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Book review: ‘A Long Way Home’ by Saroo Brierley

Explore Summit Explore-summit | Mar 18, 2017

Every once in awhile, a story comes along that seems too remarkable to be true, tying together a miraculous sequence of events that once would have been ready fodder for Oprah Winfrey in her talk show days. Luckily for readers — and moviegoers — there is just such a tale in Saroo Brierley’s memoir “A Long Way Home,” which served as the basis for the acclaimed 2016 movie “Lion,” starring Dev Patel.

There is a real feeling of catharsis when reading Brierley’s astounding narrative. It comes in the classic sense of a happy ending, for the journey of the author, both as a boy and then again as a young man, evokes the audacity of a fable. However, it is set in the real world, a place where wonderment and miraculous occurrences can often seem wanting.

Brierley’s story spans three decades, from his earliest years in India as a boy living in poverty, but rich in his mother’s and his three siblings’ love, to his life of comfort and affluence in Australia with adoptive parents and a brother.

The threads that connected his two worlds were gossamer-thin, the faintest of clues embedded in the unyielding memories of his childhood. Though it had once been his home, India was an abstraction for the author, a place his adoptive mother taught him about on a map.

The remarkable outcome spurred by his determination to find his way home again could have only succeeded in the modern world, for without Google Earth, his story most certainly would have turned out differently. .sd-donation { background: #037BC1; max-width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; } .sd-donation .logo { width: 50%; margin: 1rem 0 1rem; } .sd-donation h1 { font-size: 2rem; text-transform: none; color: #fff; } .sd-donation p { color: #fff; font-weight: 300; } .sd-donation hr { width: 20%; border-top: 4px solid #000; } .sd-donation .btn { padding: .5rem 2rem; background-color: #fff !important; border-radius: 0; } .sd-donation .btn { color: #037BC1; } .sd-donation .btn:hover { background-color: #005789 !important; } .sd-donation .btn:hover a { color: #fff !important; } .sd-donation .col-xl-5.p-0 { background-image: url('https://swiftmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/mountain.swiftcom.com/images/sites/2/2023/09/11170549/SDN-donate-cta-bg.jpg'); background-size: cover; min-height:330px; } @media ( min-width: 768px ) { .sd-donation .logo { width: 35%; } } @media ( min-width: 1440px ) { .sd-donation { text-align: left; } .sd-donation-mobile { display: none; } .sd-donation hr { margin-left: 0; } } Support Local Journalism Donate -->

Little did Brierley know, it would be a map that led him back to the moment and place that changed his life forever — a train station, where at 5 years old, he boarded an empty train car searching for his older brother.

At that moment, the boy was swept away from everything he had ever known to Calcutta, “the sprawling mega-city famous for its overpopulation, pollution, and crushing poverty — one of the most dangerous cities in the world.”

Thus began young Saroo’s nightmare. He was barefoot, penniless and desperately hungry and thirsty. Shock overwhelmed him and his mind went numb as he sat in that bustling train station.

He had been trained, as many poor children in India were, to avoid authority figures — for they had always led to trouble. For him, “It felt as if the people in the station weren’t people at all but a great solid mass, like a river or the sky, on which (he) could make no impact.” Invisible, he was simply another child devoured by the city.

Showing an astounding amount of resourcefulness for his age, he made a conscious decision to solve his problem by living off the abundance of trash and systematically boarded trains that left the hub of the city’s central station in the hopes of chancing onto one that would take him home.

But therein lay the crux of his problem. Uneducated and unable to read, he did not know the name of his hometown, let alone the station from which he began this terrifying journey.

Brierley writes of this time with honesty and expressiveness. The reader is transported to the terrifying bigness of the world that he inhabited as a lost little boy.

His perilous situation lasted months, and sheer luck and the kindness of a handful of strangers saved him from the myriad fates that claim countless forgotten children.

The longer he lived on the streets, the more that life became normal. With the resiliency of a child, he learned the places to avoid and where to linger. As time passed, so too did the hope of reuniting with his family.

