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The Long Journey Home- - Star Control 2-inspired roguelike from Daedalic Entertainment

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Oct 5, 2012
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13,582
Codex 2014
Oh, deja vu. I hope at least its Steam score will not be dismal as Blackguards.
 

Jimmious

Arcane
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
On the one hand, I do get more interested since everyone seems to not be able to handle a game being punishing for a change.
On the other though, it really sucks that they all kind of "bash" it with their review scores because of that..
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
And of course, we do recommend a controller for playing the game, especially the Lander sections. Plenty of folks are playing with m&k, but we all favour Xbox controllers.

Um

:whatho:
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
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Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
I hope this is a bigger success than BG2 and they get rewarded for trying new things (either themselves in this case or publishing Shadow Tactics).
 

Startropy

Startropy Games
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Too hardcore for PCGamesN: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-long-journey-home/the-long-journey-home-pc-review

The Long Journey Home PC review

I’m lost in space: totally stranded, low on resources, and on the lam from a gelatinous loan shark. Two of my four crew members are critically injured, meaning there are no spare hands to man my ship’s weapons. Worse still, I’ve just used my last tank of Exotic Matter, the resource that powers the Daedalus-7’s interstellar jumps, which means I have two options: scoop up enough EM for another jump by orbiting a star, or mine it from one of the many planets within range. The former will likely kill one of my weak crew members through radiation damage and all but obliterate my ship’s hull. The latter will require me to meticulously probe each planet to find the one or two with the right resource and safe enough landing conditions. I opt for the orbital scoop, but as I plunge into the star’s gravitational pull I’m intercepted by a Raxact raider who offers me a different choice: blood or coin? I don’t have the coin, and my ship is in a critical state of disrepair, so I flee in exchange for taking a few hits. I flee straight into the sun though, filling my view with injury updates and death notifications as the screen fades to black and sombre music swells.

This introduction reminds me of old PC gaming articles, only this would be the opening paragraph to a game they would go on to sing praises about. :lol:
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It seems that RPS, PC Gamer and Eurogamer have elected not to review this game. Could that to be due to conflict-of-interest because Richard Cobbett writes for them? If so, that's a problem. They're like the three most important sites for this sort of game.
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
. It would have been ideal if there had been Kerbal Space Program style control to let players autopilot the perfect slingshot maneuver.
So how similar to kerbal are the spaceship controls?

Cause I get very interested in any game that has realistic orbital mechanics.
 

Zanzoken

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I think if I was a dev I would nerf the hell out of my game's difficulty before sending it to the press. Like literally convert every difficulty mode to Easy in the review copy.

The truth is these fuckheads just will not spend the time to learn and improve at a challenging game. As soon as they hit failure a few times it's "game is too hard" then off to review the next AAA hand-holding shit.
 
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Screen_Shot_2017_05_30_at_2_52_28_PM.png
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Launch numbers on Steamcharts look really good, no?

EDIT: In response to Infinitron's WTF, the launch numbers are much better than Sunless Sea's, despite the the pricepoint being much higher.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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It seems that RPS, PC Gamer and Eurogamer have elected not to review this game. Could that to be due to conflict-of-interest because Richard Cobbett writes for them? If so, that's a problem. They're like the three most important sites for this sort of game.
Nah, I'm sure they cleared this before they hired him (in fact, I'm sure his stature in the indie game reviewing community is part of why they hired him, since that stature reflects the high regard folks have for his writing), and RPS has gone all out on promoting it: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/30/the-long-journey-home-review/

This is part of what's great about the indie scene -- critics and creators don't just talk past each other, they work together to advance the art (or, their vision of the art, anyway), whether it's developers supporting the Patreons of their most engaged reviewers or critics reviewing games they helped make. I can see why people would look askance at it, but ultimately the amount of money involved is so trivial that it's more about a tight community that puts all its resources (soapbox, money, talent) into promoting their goals. It's really not that different from the Codex doing a fundraiser for a game the Codex then reviews while developers of that game are active participants in the community, except that the Codex has such an anti-authoritarian/iconoclastic streak that it's more like a snake eating its own tail than one hand washing the other.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Wot I Think: The Long Journey Home
Adam Smith on May 30th, 2017 at 8:00 pm.

tljh_2.jpg


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.

tljh1.jpg


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.

tljh2.jpg


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.

tljh3.jpg


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.

tljh4.jpg


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.

tljh5.jpg


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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Pentagon

Educated
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Cascadia
It seems that RPS, PC Gamer and Eurogamer have elected not to review this game. Could that to be due to conflict-of-interest because Richard Cobbett writes for them? If so, that's a problem. They're like the three most important sites for this sort of game.
I think avoiding conflict-of-interest is a very good reason to avoid reviewing a game. Here's what PCGamer gave as its explanation for why it didn't review Gunpoint:
Tom Francis, the Gunpoint's designer, programmer, writer and thinky-person, has worked at PC Gamer for ten years. He is friends with all of us, and we're all friends with him. We're all grown-ups and professionals, but even if we felt we could write about the game honestly, we recognise that it would be impossible for you to ever fully trust that review.

Similarly, even if we found a writer to review it who didn't know who Tom was, and put a disclaimer at the top of the review explaining the potential conflict, any score we gave it would still be shared around the internet on sites like Metacritic without that necessary context.

