First Impressions: The Longest Tale (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for The Longest Tale through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

The Longest Tale
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: TBD
Publisher: Dev Null Productions
Developer: Dev Null Productions
Time Spent: 71 Minutes
Playlist on YouTube

I have very mixed feelings about The Longest Tale, and most of those negative feelings stem from a mechanics standpoint, with just a pinch of a need to clarify UI.  I admit that if you only watch the videos from my playthrough, it probably won't give you a comprehensive view of the game and even watching them over myself, I kind of feel that I didn't give the game a full and fair chance before I wrote it off as needing some significant improvements before I could manage to find some more fun out of the game.

Let's get some stuff out of the way first.  I liked the visuals and the general aesthetic of the game as it reminded me of that early 2000s Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind vibe.  I didn't mind that the weird pig-man didn't move his mouth or that the draw distance never felt more than a hundred yards or so.  The music, too, while sparse and never feeling grandiose beyond the needlessly long and confusing title sequence, felt appropriate for the game and the referenced era.  I didn't mind some of the janky animations, like the crouch-walking, as that just kind of adds to the visual charm.  I also didn't mind needing to remap a lot of the default buttons in the background on the Steam Deck, as it's something that I've either come to expect or find easily forgivable for an indie game that may not have the budget to take into consideration all possible control configurations.  I was a little annoyed that there wasn't any kind of menu system to invert the y-axis outside of doing it manually on the Steam Deck.  

On that note, there were times when the game used both keyboard and controller prompts to tell the player what to do, like pick up a torch by pressing the A button or the E key "to pickup/drop objects," but neither the default mapped E key or the A button on the Steam Deck actually did anything.  Only later did I manually map E to one of the back buttons and then it seemed to work.  As for why the torch stopped working, I'm going to chalk it up to a glitch, although I'm thankful that I wasn't required to light anything with the lit torch.

While watching my playthrough, and knowing more about the game, I am kinda kicking myself for not picking up on what the pigman said about following the light, because that was kind of what I inadvertently did.  I followed the green light to the carved statue of the fair maiden in the woods.  I am also kicking myself for not fully exploring what the red-hazy light in the large cave was about.  But the yellow light was the goal of the forest area, leading you to the eye-patched man who tells you the tale of the wanderer in the desert, which is where the game then transitions to.

The desert was pretty different from the forest environment, strictly from a game mechanics standpoint.  Through the introductory cinematic, you are given a location to reach, although due to the camera movement and the many vertical shafts of light make locating the exact location of where the carpet flies off to a little difficult to parse out.  On top of that, a new mechanic was introduced without a word of warning to the player, which I was somewhat annoyed by.  It makes sense, though, that there is essentially a hydration meter that causes the player's disorientation the lower the meter gets.  What really annoyed me about this new mechanic was that I presume that each pillar of light was an oasis where you can drink water and recharge your hydration meter, but they are so far away from your starting location, that if you deviate from anything by a nearly straight line from where you start to where you presume the nearest oasis is, you're likely to die along the way and will restart back at the beginning of the stage.

The other new mechanic is your weapon and learning how to fight, introduced through yet another flashback.  I actually don't mind this method of storytelling, though.  The fighting itself didn't feel particularly great, likely because it felt like fighting was meant to feel akin to combat in Dark Souls, but felt more like Neverwinter Nights.  I don't know how to describe it better than, it just didn't feel great.  I knew what to do and how to navigate the buttons and mechanics, although I probably should have remembered about the rolling mechanic, but again, it just didn't feel good.  I made it through the tutorial battle, then through an actual battle that made me worried I was going to die, and finally to a large complex in the desert where I think I didn't need to worry about my hydration meter, either because of the area or because I was in the shade, but then the game froze and crashed on me.

For this particular playtest, I only needed to play the game for 60 minutes and then fill out a survey about my experience.  After playing 71 minutes, I genuinely felt that I didn't need or want to play any more.  That probably doesn't bode well for my overall impressions of the game.  Had there been a 120-minute requisite, I would have played longer, and then maybe I would've gotten further, and maybe by then the game would have stuck with me more than it has.  Maybe when the game is finished and is released, I'll give it another try, hoping that there's something more there that I wasn't able to see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'm Gracefully Bowing in Sorrow