Snowflake Challenge #2

[got_quiet]

My complaining last post seems to have unclogged some writing blockages because I immediately set to working on Challenge #2 after that, which is to write a fandom manifesto, so now I have done so!

Behold!

Challenge #2

In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom.

Let me tell you guys about Long Gone Days.

Here is the tl;dr: Long Gone Days is a little indy game with a small cast of well written and interesting characters, a dramatic conflict, lots of angst, brotherhood, us-against-the-world scenarios, and the triumph of human kindness over violence and brutality. The art is breathtaking and the artist for the game likes drawing the characters a lot so you can get new content straight from the source! The main duo are very shippable as two brothers in arms fighting to survive in the middle of a warzone. And if you like a different dynamic there is also a cute pacifist civilian that needs to be protected and is understanding and kind to the soldiers, who are really fish out of water who need to learn how pretty much everything works outside of their little cult bubble. There are infinite opportunities for hurt/comfort, found family tropes, and some darker stuff thanks to the brainwashing, and weird genetics/breeding elements in the worldbuilding. If you get into the fandom now, you can take advantage of the fact that this is open canon and write your own happily (or very unhappily) every after!

And if you ever bought one of those big itch.io bundles, you probably already own this!~

There's a trailer in the game with lots of nice shots:

 

Watch on YouTube

 

If this sounds kind of interesting to you, read on for the full manifesto. I also did a more gameplay focused review a while back but below is the fandom tailored argument.

There will be some spoilers, but they will be at the end. And I should admit right from the get-go because I know that for some people this is a deal breaker, the game - and therefore the story, are unfinished, and the final update has been stalled for a long time. HOWEVER the devs posted recently that they are done with major content and are in the debug phase so I have hope! I also don't mind WIPs at all so this isn't a problem for me, but I know some people hate it. Still! Please read and give the game a chance because it is such a great hotbed of interesting ideas, plus it's pretty. And 3 people did all of it. That's crazy!

Long Gone Days is set in an alternative future where things are kind of sort of the same, except there's this underground military nation called the Core run by a totalitarian leader everyone calls their father, General Eugene. The members of this nation all live in a society where everyone's role is decided for them, and their only concern is the service of the nation, and by extension their father. Rourke is a member of this nation, a young sniper in training who is assigned as a last-minute sub for an important mission surface side. Like all young Core citizens, he's literally never been outside before his first mission! He doesn't know anything about the world, including things like, what families are or how money works, or even what the sun is. All he knows how to do is snipe, and he's very good at that.

Unfortunately, he also has a heart of gold and a conscience, which is a bad thing to have when you are a drone in a army that's only moral imperative is obey and is about to start a world war with a false flag operation. When he realizes that he is actually a bad guy, he goes into crisis, and becomes desperate to find some way to not have to perform the role that was decided for him from childhood.

Enter Adair. Adair is a medic in the unit that Rourke has been assigned to. He's more experienced, more savvy, and less concerned with things that he is not supposed to be concerned about, like whether the people who he unit is slaughtering are enemy combatants or innocent civilians. He is, however, nice enough to help out Rourke during his breakdown, promising to give him essentially a sick note so that he can withdraw for medical attention and be taken out of the fighting. Unfortunately for Adair, this little conspiracy is discovered, is interpreted as treason, and suddenly both boys are on the run from their own forces. Their desperate bid to escape and survive eventually turns into a mission to stop The Core from executing its designs on the rest of the world, which is as ignorant of The Core as Rourke is of the surface.

There are a ton of things about this game that I think are right up fandom's alley. First, it's looks so good. There are a handful of cut scenes done in a well-executed cell style, and the bulk of the game is in pixel art, which is just as nice. The music is nice and atmospheric, and the game is short and easy to play. In terms of its mechanics it does some interesting things, nothing to write home about, but there are some cool bits such as morale affecting combat (though the devs said they were going to adjust this) and certain characters are pacifists who cannot attack, only support, which is a neat idea. There's also a visual novel choice element.

But I'm not recommending the game on gameplay. The characters and story are the selling point for me.

