A Long Road Home
One Bit
Studio
As described on its website, A
Long Road Home is an indie point and click adventure game, created in a
top down, 2D perspective. The gameplay harkens back to the adventure
games of old, with lots of text descriptions, puzzle solving and item
usage.
Usually when you see a game like
this, it screams RPG, especially when you descend into tunnels and
catacombs under a comparatively tranquil village. You expect to be
vanquishing foes with swords and/or magic, and to be dying fairly
regularly.
Except in A Long Road Home, you
don't.
Everything is point and click
adventury, finding and using items, reviewing notes and books, solving
codes and deciphering recipes to create bombs. There are beasts to be
vanquished, but they require a puzzle solve, not an actiony twitch.
Everything is done with the mouse, except for entering information to
solve certain puzzles (e.g. “who sent you”) which is done with the
keyboard. If you have paid attention to what you find, or have indeed
been sent by someone and aren’t trying to gain entry by trickery, type
the answer and move on.
The game casts you in the role
of a character named by you, at least for Chapters 1 and 3. Said
character (let’s call him flotsam) has been wounded and separated from
his family. Now recovered, flotsam must set forth and find his mother
and sister, although getting out of the village isn’t as easy as simply
leaving. Needless to say, it gets a lot more complicated, and involves
soul stealing, world conquering, dimensional travelling and a being
called Amuna.
Chapter 2 casts you as the
sister. She has a pivotal part to play, far more intricate than simply
being found. I will say no more.
There is no spoken word in A
Long Road Home, all conversations being read. A ribbon at the bottom of
the screen types the dialogue (accompanied by an old fashioned
typewriter clickety-clack) two lines at a time, and waits for you to
click when you want the next two. It is a complicated and detailed plot,
and there are lots of people to speak with and errands to run. Throw in
the books and letters and other things, and there is a lot to read. What
you read is very occasionally “gritty”, sometimes funny, and never
becomes a chore. There is musical accompaniment, which helps set the
mood at the various scenes, as well as limited sound effects. When
overlaid on the game world, it all amounts to a rather engaging whole.
There is a rudimentary look
about things, but I did find it appealing. This was helped by the almost
anime look of the characters, and the excitable little hop they
sometimes engaged in. Some screens scroll left and right, and even up
and down, but others are single screens; exits on all of them lead to a
load and a new location.
Puzzling is a mix of inventory
based and puzzle solves, challenging at times but not hard. You can
combine items in your inventory, an essential part of a few puzzle
solves, and you can also examine some items further. It is also where
you read the books and diaries you collect.
I generally knew what my
objective was, but there was a bit of aimless wandering, particularly in
Chapter 3, and some back and forth in that same Chapter which borders on
becoming tedious. As well, while you can pick up all manner of items
simply because they are there, for one item at least, not only can’t you
pick it up before the appropriate trigger, you won’t even know you can
enter the location where you will find it until then. Everything up
until then cried “nothing to do/see here”, and nothing about the trigger
suggested that was where you needed to go back to. It felt like unfair
and unnecessary filler.
I also hit some cantankerous
hotspots that wouldn’t respond as they were supposed to (a walkthrough
made it clear what should have happened), but discovered that leaving
and coming back, and even exiting the game, sometimes helped. I can’t
offer any further explanation.
You can save at will, and the
game also autosaves now and then. Make sure you toggle the screen size
at the initial window to play full screen. There is a choice to make at
the end.
A Long Road Home took me about
eight hours, and notwithstanding the irritants I confess to enjoying it
quite a lot.
I played on:
OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz
RAM: 32GB GDDR5
Video card: AMD Radeon
RX 470 8192MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
February 2017
design copyright© 2017
GameBoomers
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