I’ve just played through Long Gone Days, a dystopian RPG in which you play a guy raised as a sniper in a subterranean military colony. I’d thought going in that the whole setting was fictional, but actually once you hit the surface it all takes place in the real world.
It’s got very nice pixel art, with lots of little one-off animations. I got interested in the game both from the pretty pixel screenshots and also because I played and enjoyed Nanopesos, a poverty simulator made by one of the main devs, Camila Gormez. I think she made the initial demo of Long Gone Days before developing it as part of a three person team (with various collaborators) for several years.
The main combat system in the game is pretty standard turn-based stuff, but there are also a few scenes where your character’s sniper training comes into play, though these are basically cutscenes (I’m not sure what happens if you fail them).
The bulk of the game, from a combat point of view, is this turn-based system. You can use normal attacks, which can be aimed at different body parts to change the odds of hitting, inflicting status, and the amount of damage done, or you can use skills or items. Each character has different skills and different weapon types, and while you can sometimes choose your party, a lot of the time it’s chosen for you. Sometimes this means fighting without a healer, or with a pacifist who will buff or heal the rest of your party but won’t attack. The encounters are also curated - there are no random encounters, only fixed fights at certain points in the story and in the dungeons (which are warehouses, office buildings, city streets, and so on). Character skill names usually have something to do with their personality - the reporter has “hard hitting questions” and “no comment”, for example. Just a bit of fun.
A lot of the combat is pretty easy, to be honest, and sometimes a bit slow (late in the game there’s a skill that gives your whole party three buffs, and you get one message per buff per character with a brief pause in between, and then another three messages per character when the buffs wear off), but there were a few fights that had me on my toes. I also played the game in a completionist way, so I had all (I think) of the hidden gear and optional boosts for my characters. There’s a morale system which apparently impacts on the combat in a way that was kind of opaque to me, but I’m pretty sure I had my guys’ morale fairly high throughout. Maybe if I’d rushed through without doing side quests or if I’d made worse choices in the dialogue it would have been harder.
Speaking of dialogue, a lot of it is not in English. Unless you have someone in your party who speaks whatever language is being spoken, the game won’t translate it for you. I used a camera translation app on my phone a few times in the early going, but decided the intended experience was probably for me not to understand what was being said so I stopped. The language thing kind of gets trivialised by finding interpreters pretty quickly in each new location, but when it works it does a good job of making the player feel the disorientation and isolation of the characters, some of whom at various times are deserters, refugees, investigators, and rebels. I’m curious how the game plays in translation, especially in the languages featured in the game. In the English language version, your characters specifically speak English. I wonder if in the French version for example the dialogue is in French but the characters still say they’re speaking English. I also wonder how the German version handles the player characters not understanding NPCs speaking German. The dev team are Chilean, so presumably the game was originally written in Spanish.
I won’t go too far into the plot, but the starting point is that you’re part of a subterranean society entirely dedicated to its military, with people chosen for their roles very young. The army is then hired out to countries on the surface. The story given to the members of this society is that they are living in a utopia while also protecting the stability of the world above, and the plot follows the player character realising that it is not so. I didn’t find the specifics of the plot all that convincing - I think a lot of the time the game mechanics were in conflict with the narrative, not that that’s unusual in games, and it relies a lot on coincidence - but I think it works well enough for the game. It’s about inter-state conflict, suppression of civil liberties, public misinformation, and so on, and it’s probably fair to make concessions to how that can be covered in a party-based rpg. I think the early part of the game, where your two deserters join a hastily assembled militia in a town being attacked by your former army to defend civilians until they can be evacuated works quite well even if it’s kind of implausible that the ferry would still come in the circumstances, for example, but as the game goes on and the dungeons get more involved they don’t work so well as real world locations and events.
Here’s the leader of the PC’s society, Father General Eugene. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that a guy with that title is not an admirable figure.
Here’s an outdoors scene. A lot of the early game is either dark and gloomy or kind of corporate sterile, but once you get outdoors in the daytime there’s some nice scenery.
And this nice poster, which I thought at first was showing the main character. This poster shows up in quite a few places, just like a poster in real life, but there’s also a lot of one-off street art and scenery. I really enjoyed the pixel art in this game, though sadly I stopped taking screenshots fairly early on and have less of it to show here than I thought I’d taken. I also had a good time with the towns, where you can wander around doing side quests as well as advancing the story.
Here’s the menu, where you can see the bent rifle that was in the river a few screenshots ago. I thought I had a shot of the main part of the menu rather than the equip screen so I could show the very helpful quest section, which gives you a list of all the side quests in each area as you get there, very helpful for a completionist like me (though there was one quest I didn’t find and looked up later - turns out you only get it if your morale is low, which I think required either skipping or screwing up earlier quests, meaning you can’t get 100%). I always enjoy running around town solving people’s problems, and there’s plenty of that here. There are also puzzles in the dungeons (some rather easy sokobans, mostly, but some others). The morale system is a bit opaque - you can see when your morale goes up or down, but you can’t see what it currently is. Apparently it also changes performance in battle somehow, but the specifics of it I didn’t figure out. I think it’s the main determinant of the ending you get as well - I think you get different dialogue in the boss fights based on it. My confusion over how it all works I believe is intended by the devs.
Anyways, that’s about what I have to say about this game. I had a good time with it despite some faults. Before playing I looked on howlongtobeat and it said five and a half hours, though that must be without doing any side content. I don’t know how long I spent on it because the switch version’s timer keeps counting up while the system is on standby, but it was probably in the vicinity of ten hours. I don’t remember playing another game quite like it. You may already own a copy - it was included (in incomplete form) in the twitch bundles for racial justice and equality and for Ukraine, and now that it’s finished if you got either of those bundles you can get the full version for free, though that won’t get you the convenience of playing it on switch. Anyways, if any of the above was of interest, give it a go and report back.
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