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**The Long Journey Home**
The Long Journey Home
Developer(s)	Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher(s)	Daedalic Entertainment
Writer(s)	Richard Cobbett
Platform(s)	Windows; macOS; PlayStation 4; Xbox One; Nintendo Switch;
Release	Windows; May 30, 2017; macOS; June 28, 2018; PlayStation 4, Xbox One; November 14, 2018; Nintendo Switch; September 4, 2019
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

The Long Journey Home is a 2017 space exploration video game by Daedalic Entertainment for Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

Plot

The player controls the crew of Earth's first jump-capable starship. The game begins after a jump to Alpha Centauri goes wrong, leaving the misfit crew stranded on the far end of the galaxy.^[2] As the crew journeys back home, they meet aliens who offer them various quests.^[1]

Features

The goal of the game is to return home after being lost in space.^[2] The player navigates a procedurally generated universe,^[3] which is randomized to make the experience of exploring more open-ended and diverse.^[4]

The physics of ship movement are realistic, as the player has to use gravitational slingshot to navigate.^[1] There is a steep learning curve to be proficient to travel.^[1]^[5]

The player will encounter aliens who offer them quests. The player can choose to help, ignore, attack, or even betray the quest-giver.^[2] For example, when an alien asks a player to transport a box, the player can decide to open the box and steal what's inside of it.^[3] Each alien has their own culture, which creates challenges around cultural misunderstanding.^[5]

Development

Daedalic was a game studio known for point-and-click adventure games with a narrative focus.^[4] The team has described the game as a roguelike space role-playing game, drawing its main inspiration from Star Control II and Starflight.^[2] Where Star Control II described many aspects of the alien cultures through dialog, writer Richard Cobbett pushed to improve on this by making this culture more visible and interactive.^[2]

The team strived to maximize player choice, allowing them to break or ignore quests, or attack even friendly encounters.^[2] Quests were designed to encourage forward momentum, and also illustrate the different alien cultures and personalities.^[3] This led to what Cobbett described as "a lot of writing", which was organized in spreadsheets using proprietary tools.^[3] A goal for the game's writing was to create feelings of loneliness, vulnerability, and desperation.^[2]

Initially, the game featured a trade system, but this was simplified in favor of credits.^[2] A month after the game's release, The Long Journey Home was updated with an easier story mode.^[6]

Reception

The reception to The Long Journey Home has been mixed. Its aggregate Metacritic score is 68/100.^[7] Adam Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun compared the game favorably to the openness of No Man's Sky with the short minigames of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, but felt that there was "not quite enough here to win me over completely".^[8] Polygon, giving the game a 55% rating, explained that it was "extraordinarily difficult to navigate" and "infuriating," concluding that the game had failed to live up to the promise of a "truly narrative-driven roguelike."^[9] Giving the game a 6/10, PC Games N praised the characters and setting, but criticized the different minigames as tedious.^[10] IGN, which gave the game a 6.4, complained of "the weight of frustrating and tedious minigames" that were "often unfair."^[11] Kotaku dismissed the game as built upon "a poorly-implemented version" of Lunar Lander, "an infuriating experience" and "a poorly thought-out homage."^[12]