A Long Road Home Demo

Adventure games usually feature some kind of journey that takes the main character through a variety of situations, each one of which has some sort of lesson at its core. Having a destination and a goal makes the journey a lot more enjoyable, because your progress feels rewarding when you manage to get a little bit closer to what you hope to achieve in the end.

A Long Road Home is a top-down RPG with simple gameplay mechanics and a variety of puzzles for you to tackle. The game can also be considered a point & click in certain regards, because it shares many characteristics with the genre, even if it looks like a retro hack & slash. In essence, the main goal is to solve puzzles and talk to people, not fight hordes of monsters every other minute.

The story puts you in the role of a young man who wakes up in a stranger’s home after being attacked by monsters in the wilderness. The man who saved him is a doctor, and he lives in a village surrounded by dangerous creatures. Your goal is to help the young man get out of the village and find his way back home, a task that is anything but simple.

It must be mentioned that the puzzles are not very challenging, at least not the ones featured in the demo at hand. There’s usually a very obvious solution, and the map is small enough for you to quickly notice what must be done. This can be a bit of a bother if you were expecting tougher puzzles or a more demanding experience, but then again at least the missions you undertake are fairly fun and they usually make sense in the grand scheme of things.

Lastly, the graphics are typical for RPG Maker flicks, which means that you have to get used to a classic isometric perspective and low-resolution tiles, although it shouldn’t be a problem if you are a fan of retro video games. The level design is actually quite decent, even if the maps are very small, as previously stated. Not much can be said about the music yet, but the full version should be more polished in this regard.

A Long Road Home might be a tad too simple for some players, but at least it doesn’t try to be more than it actually is. Hence, there are enough enjoyable puzzles in the game to keep everyone busy for a few hours, and the story is interesting enough to captivate most people.