The Long Reach

Bought this game for $4.23 CAD about a month or so ago and overall, I would say it's okay. The game takes place during Christmas time, so I guess now was as good a time as any to play it!

You play as Calvin, a low level scientist at a research institution in a fictional city in New Hampshire. He checks into work one day, is lead into a testing room where he plays some bars by Bach and Beethoven on a piano before blacking out. He awakes sometime later to learn that an experiment being conducted in the institution has gone off the rails, leaving some characters dead, some who have gone insane and leaves Calvin questioning his own mental state. It's then up to him to find out what's happened and shut the experiment down. Overall, the story ends up being just alright, the writing is also just alright and there's no voice acting, so you're fed dialogue through text dumps. The game also has dialogue options, most of them don't matter, save for a few encounters towards the end of the game.

The art direction is well done, even though it's pixel art, they were able to render some truly horrifying and unnerving scenes such as a guy blowing his brains out with a handgun, to a guy hanging himself with Christmas lights, to a person being lit on fire, among other things. The pixel art environments are highly detailed and the lighting and piano-heavy, musical score create a dark and unnerving atmosphere.

While the game is a 2D side-scroller, it also borrows some classic point-and-click adventure game mechanics as well; hunt for items, use item or combine items to use on objects to solve a puzzle and progress the story. The game features a lot of monotonous backtracking through mostly the same science lab environment to find the items you need. I found the puzzle solving to be kind of frustrating, since the game doesn't really hold your hand with any of it. This was a huge drawback for me and it made me realize this part of the game is definitely not for me.

The game also has some survival horror elements as well where you can sometimes find yourself being chased by a crazed cenobite-looking, machete-wielding murderer and your only options are to run, hide or die.

I really wish this game expanded on it's story and it's world a lot more than it did. The game gives you some brief moments of this when you're walking outside or talking to people in a diner or store, but then it drops you right back into the same science lab environments with item hunting.

The Long Reach's art direction and music certainly drew me in and enticed me to keep playing, but the game's tedious backtracking through samey environments, item hunting and puzzle solving left me feeling more frustrated than rewarded. Couple that with a story that's just okay, underdeveloped characters that I had no investment in and it's roughly 2 hour run time that left the world feeling kind of underdeveloped and overall, I'd give this game a rating of Hazy.

There isn't much I can say that the other review didn't cover.

If you liked the game Uncanny Valley then you'll probably like this one too. I couldn't verify if Cowardly Creations, the creators of Uncanny Valley, had a hand in developing this game, but The Long Reach definitely feels like a more fully realized version of it. The game even takes place during Christmas time and has some pretty disturbing holiday-related story elements. The whole thing took me around 4 hours to finish, mostly because the puzzles can be a little frustrating to figure out.

All in all, I really enjoyed it. A solid 8/10.