Long Gone Days

Still rather early in the game, but so far it's quite good. The combat system isn't too cumbersome. The characters interesting and the art style simply great. I highly recommend for fans of story driven rpg.
After finishing it, I say this was a pretty darn good rpg despite being one on rails. The story was nice, but I wish you would have had the chance to interact and chat more with the NPCs who are part of the cast, maybe have a chance to have sgt, Faye officially join the team during the last act and have a chance to turn Branna to your side (poor brainwashed child soldier that she is). All in all, a very good indy game.

Easily one of the best new games I've ever played. I bought it because the screenshots reminded me of the geopolitical intrigue of the Suikoden RPG series, and I was not disappointed.
I instantly cared about the characters and their motivations, the story was compelling, the NPCs brought life to each location.
I hope this is the first in a new series.

A nice nuanced story and decent pixel art, but very little actual game play. Terrible interface, though. Every little thing takes half a second too long for comfort. And no way to change the keybinding.
Recommended if you want a story about the horrors and uncertainties of war from the perspective of everyday people. And if you don't mind to read a lot and do very little else. And press the X key a lot. A lot!

Very solid storytelling game, that while linear and at times a tad tedious, still captures my attention, my thoughts and enjoyment. The art is amazing, and the vibes of the game are on point. There are many mechanics that are implemented that I wish were developed further upon, but it's a game I recommend purely on the narrative and storytelling it weaves.
I don't know how much replay-ability is in store for me personally, as the roster of available party members never gets too far, and several quests are not quite intuitive to finish or start. That being said, if you can get this game on sale, just need a story to play through and enjoy, hate shadowy fascistic authoritarian psuedo-governments that ruin people's lives, spread misinformation, disrupt people's livelihoods and you want to take them down with the little guys, it's the right game for you.

Let me preface this by saying that I finished the game and enjoyed it, but I can only recommend it if you can buy it on sale because of the rather short playtime.
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The Good:
The artstyle is amazing. The game uses a mix of pixel art in the overworld, character portraits in combat and dialogue, and
full-on vibrant/moving art pieces in some important scenes. The love could be felt everywhere in those special scenes, so much so that I sent a couple as screenshots to my friend so we could admire them together. The main cast of characters are mostly just a bunch of everyday people, and the character design shows that by making the characters look rather normal, but in the best way. They felt real, partially because of the art. Standouts in the characters design for me were Beqiri, Coyle and Pascal (mostly because he somehow looks like my friend, who's also named Pascal). The pixel art sprites were very well done and while the environments weren't anything too special, the art depicted was still charming to look at.
The gameplay is (mostly) very fun. I'm a sucker for simple RPGs, and the gameplay fit that bill. Part of why the game only took me around 13 hours to beat is because there's no experience system, no difficulty spikes and no grinding (thank god). The combat is enjoyable and easy to understand. Each party member has a specific role that they can fulfill, with my favourite "combat" character being Ivan. His skills are definitely the closest thing this game gets to broken. The game has sidequests you can very often do, and while they're nothing super special, they're charming in their own right and I felt compelled to do them. The most fun (and realistic) aspect of the game is the fact that often times the main characters do not speak the native language of the country they are in, and thus cannot understand locals. This leads to both the characters AND the player sometimes having to interpret what is being said, which leads to some fun moments. And if you see a language you yourself know being represented, it adds to the fun of it, because you can actually understand the conversations you're not "supposed" to understand (German for me). Kinda feels like cheating, but in a good way. The only system that I did not understand was the morale system, since I didn't really notice the effects of it in my playthrough.
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The Average:
The characters are inoffensive: decent at best and boring at worst. Ivan was easily the best, standout character, playing the role of non-combatant very well in story, side quests and combat. He was definitely my favourite character. Rourke was kind of an emotional wreck all throughout the story, but mostly in an endearing way. His best aspects were his innocence and having to discover how to live as a "normal" human, while his idealism was his worst aspect from a writing perspective. Atiye and Pascal were fine additions, they had their funny and cute moments, don't have too much to say about them. Lynn's arc was incredibly predictable and while a lot of her backstory was resolved, some aspects still felt too vague. This unfortunately comes at the detriment of her character, because she isn't much without her backstory. The biggest disappointment was Adair, who unfortunately gets absolutely nothing to do in both the main story and the side content. Most often he just felt like a yes-man to Rourke. The side characters were fine. The villains were fine. The NPCs were fine. Most of the characters in this game were, unfortunately, just fine.
Unfortunately, the writing of the game was also very average. The story tackles serious topics like individuality, war, political gain, racism and actual human trafficking. For the most part, they really hit the nail on the head of the importance and effect of these topics on both the world in game and our real world. The problem is that the game has a very simple view of the conflicts and there's no room for nuance. There's an obvious "correct" answer to all of the conflicts that the game will throw in your face non-stop. I won't go into detail because I am not an expert on writing in general; I'm mostly saying this from a reader's perspective. The story is very predictable and simple. This is not necessarily a bad thing because we need some simplicity and happiness in our daily lives, especially in this day and age; I was just hoping for a bit more. The side content was very simple and unfortunately also suffers from being "in your face" about its messages. The best written parts of the story were the before-mentioned moments of Rourke and the gang just living life, especially the jazz scene and the scenes of Rourke hanging out with specific members of the group. Overall, I did enjoy the story, despite said predictability. I'd honestly love to read a story about the future of these characters, because despite my bitching about their simplicity, they did grow on me in the end.
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The Bad:
The main thing this game suffers from is bad controls and UI. I noticed that the game only uses about 6 total keys on the keyboard, 4 of which being the movement keys. Besides that, 1 button was used for pretty much everything in the game, while the last button was the "Back" button. The simplicity of the controls led to the game sometimes feeling like a slog to play, while also leading me to accidentally activate the menu over, and over, and over. In my head, I often made the comparison to the Zelda CDI games. While Long Gone Days is obviously not as bad as the CDI games, those games also suffered from having 1 button for many different action, despite more buttons being available to be implemented. The UI works at a base level, but it is very often unclear what certain parts do or which part of the menu has what information. Sometimes you get an item/weapon for one of the playable characters, but the game doesn't tell you who each item is for. That means you have to scour every single character's items in different parts of the menu to find what you just got. It's frankly just a tedious menu to navigate, both because of the controls and because of the UI.
The last thing I wanna mention is that the game speed is very, very slow. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to speed up dialogue boxes, which made reading go by pretty slow. The biggest offender of the slow game speed is the combat, specifically the buffs and debuffs. In the endgame, buffs are very important to stand a chance in the combat, and the strongest move in the game is a move that gives all of your party members +1 to each of their stats. The problem is that every single individual stat increase or decrease gets mentioned in its own dialogue box (which I just established goes by slowly), so using that move makes it so that you get 12 messages in a row telling you the characters' stats have increased. And then later when they go back down, the same thing happens. This section is the shortest section of my review, but trust me when I say that the game speed halted my fun of the game the most, because it often just felt like my time was being wasted.
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TL;DR
Art good, gameplay fun, characters and writing fine, controls and UI bad, game speed frustrating.

Such an underrated gem of a game, I loved how it tackled a difficult topic in an RPG theme. The art is stunning, and the colors and the vibe really help put you in the shoes of the characters.

Honestly a very good game with a compelling story. There are multiple endings to be aware of. It isn't very long, so I'm not sure that it is worth it at full price, but on a good sale definitely worth picking up. The game is really easy. Near the end some combat sections can seem annoying as you will wait for each text block if you buff your whole party, especially with Ivan who gives each person 3 buffs. No complaints other than that! Considering playing through again!