Really unique game. A war story that focuses more on the social political side of things instead of the typical "power fantasy" COD-like games, exudes a refreshing anti-war message and a hopeful feeling without losing its core sense of grounded realism. Feels very fucking real with everything happening in Gaza right now, couldn't have picked a better time to play it, hits you in the soul when you draw the parallels with real life events
The characters feel authentic, everyone feels multidimensional with nuanced motivations and backgrounds, the antagonists don't fall behind the main cast in any way, none of them seem cartoonish evil, you can understand their reasoning even if clearly flawed. One thing that I personally loved was the language barrier mechanic, enriches the setting contributing to that same grounded realism while helping you feel how broad the social impact of the war is
Unfortunately, the gameplay is... not good to say the least, the main combat is super monotonous lacking polish and depth, I was just sighing at the repetitiveness in the final dungeon
It doesn't impact the experience that much since the game is short, and the developers clearly knew it was their biggest fault, judging by the amount of combat the game has

Complete playthrough. Long Gone Days is a 2D RPG set amidst a modern-day war - a relatively unusual setting for the genre, which it uses well to facilitate some meaningful character and relationship development, exploring themes of friendship and loyalty, alongside moral dilemmas that conflicts naturally bring to light. The gameplay is admittedly relatively basic and, especially early on, the battle system doesn't provide a great deal of options - but some complexity does eventually come, as the party expands and develops. With no random encounters and limited healing options, the feeling is definitely one of an attritional struggle, very fitting for the setting. I wouldn't say that the game ever truly excels, being limited by that overall lack of complexity, but it's certainly been a worthwhile experience all the same.

A really solid RPG that I got to support my local gamedev scene (Chile) so I'm glad that it was as enjoyable as it was. Solid story and solid game balance. The latter's exception may just be the final boss, but, also, I think that may be alright(?) when I consider the plot at that point (and the extremely overpowered sniper you can get for Rourke lmao). The rest of the bosses sometimes felt like a struggle for my life despite not losing once against them, a feeling I think is great when it is about a boss in this type of story in particular. So, just an overall very consistent and very fun game with fun chracters whom I all felt close to my heart by the end.

I also appreciate the distinct lack of any direct/mentioned romantic tension between any of the characters, just all friends part of the same rebellious group. As an aroace person it was fun seeing a story kinda discard those notions altogether.

Maybe my two other gripes, one silly and one kinda serious, is that you can't pet the animals, while the other is that I hoped that you didn't get to choose who to hang out the few times it prompted you to, it kinda made me not care as much about certain characters compared to the ones I got to spend time with, but, also, that's just kinda how life is while being chased by the embodiment of the worldwide military industrial complex controlled by empires as it creates excuses to start wars sometimes! So maybe this complaint is also a little silly.

edit: i can't believe i originally wrote jrpg instead of rpg lmao brain is completely consumed by The Rot

A unique RPG with good art and music, good moments more fitting for a slice of life style story, interesting mechanics that aren't utilized enough, and incompetently designed but easy and fairly infrequent combat.

The main plot is hurt quite a bit by the fast pacing and somewhat nonsensical opening that bristles against the main more serious plot that it doesn't take the time or have the quality of writing to deal with in any meaningful way. With how quickly you are rushed into the main narrative you have no build up about the state of the world and no time spent working with the people in the army you begin the game being part of or seeing anything that could appear to give them any kind of sensible personalities based on their training and indoctrination.

You are part of an army of soldiers that have been born and raised in an underground high tech facility and trained to be soldiers since birth, all under the orders of a Father General who says their goal is to keep peace throughout the world. You've been trained as a sniper all your life and when the sniper of a more elite unit is injured you are assigned to take his place and join others on what ends up being a false flag operation where you pose as Polish soldiers attacking Russian civilians in small towns in order to start a war because your leader seems to want to be part of an invasion of Poland. Everyone knows you are killing civilians, except your character (mixture of night vision scope, lack of understanding about outside world, indoctrination explaining why he doesn't notice he's shooting unarmed random people in a town I guess), which as the the sniper and by extension the person who should be the most likely to be a psychopathic murderer that raises a lot of strange and never answered questions. Did they suspect you would have some personality flaw towards their goals if so why did they assigned you, why would they keep you as a sniper, did they not train any other snipers, why did they even need a sniper or a particularly talented one in this situation, why is everyone else ok with this when its most of their first assignment when they seem to have similar personalities to you, etc. It doesn't help that all of this seems to be completely contradicted by the shared briefing you had with the other soldiers, some early tutorial like lines in the opening area are also wrong as they reflect former mechanics that were changed over the early access period the game was in. You and another soldier you convince to join you flee the army after your first mission.

When you fight your old army many of them do seem to be portrayed more as the psychopathic characters they should be, but nearly everyone you meet at the start of the game is bumbling anime cliches like, "Can you bring me a gift from the surface," "lol my medical supplies weren't assigned correctly and I was excited and didn't bother to check," "Guard duty is boring can you bring me some cookies and apples?" You have people who should be closer to the Kurt Russell Soldier film and often are when it wants you to fight them, but seem more on the Forrest Gump side for the opening. Your two early characters also have no difficulty interacting with others or personality conflicts from their upbringing other than trying to make amends for being with the army in the opening and some repeated confusion over food. It's kind of like Tales of Arise's plot of, "Ok we freed the people who have been starving worked to death mining slaves for 100s of years...no other issues to deal with from that everything is fine now." 22+ years of indoctrination and it takes about five minutes to go, well everything we've ever been told must be a lie, we had better shoot them.