“The home I’d lost felt farther away with each bite of food that I foraged,” he wrote.

His eventual adoption by a loving Australian family ends the first chapter of his extraordinary story, but the gripping nature of the narrative does not stop there for Brierley never abandoned the idea that his birth mother was still out there somewhere in India, and he longed for answers.

The remarkable outcome spurred by his determination to find his way home again could have only succeeded in the modern world, for without Google Earth, his story most certainly would have turned out differently.

The narrative ramps up into deeply emotional territory as Brierley recounts the series of events that led him back to his Indian family, an experience that culminated in one emotional meeting after another and gave him a perspective on his past that gained him a new sense of peace.

“I am not conflicted about who I am or where to call home,” he wrote. “I now have two families, not two identities. I am Saroo Brierley.”

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The Long Journey Home: A Novel of the Post-Civil War Plains

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A war-shocked Civil War veteran returns to find his homestead on the Mississippi River bluffs in ruins, his wife dead, his grown children seeking lives of their own. When an unexpected government land grant of 160 acres of Minnesota prairie land promises Henry Morton a new life, filled with dreams of a second family, new home, and prosperity, he packs up his wagon and treks west toward Todd County. His paths, however, soon cross with those of Agnes Guyette, the young, naïve, and illiterate daughter of a French Canadian settler. Their suspenseful journeys now take them in different directions across the wild beauty of the prairies and threatening Badlands to dramatic and unexpected challenges. There are some giddy moments of happiness --- Agnes galloping through fields of wild prairie flowers; some comical conversations --- Henry sharing confidences with his horse, Major; and some ingenious sequences --- Charles Bertrand springing Henry from jail. Yet, over all, the result is a pilgrimage of the soul forcing the main characters to recognize their own identity, both the good and evil of the human spirit and, finally, the power of friendship and love.

The Long Journey Home: A Novel of the Post-Civil War Plains by Laurel Means

• Publication Date: July 1, 2008
• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
• ISBN-10: 0897335694
• ISBN-13: 9780897335690

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Wot I Think: The Long Journey Home

Star Trekkin'

It's not all that long, the journey, but it is very busy. About six hours might do the trick, but you're likely to get distracted along the way. Part Star Trek Voyager and part The Odyssey, The Long Journey Home [ official site ] puts you in charge of a small crew who have been stranded far from Earth due to a tech malfunction, and must make their way home, making friends and enemies along the way. Though it's clearly inspired by the likes of Star Control and Captain Blood, I've found myself thinking of No Man's Sky as I play. Here's wot I think.

TLJH is one of those games that feels like lots of mini-games stitched together. There's some basic resource management, Thrust-like planetary landings, conversations with alien races, combat, and star system navigation. It's a game that could easily end up being less than the sum of its parts, but the structure of the journey itself ties everything together and makes each decision and challenge important. Whether you're figuring out if a diversion to save a plague-ridden planet is worthwhile or even a realistic possibility given how limited the essential resources needed to keep your ship running might be.

There are four things to consider. Your crew are a primary resource and as they pick up injuries, your journey becomes more perilous. Those injuries come from rough landings, risky flying, certain encounters and ship-to-ship combat. People are your most precious resource, and are irreplaceable, though they can be healed if you find the appropriate items.

The other three resources you'll need to trek across the stars can all be picked up along the way and the core loop of the game involves ensuring you gather enough of each at each stop along the route.

First of all, you'll need fuel to move within systems, and to send your single-seater lander craft down to the surface of planets. It's planetside where you'll find the gases, metals and minerals that are used for refuelling and repair, but you might also want to visit some planets as part of a quest chain, or on the off-chance there'll be some mystery to uncover. But, yes, fuel is of vital importance, and you'll use it to move between planets and find it on planets.

And then there's a second kind of fuel that lets you jump between systems. The ingredients for that are found on planets as well, and you'll always have a fairly good idea what you're going to find once you settle into orbit. A scan tells you what kind of resources to expect, and what quantities they might be found in, and information about inhabitants, atmosphere, weather and overall threat level.

