So, let's take a look at the Long Journey Home, a roguelike space game inspired by games such as FESTA THE LITE, Star Control and Space Ranger 2. The Long Journey Home is developed by Daydelix Studio West. Graphics Man, I love this game's presentation. This cute yet simultaneously quite the looker too with surprisingly high quality textures and effects. What really gives this game its character is the overall vibrant colors and the weirdly cartoonish art style. Just by looking at your own crew members, which resemble the typical cartoonish art types, you can almost envision a personality just by way of how they're designed. Galaxy itself shows both beauty and ugliness with nice effects that show the celestial bodies in their full and sometimes devastating glory. Planet can be seriously beautiful to look at, or they can have this otherworldly ugliness to them with rotten trees covering most of the planet. During your adventure, you'll encounter all kinds and types of stars like neutron stars, red dwarfs and even black holes. Each system is often dotted with many different types of planets too such as lava and ice planets and even gas giants that all seem carefully crafted with realistic and plausible effects making some of them exceptionally deadly and dangerous to explore. But sometimes you just don't have a choice. Gameplay When first starting the game, you find yourself in the Alpha Centurri galaxy because of a test flight gone wrong. Now you're stranded in an unknown galaxy, many, many parsecs away from Earth and the main goal in the game is to somehow defy all the odds and to traverse the universe back to precious blue Earth. When you start the game, you get to pick your crew. You can pick four out of the ten capable crew members that all have different specialities in the form of unique items with certain properties. Bringing with you an engineer is sound advice for repairs, which is not much of a diplomat. On the other hand, bringing with you a silver-tongued corporate executive won't do you much good in the combat department, but at least he brought with him the means to scavenge Rex and Ruins, lining his pockets with credits and other valuables as he goes. Bringing a certified test pilot with you is also helpful since they have the right tools to fix your lander efficiently. In any case, since the game is almost entirely random, except for the actual distance back home, you'll visit many different systems in the universe. In each of those systems, there's usually a multitude of planets to visit. The long journey home simulates the gravity of celestial bodies so to land on planets, you'll ideally use the mass of planets to basically slingshot yourself through space to keep momentum and in turn to save fuel and to eventually slowly guide your ship into an orbit before you're able to actually land your delicate lander vessel on a planet. I call the Lendership Delicate because it might as well have been tied together with duct tape, given its fragile nature. And well, regarding your crew, boy, do you need your crew? Consider the vital cogs that keep the machine going and losing one of them is akin to some serious machine malfunctions. Because they all bring something important to the proverbial table, losing just one of them can spell disaster for the remainder of your long journey home. And believe me, losing them is easy. Man, do they die fast if you're not careful. Flying too close to the sun or a hot inferno planet? Well, much like Icarus himself, everyone is most likely going to burn pretty hard and fast, resulting in various burn wounds to random members of your crew, unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or perhaps the pilot you sent out in your precious planetary lander on an excursion together resources has the unfortunate accident of crash landing too hard due to high forces of gravity which might lead to concussions, broken bones and all that other good stuff. Either way, whatever you do in this game has to be done with care because there is no going back from making a mistake apart from starting a new or being lucky and successful enough to find all the necessary healing items of which there are many. Each party member can suffer a maximum of 5 injuries before they start knocking on heaven's door so as of the utmost importance you go to great lengths to avoid that, which is so much easier said than done. The amount of dangers you face are just two numerous to count, but I've gotten infected just by landing on a planet, I've seen crew members returned from a brothel, yes a space brothel with broken bones and even occasionally suffered the worst of fates by losing control of the lander due to high winds on a planet only to crash upside down with very little chance of recovery. Losing a party member stings, losing basically your only means of extracting minerals from a planet stings even more and these precious planetary resources are vital to your survival. They are required to fill up your warp drive, to patch up all damage of both your main ship and your planetary vehicle and lastly to refill fuel. Failing to either refuel your ship or warp drive can result in some pretty hardcore alternatives like flying close to a star to scoop more exotic matter for your warp drive or you just simply have to hope you'll run into an NPC trader or a trading station of some sort. Exploring planets with your lander sometimes lets you investigate certain mysterious spots further which can also result in obtaining new items which can then be used by your crew or used for trading in exchange for precious credits depending on the type of item. It's also completely possible to run into a derelict ship out in space or to discover an asteroid belt with precious and powerful materials which you can then mine by destroying the asteroids with your weapons. But all this danger makes victory or well surviving another day quite satisfying if you manage to get it right. But don't get lulled into a false sense of security because there might just be a blot there steel it's a spaceship waiting around the planet eager to intercept and enslave you for all of your troubles. That's because you're not alone in this humongous galaxy. In fact you're the newcomer and in the eyes of many other aliens the lesser race. The noob if you will. Luckily I found that most alien races seem generally friendly or at the very least reasonable. Some aliens like them is a runny seem to want nothing more than an awesome friendship and to be best friends forever with us humans. And even after running into them they often start tagging along with you until they inevitably crash into a planet. Most alien races have distinct personalities with most of them have a gain neutral disposition towards you until you help them out. You can contact them through your calm system and have some basic conversations with them, a mount form of diplomacy if you will. In which case you can kiss their ass with praise or even gossip and bad mouth the other aliens behind their backs. It's also possible they want you to perform certain tasks for them. These show up in the mission log and can be done to provide more variety in the day to day gameplay of the game. All races respond differently to these quasi diplomatic approaches and this element certainly keeps the interaction with the alien encounters you face interesting and more importantly unpredictable. Eventually it's your goal to somehow manage to get back to earth by traveling a whopping 37,000 parsecs or more which requires many, many jumps. I mean I can't even imagine what kind of effort must go into that not to mention luck. I gotta say visiting another cluster was about the highlight of my success so far. But each and every time I try I learn something new and manage to advance just a bit further which makes the game fun and fresh to come back to. According to the game's manual it actually should be possible to do it in one shot when you play the game for the first time but I call bullshit on that one unless you're an exceptionally lucky player. Overall score. The good. Colorful art style. Great music. The music is subtle enough to add rather than detract from the experience and immersion. One aliens. A large variety of alien types with widely different personalities, motivations and designs keeps running into them interesting and engaging. Planet depth. A crazy number of different planets to visit each one with a certain distinctness in terms of look, hazards and feel. Exploration. The bad. Frequent loading. Too many short loading screens can interrupt the flow of gameplay. Depth. Despite the complexity the game offers, it's coded in a somewhat simplistic user interface. Closing words. Admittedly, I don't often play rogue-like games because I prefer to have a bit more consistent and predictable progress so I'm pretty much a total nuub in this genre. Thankfully this game is perfect to just quickly pick up and play for a bit without having to invest too much time. The fun here is obviously in the journey, rather than reaching the end. The wide range of crew members makes each subsequent playthrough interesting enough to see how they fare this time and each failure, being a learning experience, kind of causes the game to show its true colors once you've gotten more accustomed to all the possible scenarios which makes it easy to come back to for more. I've gone through my fair share of intensified sweating due to the circumstances I've managed to get myself into, often unexpectedly so, which certainly kept the game engaging and fun to me. Is it worth it? Yes, it's one of those quality games that easily warns a purchase, especially if you're into rogue-likes. Mostly because of the infinite replay potential and surprising amount of quality and polish, this game is almost guaranteed to keep you coming back for more in the foreseeable future. My name is Sir Dachie, thanks a lot for watching and I wish you, as usual, a fantastic, spacey day.