Combat involves the worst of the genres kind of buffs, debuffs, and lack of information. Each character has four stats and while ATK and DEF are usually pretty obvious you get no information on what AGI (turn order, dodge, hit, multiple attacks, etc?) or LUK (crit, hit, dodge, skill influence, bit of everything, after battle rewards, basically nothing, etc?) do. Combat follows a shown turn order, except when it decides it doesn't want to follow it. Many of the game's skills are worthless. Skills that cost SP may say they do more damage but then do less damage than a basic attacks. Buffs are often the useless kind of, my attack does 80 damage, if I instead use my attack buff skills by spending SP I sacrifice one turn to do 90 damage for my next three turns. Lynn is easily the best combat character in the game because she has more useful skills including one that can damage and blind all enemies and because the second gun you get for her shoots twice and only checks if the attack hits the one time. When you find an upgrade for your first gun it is worse than the second even with the higher damage, when you find her last gun after that it is still worth even with a high attack and agility bonus. The second gun says nothing about attacking twice and with the lower agility bonus compared to the last gun doesn't even make sense that it would attack twice. Keeping this gun has her often doing more damage than your sniper even when he's equipped with the game's most hidden and high attack value weapon. During combat you can aim at different parts of a targets body with torso shots being more accurate but less damaging, arms forgetting to mention an armor value but having a chance to paralyze (so low you have almost no reason to ever aim there), and head shots deal a lot more damage but have a high evasion chance (no idea what that means and since you rarely miss I would suggest never aiming for anything else, unless they have low enough health to finish with a torso shot or it makes sense to try for to paralyze based on turn order). After most battles you can choose a reward of either getting an item or equipment piece or regenerating some SP, the item and equipment is the better choice 95% of the time since most characters don't even have useful skills. Luckily combat isn't a constant focus of the game and it is so easy that it is never a challenge.

The areas where the game does a better job that can make it worth a playthrough is the good visuals with some nice environment details and some good CGs and animated moments. The music is good throughout the game from story tracks, exploration tracks, and battle tracks. The writing as the characters spend time with each other and interact with others is good and makes it fairly obvious that the developer's talent would lie much more in writing and working on a kind of slice of life story or civilians dealing with the situation of being in a war or civil war rather than the main plot dealing with former soldiers and civilians taking up arms against an army trying to gain control of the world and if the combat was replaced by dialogue choices and activities. Based on side quests you complete and your choices in different conversations characters can gain morale and while it can't have too massive of an effect on the game based on the smaller scale of it you can see some different fates for characters in their final scenes, different scenes or lines between characters, and may gain access to a few different quests if morale is high or low enough.

You are going to be spending more time seeing likable characters interact and doing side activities and that does push the game into an area where I can somewhat recommend it in spite of the poor combat and areas that shouldn't have been the focus.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1789401810634973206

probably the most "eh" game ive played this year. it has intresting concepts but the writing falls flat for me or feels a tad simplified at times.

i dig the combat/reward/limited resources in theory but like the concepts i didnt feel like it was executed in an engaging manner.

the characters ARE the highlight but the interactions we dont get are enough for me to be satisfied.

i suppose i expected more! but alas.

I really, really, really, REALLY wanted to like this game, especially since it's something i've been following the development of for quite a while. Unfortunately, I have to fold--this is too dull especially for the experience it's trying to depict. I'm drawn to RPGs set in the modern world or, at least, in non-medieval settings and an RPG dealing with the horrors of war from the perspective of deserters/ex-child soldiers drew me to LGD years ago and that's not even getting into it's absolutely gorgeous character art, CGs, and sprite work.

Presentation can only do so much however, especially when the writing is so flat. For a game with this sort of subject matter I expected something less saturday morning cartoon. The bad guys are cartoonishly evil, not maniacally laughing at the good guys cartoony but just several paces behind that. The main crew are goody two shoes to a fault with the little gray they have being near nonexistent, they're all morally upstanding people standing on the right side of the game's conflict and who don't seem to have much of a mean bone in their pretty, well-designed bodies. Dark concepts such as human trafficking, gunning down civilians in order to start a conflict between countries, and racism are dulled by how the game treats all of it with kids gloves. The Russia part of the game was the best at keeping the mood from what I saw so far but as the game progressed and the party grew the game lingered further and further away from those vibes of desperation and near hopelessness.

The RPG aspects of the game were actually handled well for the most part. All fights are part of the plot or even avoidable on occasion which was a smart move for a game like this. The way after battle rewards were handled also incentivized strategic and long-term thinking + the absolute lack of shops to buy supplies from made every battle feel like a battle of attrition which was great.......

But maaaaaaaaan the WRITING!!!! WHY????????????

I think I should have realized how 'soft' the writing was going to be was in the game's opening hour. Having the main character so easily shake of lifelong indoctrination just like that was beyond my suspension of disbelief. The writing for the game as a whole (up to Poland, I quit after the warehouse segment) is like that: annoyingly soft and that's the best word I can think of when describing it.