If a planet has firestorms, high winds and scarce supplies, it's probably not worth risking your lander and crew. You can repair both your ship and lander, and that's where the third resource, metal, comes into play.

On one level, that's how The Long Journey Home works; you travel from place to place, gathering enough resources to ensure you can make the next jump, or survive the next tricky landing in order to get the fuel to make the jump. That's where it reminds me of my hours with No Man's Sky, a game in which I never cared for the journey so much as the destination. The lure of discovering new species and biomes was powerful, for a few days, and part of the attraction was knowing that everything I saw mine and mine alone. Discoveries born of code and procedural design.

There is randomisation in The Long Journey Home as well, but it affects the order of things rather than the things themselves. The systems you'll pass through on your way back to our solar system are different each time, but the things within them are hand-crafted. There are several species to encounter, all with their own stories, dialogues and quest chains. Those quests range from delightfully silly interstellar quiz shows and tests of strength to genocide and flirtations with transcendental beings. What they all have in common is a sense of mischievous wit in the writing, which is courtesy of RPS columnist Richard Cobbett, a man who has forgotten more about RPGs and their tropes than most of us have ever known.

The combination of resource-gathering and wordy adventures is an odd one, but it's mostly successful. At worst, the actual business of scooping up fuel and minerals becomes busywork, interrupting the flow of a quest, and the limited number of encounters means that you'll start to see repetition after a few playthroughs. Thankfully, running into aliens you've already met on a previous journey doesn't mean you're in for an identical story – some encounters have fairly predictable outcomes, but some branch and twist, and there are even emergent qualities to some stories, which can be derailed or unexpectedly collide with one another.

There's a lot to like in those encounters but it's hard to escape from the feeling that the actual machinery driving the game is simpler than I'd like it to be. If you come for the stories, you still have to do the work in between them, as if visiting a library with a byzantine membership system that requires you to sign up again every time you want to borrow a book.

Take the lander sections: they're beautiful and simple enough, rarely taking more than five minutes to complete, even if you actually explore the surface and have a mini text adventure rather than just scooping up resources before jetting away. But they're also repetitive and a couple of mistakes can make the cost of landing heavier than rewards. I'd describe The Long Journey Home as a difficult game, given how hard it is to get home, but it's an oddly pitched difficulty. I'm more likely to peter out than to explode in a blaze of glory or perish in a calamitous misadventure.

Simply put, getting home is hard work and even though there are loads of amazing adventures to be had along the way, you'll also be carrying out a lot of maintenance. Think of this more as a warning than a condemnation because I'm still enjoying the game after thirty-five hours of playing. There's something quite soothing about the repetition that puts Long Journey Home into my Podcast Pile – which is to say, the pile of games that I play while listening to podcasts. That's not a bad pile to be in given how many podcasts I listen to every day.

And, yes, it still reminds me of No Man's Sky, but with these discrete mini-games instead of the arduous walking and gathering and crafting and inventory juggling. It also feels like a successor to Digital Eel's Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, and a stronger one than the actual sequel. There's not quite enough here to win me over completely, but there's more than enough to make the numerous trips I've made worthwhile, and part of the charm is in never knowing if there's anything left to discover. The stars are strange and home to many mysteries and it's tempting to stick around until I've seen them all. But keep in mind that there's lots of work to do along the way.

The Long Journey Home is available now for Windows, via Steam and GOG .

Disclosure: Richard Cobbett wrote the words and has a regular column on RPS that I edit most weeks. The fact that I have to look at so many of his words as part of my day-job and actually enjoyed playing a game that was stuffed with even more of them could probably be seen as a compliment.