First, again, they're all pretty. You can see the main cast in this promotional image with Rourke and Adair in the center.

Rourke is the perfect combo of deadly weapon and cinnamon roll. He wants to do the right thing, is haunted by the killing he's done before he realized what was going on, and is imo a perfect combination of helpless (what's money again?) and hyper competent. Add to that the delicious angst of him not wanting to rely on his one great skill but doing it anyway when the time comes, and you have a dozen hurt/comfort scenarios already boiling in the pot.

And I love his relationship with Adair. Adair is a much more cynical and pragmatic person, but he also starts to rely on Rourke to be a moral compass. He's at first resentful towards Rourke and invested in returning to his unit, which he sees as his family, and only when he realizes that he's Kill on Sight does he finally relent. The two of them are complete fish out of water, effectively aliens in a strange land, and even when they find friends who they can trust those friends can't understand where they come from. There's a lot of us against the world energy that comes from the two of them, a lot of trust because they both come from the same place and were trained in the same way, but also conflict based on their personalities and priorities. Adair just wants to survive. Rourke wants to make things right.

There are four other members of the main party but I will focus on the two that you meet first as they develop the most rapport with Rourke and Adair. They're citizens of a town that Rourke and Adair find themselves in after fleeing. Lynn is a proactive young lady who has a bit of a rough past and has landed in the town and settled down for a while. Ivan is the local teacher. He's older than the rest, and a pacifist, but even though he won't pick up a gun he's willing to put himself in danger to protect the people around him. Lynn and Ivan sort of adopt Rourke and Adair in the beginning when the soldiers are trying to pretend that they're just lost tourists, until things get hairy and it becomes time for the two Core soldiers to protect their new friends. They only have each other for a large portion of the game.

The other big element in why this game deserves an oversized fandom is some of the wacky worldbuilding. Below are spoilers, so if you want to play the game yourself you may want to stop here, but if you don't think you'll play or don't care, read on.

So, The leader of the Core is Father General Eugene Weisner. He is referred to by the people of the Core as father, and if you do some side quests there are some hints early on that on top of being a secretive underground nation that trains its citizens from toddlerhood to be soldiers, it also seems to practice some sort of genetic engineering, with programs that manufacture batches of children and track or modify their genetics. Later on in the game, as the nature of the Core's plotting comes more in to focus, we learn that it also abducts surface women, apparently in order to keep a healthy genetic pool. The exact nature of what happens to the women is left to the imagination, but it's obviously not good. And then, during one of the many scenes in which everyone is sort of learning from each other, the discussion of siblings and family comes up, IIRC in reference to family names, and both Adair and Rourke are like, uh, I guess we're both Weisner? It becomes clear then that there's no such thing as a family unit in the Core the way surface people understand it, and that the title of Father that the leader holds is very possibly literal, with every member of the nation being a direct child of Weisner or at least a genetic decedent. And that may make Adair and Rourke blood brothers to some degree, although how much so hasn't been confirmed. The two of them hadn't even met before the game starts, and if your entire nation is one degree of genetic separation from each other, incest takes on a different sort of meaning.

The game deals with things like trauma and war in interesting ways and honestly could have been an entire anime series, but since they have one single artist working on it I think making a game like this was a great way to get the story out. If I did Yuletide or exchanges at all I'd be nominating it for everything it qualified under but since I don't this manifesto will have to do.

I've done a quick let's play of the first half of Chapter 1 too!

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

I've vaguely intended to play this game for ages; I think I first learnt about it from this Can You Pet the Dog tweet, where the detailed pixel art really caught my attention. I got halfway through this post, stopped reading to avoid spoilers and finally downloaded Long Gone Days from the bundle I bought two years ago. Thank you for finally nudging me into installing it! Let's see if I actually manage to play it at last. I hope I do; Rourke in particular sounds extremely relevant to my interests.

[got_quiet]

Yay! I hope you enjoy it! I want to wrap Rourke up in a blanket and give him some hot chocolate.

[muccamukk]

Wow, the art on that is absolutely stunning!

[got_quiet]

Yes! It's beautiful! I want to knock on everyone's doors and tell them to look at it!