A Long Journey to an Uncertain End

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is a visual novel, a simple management game, and a road trip story in a sci-fi setting. You play as a sentient AI ship running from both an abusive relationship with a human and the law. As the story progresses, there are opportunities to recruit more crew members who can be recognised by their high-quality sprites. The management part is fairly easy on the default difficulty, with the fuel, supplies, crew’s morale, and, most importantly, time being the only resources. The crew members can be sent to various jobs on the planets visited. Aside from the main story ones, the jobs felt pretty random and largely meaningless. There are 2-3 options on how to proceed during a job and usually the one that requires a skill check is the better one. The Game Over timer is ever-present and not possible to stop completely, which can be stressful, though it has never run out for me. While the setting is more or less established, there are not particularly many opportunities to interact with the crew nor do they have any side quests after the initial recruitment. It is possible to talk to them and switch between 2 very good-looking skins. The avatar, on the other hand, is significantly more customisable (including the body type but not the ship body), though the result looks a bit worse than the companions. There are dialogue options, but most of them did not feel significant to me up until the ending. The system requirements are reasonable, the settings are very limited (as the game uses mostly the mouse). The game supports the single auto-save system (+1 manual save per playthrough), so a file management system is required for the save file management. The visual and sound design are outstanding. Recommended on sale.

The idea would have some value, if not for the amazingly shocking bad writing and the current-day political manifesto forcefully inserted in it. The game is extremely short, but, in this case, I must admit it's a good feature. The price tag is laughable high. I won't recommend buying it above 1 dollar or less if possible, and only as a prank to your spose. Details: Gameplay - 2/5 (lots of buttons and text choices, don't expect anything interactive) Sound - 3/5 (the music is nice, the sound effects decent, there is no voice) Story - 1/5 (it exists, nothing else. For a game that supposed to be narrative based, it's shameful) Graphics - 1/5 (the backgrounds are atrocious, the characters are poorly drawn, the UI is cheap) Pricing - 0/5 (at no point in time in any universes this game deserves anything above 5$) Total: 7/25 or 1.4/5 Stars (Awful)

The writing breaks my immersion. It's on the level of friends playing a pen and paper. For example a drag queen rescued from an escape pod after 2 months of isolation behaves like a baby (emotionally unripe) or mentally retarded person with no social awareness. Even the threat of being thrown out does not shake him or her (writing inconsistency) out of it. Some characters a insufferable. The only character I connected with was the tutorial corgi dog. And: I never thought, I would say that, but this game is too woke for me. Almost all characters are queer (including physically impaired people like wheelchair users). I want real life queerness sprinkeled in the mix, as this is something I experience in my social environment, but this way overshot the target. The future is queer. Queers only. You are strange, if you are cis, non-inpaired, non-systematically-oppressed and so on. Gameplaywise it reminds me of Faster Than Light and Rough Justice 84. If you like RJ84, you will like this gameplay. One more thing: You cannot pause. Time passes even while you are reading dialogues. It is not a game you are forced to minmax, but a running clock puts me under constant pressure and unlike shooters and high actions games, I really do not want to feel pressured. This is supposed to be a cozy game - or so I would think. Yeah, that's a pass for me. Meh.

A game where every character has their pronoun listed and you can customize pronouns of your crew. A woke game, just what I wanted. Not/Never...