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SUCH A LONG JOURNEY

by Rohinton Mistry ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 1991

A first novel from Mistry (the notable story collection Swimming Lessons, 1989) about a family man in 1971 India who experiences a political scandal firsthand. Set at the time of India's war with Pakistan over Bangladesh, it convincingly dramatizes how an honest but naive man can be compromised by events he doesn't understand. Gustad Noble is a bank clerk faced with an assortment of family problems—an inexplicable low-grade illness of daughter Roshan; a son (Sohrab) who wins a college scholarship but refuses to accept it; and a nostalgic dream for a mythical golden age. Evocative instances of domestic humor and travail (Noble, for instance, decides to bring home a live chicken for a feast, with amusing consequences) and local character sketches (notably that of Tehmul, a man harmless but brain-damaged, whom we first meet ``directing traffic around the demon tree'') give way to undercover intrigue when Major Bilimoria, an old friend who works for Indira Gandhi's secret police, recruits Noble to receive mysterious parcels and deposit sums of money (under a false name) in the bank where he works. The plot thickens (dead animals begin to appear on Noble's doorstep) as domestic travail tightens (no medications seem to help his daughter) before scandal erupts. Bilimoria is arrested: it turns out he's either a sort of Oliver North, officially transferring funds to aid guerrillas in East Pakistan, or a crook. Noble, confused, his world in disarray, travels form Bombay to Delhi for a chilling meeting with Bilimoria, who is now near- delirious. The agent admits his guilt: he intended to line his own pockets and those of his friends, including Noble. Amidst revelations of gross governmental corruption, Bilimoria dies—but Noble survives as the war begins to ``liberate'' Bangladesh. A finely textured look at India in a time of upheaval.

Pub Date: April 25, 1991

ISBN: 0-679-40258-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991

GENERAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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PERSPECTIVES

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.

Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.

Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015

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The Long Journey Home Review

A different experience.

The Long Journey Home

To be completely honest, I did not like The Long Journey Home the first time I played it. The controls were clunky, the learning curve was steep and what I had seen made the universe feel barren and uninteresting. The thing is that I had been playing The Long Journey Home as if it we strictly a modern RPG , but it tries to do so much more than that. This is a game that does a lot of things, though nothing exceptionally well.

The Long Journey Home is a rogue-like space simulation that emphasizes exploration, negotiation with various myriad alien races, and, above all, patience. Trying to speed through the galaxy will leave players out of fuel, damaged, and likely under the yolk of galactic bureaucracy without the funds or friends to move on. However, if the player takes it slow and explores the universe they’ll be rewarded with resources, colourful alien encounters, and decent controls. Well, mostly decent controls.

As the name suggest, the player assembles a group of four space travelers with various backgrounds and skill sets. There’s a botanist, an actual astronaut, an engineer, and even a kid with a blog, all the important jobs . Your motley group of explorers is quickly thrust out into the depths of unexplored space, thanks to a convenient engine mishap. Shame about those mishaps, they always seem to happen and the most narratively appropriate times.

The actual gameplay consists of a few different variations of piloting your plucky crew through the universe. You’ll be jumping between star systems on a large map in a way very similar to Out There , a game that shares a great deal of thematic and narrative elements with The Long Journey Home , though presents them as an adventure game rather than a simulation. On a smaller scale, you’ll be jetting around solar systems from planet to planet by applying thrust in different directions to make adjustments to your course and speed. In practice, it falls somewhere between Sunless Sea and Kerbal Space Program , and similarly emphasizes patience and planning.

To be fair, there’s nothing inherently wrong with emulating a few interesting indie games, in fact, utilizing successful mechanics of previous games is a staple of the industry. Not only does the practice promote interesting mechanics, but the articles surrounding the game can help guide players to the games that inspired them. What I’m trying to say it this: those three games are good, if you dig The Long Journey Home you’ll dig those indie titles.

There is another gameplay section, I haven’t really touched on yet that isn’t so great. When you explore a planet you’ll do so by way of a lander. This lander is capable of thrust in several different directions , and tends to drop like a stone. It was very rare that I was able to pilot this little death box to the surface of a planet without sustaining significant damage or injuries. Luckily, while exploring the surface, the player is able to collect various crafting and repair components and interact with local populations in to obtain or complete quests or repair the damage done.

