You wake up in the dark, unsure of who you are. Your senses are dulled; your body feels distant. Your vision returns slowly, but your speech is garbled. 

Only after hearing your friend’s voice can you piece it together. You are a sentient spaceship, and what happened to you was no accident.

As A Long Journey to an Uncertain End opens, you’ve just come to your senses after being attacked by your abusive ex. The rest of your journey centers around escaping and finding a better life somewhere among the stars. 

On paper, A Long Journey to an Uncertain End couldn’t be more my thing. It’s a choice-driven narrative game that uses sci-fi to explore broad social issues and intimate themes of community and healing. 

It’s got a large and diverse cast of queer characters who form a found family while running from the law.

The problem is, almost none of it hits the mark. 

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End plays out in three acts as you race toward freedom from your abusive ex and the AI-hating government. Each act has you jetting across a star system, landing on a handful of planets along the way to do jobs for fuel and supplies while staying one step ahead of your ex.

Taking jobs is simple. From a menu on each planet, you choose from a few jobs and assign crew members to complete them. 

Each character excels at one skill, is mediocre at a few, and is bad at the rest. Match your crew members’ skills to the job requirements and you’re good to go. 

During each job, you’re prompted to make one or two simple choices. If you’ve picked the right crew member, their skill will come in handy. Otherwise, you’re stuck making a default choice. When the job’s timer runs out, you see how well you did and get a reward.

This hands-off system is completely unengaging, not to mention opaque. It’s not clear how your choices affect the outcome, and rewards are unpredictable. If things go wrong, you can spend a Favor token to increase your outcome, and you’ll often gain more Favor as a reward.

Resource management in general is wildly underexplained. Sometimes you’ll get a handful of scrap for a roaring success, sometimes you’ll get more supplies than you can carry for a middling one, and you’ll never know why. 

That doesn’t matter much anyway, because by the end, I had so much Favor saved up that it was essentially impossible to fail any challenge.

Crispy Creative

So mechanically, A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is a mess. Just keep enough resources in storage to make it to the next planet and it almost doesn’t matter what you do there. 

But mechanics aren’t the draw. A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is more concerned with its story — which, unfortunately, is only marginally better.

The oppression of AI is a major undercurrent to the story — being a sentient AI makes your very existence illegal — but it’s never given enough depth. The reasons why you’re being hunted and some twists on your nature come later, but there’s nothing original or interesting about how the trope is used.

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is anti-authoritarian at its core. You’re at odds with the law from the beginning, and the work you’re forced to do makes you even more of a target. 

Throughout the game, you’re in frequent contact with folks stuck under the heel of the law, whether they’re career criminals or disadvantaged people struggling to get by. One of A Long Journey to an Uncertain End’s biggest failings is that it never humanizes these characters. It doesn’t even seem that interested in them.

Crispy Creative

As you move from planet to planet, you meet new characters who disappear from your story once you leave orbit. They never return (except to offer you gifts at a few points) and they’re not particularly well developed in your short time together.

Even your companions — colorful as they are — are ultimately one-dimensional. I’ll give A Long Journey to an Uncertain End credit for having a spectacularly diverse cast without falling into stereotypes, but their personalities are pretty one-note all the same. 

Put simply, a crew including a buff drag queen, a disabled trans hacker, and a flirty nonbinary pilot should be a lot more fun to hang out with.

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is more concerned with its overarching plot. Soon after you set out for freedom, you’re contacted by a group fighting to free enslaved AI. 

Coming just moments after the game begins, this story beat feels completely unearned when it arrives. You’ve barely had time to settle into your chair before you’re being asked to become the savior of all AI, and everything else takes a backseat to that.

Crispy Creative

Early on, you also receive a much less pleasant call. Your abusive ex is a constant presence in A Long Journey to an Uncertain End. 

From time to time, they call to taunt you, order you to return, and tell you you’re nothing without them. Their calls are disquieting and uncomfortable; your interactions with them are the highlight of the game. 

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End wisely chooses to portray this relationship as over from the start. There’s no insinuation that things could have been different, no temptation to think that you could possibly change your abuser for the better. 

Making the story about escaping rather than trying to fix this person was the right call, but it’s not a nuanced portrayal of an abusive relationship. Your ex is openly hostile, seeming to revel in their cruelty, and everyone else immediately takes your side. 

Rather than a realistic manipulator, your ex is a stock villain. And when it comes time to free yourself from them for good, you do so without the slightest struggle. 

Still, the parts of the story about breaking free from their control and rebuilding your life are the closest A Long Journey to an Uncertain End comes to success.

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End has its heart so much in the right place I felt bad for how much I disliked playing it. Its resource management gameplay is so uneven it feels broken, and the story that should be its saving grace falls short. 

As much as I want to applaud it for its diverse cast and handling as tough a topic as abuse, A Long Journey to an Uncertain End utterly fails to live up to its premise.

A Long Journey to an Uncertain End is available now on PC.

Pros:

Features a diverse cast of characters that avoids stereotypes

Follows an uplifting story of escaping abuse

Cons:

Resource management mechanics are poorly explained

Missions are dull and easy to exploit

Major and minor characters are one-dimensional

The story rushes by without exploring its most interesting themes

Score: 4/10