Long Gone Days

My first hour with Long Gone Days felt deceptively modest - tile-based movement, portrait-only party members in battle, no experience points, no random encounters. Everything about the surface presentation whispers "small project." Then Rourke looks through his sniper scope, realizes his targets are civilians, and the game quietly shifts into something that lingers with you for days. This is a work of genuine craft from This I Dreamt, written, illustrated, and developed almost entirely by one person, Camila Gormaz, and the intentionality behind every design choice shows. The structure splits cleanly into three modes: exploration of compact urban areas where NPCs carry real weight and side quests illuminate the civilian cost of conflict; a first-person sniper segment that bookends the story with tense, time-limited target acquisition; and turn-based combat that strips away the fantasy scaffolding entirely. There is no leveling up, no magic, no random battles. Instead, characters gain new skills through story progression alone, and the only way to improve stats is through equipment. The combat system replaces mana with Morale, a stat that rises and falls based on your dialogue choices inside and outside of battle. Push Morale to maximum and a character lands critical hits reliably. Let it crater and their damage is halved. It is a quiet mechanical argument about what keeps soldiers fighting, and it earns its metaphor. Body-part targeting in combat adds a genuine risk-reward layer that critics broadly praised. You can fire safely at the torso for reliable damage, or aim for the head - higher damage, higher evasion, real consequences for a miss during a boss fight where SP is precious and items need to be rationed. The game saves at fixed points rather than freely, which feeds the tension but may frustrate players who play in short sessions. One legitimate criticism worth flagging: the "good" ending is gated behind two specific side quests that the game does not surface clearly, meaning a blind playthrough can result in fifteen hours of investment landing on a less satisfying conclusion. Do the side quests. All of them. The soundscape deserves its own sentence. The score is somber without being oppressive, the kind of ambient architecture that makes quiet scenes feel enormous. The pastel pixel art is easy on the eyes but does create some visual monotony between locations - Kaliningrad and Kiel start to blur when modern cities share the same tile grammar. And the hand-holding in tutorials is a common criticism across reviews, a genuine tonal mismatch given how much trust the narrative places in the player everywhere else. The game runs eight to fifteen hours depending on side quest engagement, and it knows when to end - a discipline rarer than it should be. Long Gone Days is not for players who want systems depth or build optimization. It is for people who still think about the last game that made them feel something. It draws comparisons to Undertale and LISA in its RPG-maker-adjacent DNA and story-first philosophy, but its setting in a fictionalized real world, its use of actual languages spoken by NPCs, and its political themes around immigration, refugee policy, and false-flag warfare put it in territory those games never touched. It is the kind of title that gets discovered years later through a bundle and becomes someone's quiet favorite. Now you know about it early.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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