The planet-side gameplay is frustrating, but one hiccup in an otherwise competent game. It is unfortunate how frequent these sections occur, but they are manageable with patience and practice. The Long Journey Home is a slow burn, meant to be experienced over several playthroughs and numerous different adventures through the farthest reaches of the universe. You’ll fend off space pirates with grand broadside battles akin to games that focus on naval warfare ( Sid Meier’s Pirates! , Assassin’s Creed Black Flag , etc.), liaison with the weird and wonderful denizens of the universe (Though they never seem to have enough time for you), and maybe even take part in an intergalactic freak show.

It’s easy to dismiss The Long Journey Home as a subpar pretender, standing on the backs of a few indie games that came before it, as I almost did, but it ends up being more than that. This game is a love letter to the various titles it emulates and a solid game in its own right. Here you’re guaranteed a memorable experience as you meander from planet to planet, just be careful with that landing.

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The Long Journey Home is a game of great ambition — an ambition that pulled me in before I realized the limited scope of its mechanics.

If you watch a trailer for The Long Journey Home or read the description on its Steam store page, you’ll get a sense for what this game wants to be: a procedurally generated science-fiction universe; a coherent, emergent sci-fi odyssey that players can shape through diplomacy, craft and skill. It’s a tantalizing idea, and one that got me immediately excited to discover more.

The reality is a lot less appealing than the pitch. The Long Journey Home contains some colorful ideas, but it’s dragged down by an overwhelming dependence on repetitive, discouraging tests of mechanical patience and skill.

The Long Journey Home stylizes itself as a more scientific, literary roguelike. You play as the guiding hand behind an expedition to test humanity's first jump drive. It malfunctions, of course, and deposits you on the other side of the galaxy, around a hundred jumps away from Earth. To get back, you'll have to meet alien races, conquer hostile terrain and upgrade your ship. At least, that's the framing idea.

The vast majority of my time with The Long Journey Home was spent controlling the velocity of a fragile spacecraft as I harvested resources from procedurally generated planets. On the primary star map, gravity is represented as a grid, folding and dipping as planets, moons and stars leave their gravitational indentations. And then there's the shuttle landing minigame, where you have to settle your lander down on a resource while managing approach vector, wind speed and escape velocity.

These are the overwhelmingly primary mechanics of the game. No matter what the page on the Steam store promises about diplomacy, trading and surprise encounters, eighty percent of the actual game is trying not to smash into the ground during these frustrating sequences.

It's extraordinarily difficult to navigate around mountains, planets and meteorites in The Long Journey Home . A small miscalculation of velocity when you're trying to achieve stable orbit, and you bounce off the atmosphere, damaging your ship, injuring your crew and forcing you to try again. Even after over a dozen hours familiarizing myself with the game and its controls, I found myself approaching each new planet three or four times, swinging wide, coming up short, too fast, too shallow.

The lander sequences are even more unforgiving and awkward. I routinely shaved off over half the lander's health just trying to perch it atop the meager resources the planet offers. Generally speaking, I did more damage to my lander trying to collect metal than I could ever repair with the metal harvested. Not to mention that bouncing your lander off the surface will seriously injure your pilot. A simple mistake can cause two or three semi-permanent damage conditions that you'll have to spend precious (and rare) items to repair.

The Long Journey Home is a game dependent on extremely miserly resource management, and any kind of deep progress is only made possible by planning your expeditions with care. The game gives you an impression like you don't have to land on dangerous planets, that you can pick and choose to only make dangerous landings in emergencies, but the math just never added up that way. It can take over five individual metal nodes to fix your ship, and a single mineral resource is almost never enough to allow a system-to-system jump. Being imprecise with velocity and skimming off a planet's atmosphere can give you a 30 percent penalty to filling up your jump drive, which can quickly leave you stranded.

So you have to hoover up everything you see to survive. But there are so many serious, long-lasting, deeply impactful penalties for even the simplest of navigation errors in the simplest conditions that it's hard to come out ahead. I routinely quit back to the main menu and reloaded over and over to ensure that I would pull off successful resource runs with minimal damage to my lander. The most intriguing elements of The Long Journey Home are the ones teased as being in the late game: discovering ancient relics, resolving major interstellar conflicts, grand arcs of plot that are only suggested in the early game. But the whole thing is so mechanically punitive, so quick to mire you in the simplest, least engaging mechanics, that actually arriving at those most complex levels seems as distant as Earth itself.

