast, procedural galaxy sprawls in front of you to explore. The promise of encountering new life and new civilizations as you explore is one many of us grew up with. However, everything comes crashing down when you realize that those interactions make up about five percent of what you’ll spend your time doing.

It would take a miracle….

Right off the bat, navigating your ship throughout the cosmos is a chore. Using boosters or thrusts to propel your ship through space is one thing. However, even after hours of practice and repeating the same sequence, going into orbit is still as frustrating as it was the first ten times I tried it. More often than not you’ll find yourself bouncing off the atmosphere, damaging your ship and crew while doing so.

Landing on a planet is no picnic either. Gravity, velocity – everything that would physically influence a landing craft is taken into account. The extremely fragile lander is notoriously hard to navigate around the 2D landscape, carefully hovering over landing spots a nigh-impossible task. I found it more manageable to bounce my lander off the ground near my spot in order to nestle down where I was aiming. It did damage to the lander, but not nearly as much as I would do if I tried to do so carefully.

And that’s part of the frustration. These mini-games make up so much of your game-play, that when you’re pitting with the task of having to repeat them over and over and over again, just to harvest the planets meager offering of resources, it gets tedious fast. I found many times I was doing more damage to my landing craft than I could even repair with the resources I had just damaged my craft to gather.

The Silver Lining

It’s a real shame, because underneath all of this, The Long Journey Home has some compelling interactions that would make the game worthwhile. My first interaction with the Reeve, one of the various races who will either help you or seek to destroy you depending on your play through, was charming and cute. I had one race try to give me resources in an act of good-will, only to have it infect my crew after the fact. These interactions – and the unknown outcomes – really draw me to the game. It feels almost Banner Saga- esque. However, those feelings are quickly quelled once I realize I may have to land for more fuel and metal, knowing I’ll waste more in the process than I can ever replace.

All in all, The Long Journey Home is an incredibly complex game. It’s controls take the patience of a saint in order to get used to. Its core, intriguing elements are weighed down by the repetitive and frustrating mini-games you are forced to slog through. The Long Journey Home isn’t a bad game by any stretch – underneath all that is a story that yearns to be told, and is worth sitting through. Unfortunately, getting to the story is a maddeningly frustrating task.

• Story elements are fantastic
• Aliens are unpredictable & charming
• Combat, while not perfect, is rewarding
• Frustrating controls
• Story bogged down by repetitive mini-games
• Simple mistakes mean drastic & dire penalties for crew

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• Soundtracks

The Long Journey Home Review

It’s a tale as old as time -- a science experiment goes wrong, blasting space travelers across the universe to greet strange alien life and just try to survive. Okay, so it’s a tale as old as Star Trek: Voyager and Farscape , but still.

Developed by Daedalic Entertainment (yes, the point & click adventure guys) The Long Journey Home sees you, as I mentioned, flung to the opposite corner of the universe. It’s a randomly generated roguelike universe where you interact with strange aliens -- and some very friendly ones. You have practically nothing when you arrive, so you have to make use of trade, barter and your planetary lander. Your main priority is getting your crew of four back to Earth.

In your lander, you head down to the surface of planets you encounter to get raw materials. Drill for ores, suck up gas from volcanos and find points of interest. By sending your crew member out (they just describe what’s going on) you might find useful stuff such as fuel pods, or perhaps a deadly pathogen which inevitably kills the crew member. If you’re not careful, that fuel pod will be the thing that carried the deadly pathogen…

Andrew Duncan

Guaranteed to know more about Transformers and Deadpool than any other staff member.

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Story Mode Added to Make The Long Journey Home Less Taxing

Travel Home the Long Way in The Long Journey Home

pucechan - 09:59am, 15th June 2017

Really love this, it's a relaxing chill game until EVERYTHING starts going wrong!

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