With that in mind, we feel it's best if we stand aside this one time.
I think these are quality reasons to avoid reviewing a game even if that decision generates less publicity for the game.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Seems to be wrapping up a strong first day: 1390 simultaneous players on Steam charts, which compares favorably to the 814 launch number for Sunless Sea and is a 100-fold increase from Sea of Stars, the sequel to Weird Worlds, both of which launched in 2014 -- when the indie bonanza was still going on -- at much lower prices as spin-offs to established brands. It's not quite where Space Pirates and Zombies was in 2012 (1941), but it might edge up a bit over the weekend. At 72% on Steam (vs. 94% for SPAZ) and 66% on Metacritic (vs. 74% for SPAZ), it might not have the same legs, but SPAZ had glossier production values and more gameplay variety, while it seems like TLJH has perhaps more sophistication that isn't connecting as quickly with people. SPAZ just hit at the right time, and it was always going to be hard to match its achievements. For a niche title like this, I think Daedelic did really well, and hopefully well enough that they'll build on the title/franchise.

I guess now we'll have to see how the Stardock Star Control game comes out to see whether a heavier investment can yield a bigger market share.

EDIT: That sadness when Infinitron ironically rates your post for taking a positive view of things. :(
 
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How the hell do you get stuck for 5 minutes on a name input screen, regardless of what it's actually for?

Especially if you're a reviewer who has such limited time to play that reading two short paragraphs on character selection feels like an unsurmountable roadblock. Just name it DICKS like a normal person.

By the way, I watched the video linked in the review (it's just the text spoken out loud) and this is the dialogue with the merchant alien. You actually get to see his thoughts (whispering?) explaining why he takes off quickly.

free upload pictures
 
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Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera
Seems to be wrapping up a strong first day: 1390 simultaneous players on Steam charts, which compares favorably to the 814 launch number for Sunless Sea and is a 100-fold increase from Sea of Stars, the sequel to Weird Worlds, both of which launched in 2014 -- when the indie bonanza was still going on -- at much lower prices as spin-offs to established brands. It's not quite where Space Pirates and Zombies was in 2012 (1941), but it might edge up a bit over the weekend. At 72% on Steam (vs. 94% for SPAZ) and 66% on Metacritic (vs. 74% for SPAZ), it might not have the same legs, but SPAZ had glossier production values and more gameplay variety, while it seems like TLJH has perhaps more sophistication that isn't connecting as quickly with people. SPAZ just hit at the right time, and it was always going to be hard to match its achievements. For a niche title like this, I think Daedelic did really well, and hopefully well enough that they'll build on the title/franchise.

I guess now we'll have to see how the Stardock Star Control game comes out to see whether a heavier investment can yield a bigger market share.

It seems like the kind of game that would have a long tail, since it offers complexity and requires a good faith investment of time/attention. So if it succeeds at providing a crunchier FTL experience, then word of mouth will work well for it. Of course, the long tail might not be what DSW's business model requires, if they expected to sell well at $40.

EDIT: That sadness when Infinitron ironically rates your post for taking a positive view of things. :(

Jeez Infinitron at least give him the ironic rainbow of fabulous optimism. "creative" is just a low blow.
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I've pretty much decided I'm going to D1P with the Steam wallet funds received from selling a Team Fortress 2 hat if the sticker price is <$30. If it's more than that I'm going to wait for a sale price of <$20. Your move Daedalic.
Was wavering more the more I read from Cobbett on the Steam forums, but the disappointment from many players and the "get through the repetitive super hardcore tiresome parts to get to the fun parts" vibration I'm seeing in reviews has successfully cooled my D1P lust. Sticking to what I said above but will play it someday.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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It's an odd price point. That said, it should be $10 or so within a couple months, and perhaps patched up a bit by then.

EDIT: If Infinitron thinks my enthusiasm warranted a Creative rating, what would he do with this poor soul's positive review?
I vote yes because I want them to make a decent sc2 game. Proper funding makes that possible.

For the ur-quan masters fans. You wont be impressed . . .

UQM vs Long journey - short story line, no real point in exploration. none customizable main ship, no war fleet. Semi smaller universe with bland planets. Interaction with other races is fairly pointless, They dont even have theyre own voices like in UQM.

Cant say i speak for all the UQM fans, but i want more open world. I want artifacts to make the illwrath call themselves the dill-rats. I want to con the thradash into getting squashed by the kor-ah. I want to collect life forms from planets to trade to the melnormae for epic weapons for my ship. Find rare lifeforms to trade for the shofixti maidens so I can hear the last male standing talk about "replenishing theyre race".

This game lacks depth and intrigue for me. However ill still buy it in hopes the next one you make will hit more to home. Stop focusing so much on graphics and worry about the gameplay.
 
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HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.

49 hours of play. First victory. So much for "4-6 hours".

It doesn't really feel like a victory. I got everyone killed except the asshole scientist, because I sacrificed the civilian and the pilot to keep the ship afloat. The engineer died in the very last system because of radiation, and she was the MVP who repaired everything. Oh and I brought an alien virus back to earth too, so humanity is probably doomed.

Review incoming. Will I be the first reviewer to actually beat the game?
will wait for your review. i am on the fence about this. whether buy it day soon, wait for sale or something
 

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