Combat adds a whole new dimension of pain to the experience: Your ship, at least to start, is only capable of firing broadsides. These sequences play out like top-down naval engagements where your puny human vessel, firing and moving as agonizingly slowly as a Spanish galleon, must spar off against alien ships with homing missiles and defensive fighters. After dozens of fights, I still couldn't pin down proper aiming technique. My only workable tactic was to ram the enemy vessel, hook on the geometry of their ship, and fire point-blank. Combat can be expected about once per star system after the first star cluster, with some systems holding a half dozen enemy ships who all ask for Blood or Coin.

The aggressive pace of the combat encounters further gates the narrative content behind a skill wall. There are complicated systems of allegiance with the aliens you meet, and they respond in complex ways to prompts and quests. For example, I accidently showed the leader of a pirate base the head of one of his lieutenants, whose ship I destroyed when they tried to rob me. At first, he screamed at the insult, then immediately offered me a job as a pirate for my bloodthirsty gall. Or consider an over-friendly race who offer helpful items, leaving you to realize too late that the items give your crew an infestation. Narratively speaking, this is engaging. But mechanically, it’s infuriating: insult on top of injury. The excitement of being offered a piracy job is dulled when you consider that it means you have to spend more time with the combat minigame.

I can tell that The Long Journey is a complicated game, but the narrative is the least complex thing about it. That's the fundamental frustration of the game: It's marketed to people exactly like me, sci-fi fans who want a video game that's grounded in the optimism and curiosity of the science fiction novels of yesteryear. Artistically, thematically, the game follows in those footsteps. But don't get the impression that it's a casual game by any means. It's a cruel and finicky physics puzzler. It requires absolute attention be paid to each one of its many mechanical systems, even on the easiest difficulty. It supposes the power of your imagination is enough to make micromanaging the curve and flight velocity of a cursor on a screen exciting.

The Long Journey Home may hold many secrets and wonders, but it's hard to hold on to the promise of them when the game's more likely to break both your legs as soon as you step off the front porch. The promise of a truly narrative-driven roguelike is tantalizing, but this isn’t that game. It's just as tied to your skill with the controller as any bullet hell — more so, really, because you carry the consequences of even the slightest mistake a long ways before finally seeing the game over screen. It promises to be a game about the wonder of unbound space; instead, it’s more about the infuriating heartbreak of high wind speeds in a low gravity environment.

The Long Journey Home was reviewed using a pre-release final Steam code provided by Daedalic Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here .

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A Long Journey Home

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The Long Journey Home Review

It’s tough to hang out and have a latte in space. Every time you wake up you find yourself facing radiation poisoning, suffocation from lack of life support, or just complete and utter devastation where everyone you’ve ever loved dies in front of your eyes. If you’re looking for your next holiday try Ibiza, or Skegness… just not space. But we can’t resist it, can we?

We all want to boldly go where no man or woman has ever gone before, and The Long Journey Home is no different, taking us on to an adventure into the unknown. But is it the new Star Trek or does it come across more like some Pigs in Space?

You start The Long Journey Home with a heavy decision to make; one of choice. I hate having to make choices in real life, let alone in games as it makes me feel queasy and here it is no different – who do you take with you on your fantastic voyage? Do you take a pilot, a botanist, a philosopher or even the intern? Personally, when it’s time for an intern to head to the unknown, then you know the human race is in trouble. Each of these 10 characters have different attributes and thoughts on space travel though, and you may well find that some will be able to help you on the journey ahead. You’ll need to choose wisely.

It is from here where you leave for the great journey into the unknown. The first part of the gameplay sees you controlling a small ship out in the wide expanses of space, leaving you to accelerate and steer into the orbit of an interesting planet, allowing you to then land. Once down on terra firma the next part of the gameplay employs you with attempting to pilot an orbital lander vehicle successfully onto mining spots, possible locations for exploration, or the chance to meet exotic species.

