Parents' Guide to

The Long Journey Home

By David Chapman, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Space tale filled with challenge, choice, and consequence.

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This space RPG will challenge your management and diplomacy skills as you try to safely return to Earth. If you were stranded, far away from everything you held near and dear, surrounded by the unknown, what would you be willing to do to find your way home? That's the constant question players must answer in The Long Journey Home. While you may be lost in vastness of the cosmos, you're never alone. Stumbling into various alien encounters pushes players to make some hard choices. Should you give up one of your crewmembers to satisfy a slave trader's demands? Or do you fight it out and try to escape, potentially crippling your ship and leaving you with no way home? This is just one example of the tough moral choices you have to make in the game, the consequences of which can ripple through the rest of your adventure. Thanks to the procedurally generated content, each fresh start opens up new scenarios and new choices, with no two games ever playing the same.

Of course, there's a lot more to space exploration than alien diplomacy. You're in charge of a manned spaceship, after all. One that needs fuel, maintenance, upgrades, with a crew that needs its health and well-being if you ever plan to see home again. This means taking planetary excursions for supplies and discoveries. It might seem simple enough on paper, but there's a lot more to flight than just pointing the ship in a direction and hitting the gas. You'll need to factor in things like how to use a planet's gravitational pull to slingshot to a new destination while conserving fuel. Or you may need to adjust course and speed on the fly, with even slight changes making the difference between entering into a safe orbit or slamming full speed into a nearby star. The controls definitely take some getting used to and can feel a bit overly sensitive (especially if using a keyboard/mouse combination). Thankfully, the game is a bit forgiving when it comes to mistakes. Sure, crashing into a planet might leave the crew with a few broken bones and your ship a bit worse for wear, but it's rare not to be able to recover from a single bad choice.

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