Long Gone Days Review – Good times and war crimes

Long Gone Days is a game that feels really familiar as Many of its themes and aesthetics remind me of Metal Gear Solid, a franchise near and dear to my heart. In many ways, Long Gone Days tackles the same issues as Metal Gear and wants to convey many of the same messages, but the former is reluctant to commit to the tone. Without that commitment, the game’s story fails to hit the mark in certain areas, and the unintuitive gameplay fails to make up for it. Despite its kinks, there is still something that shines through the muck. In this review, I hope to convince you that Long Gone Days is worth at least checking out if it interests you, while still being honest about the game’s flaws.

Long Gone Days tells the story of Rourke but in a broader sense, it’s actually about The Core. The Core is an independent, underground (literally) nation that prides itself on having a 0% poverty and 0% unemployment rate. Either that or it’s a nation of soldiers without any loyalties to a real-world government, a Militaries Sans Frontieres if you will. For how important The Core is to the game’s story there isn’t a ton of information given about it.

Rourke, like the rest of The Core’s military, was trained from childhood to be a soldier. This practice is so common that the leader of The Core (or at least, its military) is referred to as Father-General by his soldiers, who also refer to each other as brothers. Rourke, now 22, is set to go on his first mission, apparently ‘aiding’ the Polish army in a war against Russia. If I’ve learned anything from the Twitter artists I follow, it’s that Eastern European armies are incredibly popular with military aesthetic fans, so I wasn’t shocked that these were the countries chosen for this imaginary conflict.

Rourke proves his prowess as a sniper on the field of ‘battle,’ only to learn in shocking fashion that the entire engagement is a farce. Rourke, as well as every other soldier in The Core’s soldiers, is actually just killing civilians. The whole attack is a false flag operation staged to trigger a war between Poland and Russia, who both have no idea about the plan.

Shocked, disillusioned, and scared, Rourke attempts to flee from his post and drags his only friend along with him. This brands the two as traitors. They have no choice but to flee from their brothers, forced to hide in an alien world neither are accustomed to. Eventually, the two join a resistance movement and fight to uncover and stop The Core’s plan before it’s too late.

It goes without saying that the game wants to tackle some serious subjects. Real-world issues are portrayed with on-screen atrocities, such as the blatant murder of an innocent child by a cold-hearted soldier who is “just following orders.” These shockingly graphic scenes aren’t given the weight they deserve, and they’re cut to black with lackluster or quick dialogue or just not fully committed.

The game seems to want to be serious at times, and funny and light-hearted in others, but never fully commits to either, instead sitting in this sort of middle ground where everything feels wishy-washy and lacking in any weight or emotion. 

I saw someone in the Steam reviews section of this game describe the dialogue in these tense scenes as “deflated anime speeches that feel like they don’t have anything real to say” and I couldn’t agree more with this statement.

And yet, even if the dialogue isn’t the best, you’ll find yourself easily invested in the characters. They have a way of growing on you, even when they probably shouldn’t be earning it. I especially felt this way about Rourke and Lynn who are sort of the emotional core of the story.

Despite the noncommital nature of the storytelling, the story is still interesting enough to keep you invested, using what I am once again calling familiar themes well enough to make you want to know more about what’s going on and keep you guessing about what’s going to happen. This story is broken up by beautifully drawn cutscenes which use a sort of anime mixed with attention to real-world military detail to create a really unique aesthetic that serves the game well.

That and certain pacing choices really serve to show the nuance of the tragedy of war. Switching between intense tales of conflict and loss and simple day-to-day activities with a group of new friends is a fantastic contrast that helps you invest yourself in these characters. Having to get an interpreter to go back and interact with foreign languages is also a neat little game design choice that shows just how alien the world is to our protagonist.

The story is what’s going to hook you in because the gameplay certainly won’t. Cookie-cutter turn-based combat awaits you in each encounter and really just feels like a roadblock to progressing the story. Your skills, which are standard of every turn-based RPG at this point, are tied to something called morale points. Morale Points are a reflection of your party’s general will to go on. You recover this exclusively through the story (winning a small amount back each battle) and lose some when you use your skills. This sort of pressures you not to use your skills at all because you don’t know when you’ll get the resource back, and running out severely punishes you.

Oh, and good luck if you lose an encounter. The game, at least at the time I played it, lacks any kind of autosave feature. So if you don’t save often, you’ll be repeating a lot of the game because of a defeat. Or, in my case, totally restarting.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Long Gone Days is available on Steam.