Without a word of a lie, both of the gameplay sections found in The Long Journey Home can be tricky to action, but it is the second – that of piloting the orbital lander – which will make you want to scream and throw yourself out of an airlock. But in the same breath, that is part of the draw with the game; space travel is not meant to be easy. I just wish it could be a bit more enjoyable.

The story that accompanies this is, frankly, brilliant and involves you travelling to Mars after leaving Earth to test a new scientific jump system – or something more technical than I’m describing. It, of course, all goes pear-shaped and you find yourself light years away across the universe, attempting to action the long journey home.

The good thing is that each journey you make is different, delivering a multitude of personal stories, some great encounters with the strange, discoveration of aliens or the usual “oh my god, we’re all going to die” scenarios. Alien encounters are really interesting in fact and there are some nicely written scenes on offer here, leaving you to try and work with the best choices. This is the highlight of the game for me and I love the premise and the possibilities on offer.

Away from that though and the rest of The Long Journey Home is intentionally hard as nails and the two little game types that make up the action will see you battling constant fuel problems, crew injury, and bloody hull damage. It’s a nightmare and you will wish you’d never heard of words like ‘space’, ‘ships’ or ‘critical’ ever again. I have destroyed my crew countless times, but there is something about the game that makes you want to go back to try again and again. I guess it’s the lure of exploration that keeps you coming back for more.

It also comes with a nice visual tone that sets the scene well. I love the first take-off, the cities in the background, and the simple asteroid-type ship navigating across the galaxy. The character designs are great and there are some nice touches throughout. It does get a bit samey after a while, but overall it brings a cool and sharp vibe throughout.  

This all sees The Long Journey Home become a game that, at times, is easy to love; scope, energy and innovation come to the fore. I really dig the visual design and the way it has tried to do many different things in its execution. The problem though is that it is, firstly too expensive, and secondly, very hard and getting through the landing section, drilling and getting out again without killing the crew is at times impossible. But that said, there are no doubt many gamers out there who love a challenge, looking forward to the task in front of them.

If you’re looking for an strange little alternative to No Man’s Sky then look no further than The Long Journey Home.

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A Long Journey

Residential schools in labrador and newfoundland.

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Table of contents

Foreword by James Igloliorte vii

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: The Journey of Reconciliation 1

PART ONE: The Peoples of Labrador

1. The Peoples of Labrador: Life Before the Boarding Schools 17

PART TWO: The Moravian Mission Boarding Schools

2. The Moravian Church in Labrador 31

3. Early Moravian Schooling: Teaching the Gospel of Christ 45

4. The Makkovik Boarding School 63

5. The Nain Boarding School 107

6. A New Boarding School Considered 163

PART THREE: The International Grenfell Association Boarding Schools

7. Wilfred Grenfell and the Grenfell Mission 177

8. The Children’s Home at St. Anthony 197

9. The Cartwright Area Boarding Schools 247

10. The St. Mary’s River Boarding School 305

11. The Yale School and Dormitories of North West River 313

12. Boycotts and Protests: Inuit Demand More Control 367

PART FOUR: The Innu Experience

13. Labrador Innu, Roman Catholic Schooling, and the IGA Boarding Schools 383

Conclusion: Moving towards Respectful Relationships 399

Appendix 1: Record of Children at the Children’s Home, 1929 413

Appendix 2: Record of Children at Lockwood Boarding School, 1935–36 414

Appendix 3: Record of Children at St. Mary’s River Boarding School, 1935–36 415

Bibliography 479

Related Media

The previously untold history of residential schools in Labrador and Newfoundland, recounted by former students and survivors.

• Short-listed, BMO Winterset Award 2021
• Winner, Peter Cashin Prize 2021
• Winner, Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing 2021
• Winner, Clio Prize (Atlantic) 2021
• Winner, Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award 2021
• Short-listed, The Honourable Edward Roberts History Book Award 2022