Review | Beyond The Long Night - Don't Go Quietly

Beyond The Long Night is weirdly one of the most chilled out experiences I’ve had in some time. I say “weirdly” because my expectation of roguelike tends to be fast paced, high intensity and honestly, stressful at times. Beyond The Long Night differs from this by pumping the breaks, slowing down and encouraging the player to take their time with things - you’re in a time loop anyway, so what’s the rush?

Waking up without memories in The Underworld of all places, Beyond The Long Night opens fairly simply. After floating around for a bit, the player meets Pickles, another friendly soul inhabiting The Underworld. It’s here we learn that this world is stuck in a dangerous loop - every night without fail, the world is corrupted by The Long Night, an in-game force that kills basically everything it touches. The following morning, everything is reborn as though nothing had happened. It’s a simple premise that sets up the player’s adventure to stop The Long Night and figure out what’s actually going on.

“Anyway… Here’s Wonderwall.”

As a twin-stick shooter, Beyond The Long Night plays it very safe in terms of controls. You use one stick to aim, the other to move. You can dodge to move out of the way of incoming projectiles and enemies - it’s all very familiar, but that means that the game can excel in other areas. It’s a roguelike and so, as to be expected, the real challenge comes from the perks and abilities you pick up along the way.

Beyond The Long Night offers a wide range of abilities which lend themselves nicely to a few different builds. Ranging from basic upgrades like movement or damage, to elemental perks or buddy abilities, there is a lot here to experiment with. A particular favourite combo I found was the burning bullets ability matched with the toxic cloud, allowing me to ignite the area around myself to deal big AOE damage and get me out of tight scrapes. Learning how and when to utilise these abilities, and how to synergise them is one of the strongest elements of the game and is fun to play around with.

On top of these abilities, each run starts with you receiving a new superpower - a strong move that works almost like an ultimate. Collecting these is good fun, but I found that they weren’t usually as impactful as regular upgrades or buddy abilities, which is strange to say about something called a superpower. 

Has anyone thought of installing LED lights in these deep dark caverns? Might be better than these lanterns.

In addition to this, there are projectiles you can collect on your adventure, each of which have different uses. There are bombs that deal big damage (and can unlock secret areas), little singing birds who unlock unique NPC interactions, and probably the most impactful, torches that can be used to deal fire damage and unlock hidden paths in certain rooms. Beyond The Long Night gives the player a lot of tools to use and for the most part, these items open up some interesting interactions and fun experimentation.

There’s a pretty tight time constraint in Beyond The Long Night, because if The Long Night itself catches up to you, you’ll take continuous damage until you either leave the burning room it has infected or you die. It’s not too hard to deal with if it’s just one or two rooms on your level, but it does quickly escalate and can lead to some tense moments as you hastily plan an exit route.

Beyond The Long Night manages to balance its core mechanics quite well. Combat is never overwhelming or out of control, but still manages to offer a significant challenge the further you progress. I’ve yet to die in a way that I’ve felt was unfair or too difficult. It’s usually because my positioning was wrong, I missed an obstacle or wasn’t aware of an enemy getting a little too near.

Outside of combat, Beyond The Long Night has a lot on offer to keep players busy during their adventures. There’s a large amount of puzzle rooms requiring you to dodge obstacles, solve runic symbol puzzles or move blocks onto buttons - most of them are quite simple, but break up the gameplay quite nicely. Some of the puzzles, however, don’t really give you enough information to solve them. For example, some of the runic symbols are simple match-the-symbol rooms, but others will just give the symbols with no further guidance. I can’t tell you how long I spent in some of these rooms randomly shooting the symbols until the room unlocked. While I don’t want the answer spelled out for me, having some indication of how to solve these puzzles would be nice.

Oooooh, pretty fireworks!

The strongest aspect of Beyond The Long Night is its sense of atmosphere and that, in part, is because of its eclectic cast of characters. The story of Beyond The Long Night is one that’s drip fed to the player and only progresses upon discovery and interaction with the NPCs dotted throughout the mountain. There’s a farmer who’s lost their cows and needs you to round them up, a small child who needs help getting their toy boat out of a well, a suspicious Pilgrim who is devoted to The Long Night. Each character is memorable and has their own little side story going on, and it is encouraging to find them to progress their story more.

Overall, Beyond The Long Night is just a very solid game. It doesn’t do too much new to push itself out there, but everything it does do is very well done. It’s full of fun NPCs and engaging stories, the look and feel of the game is immaculate, and combat and  progression is fun and satisfying. I can see it not being for everyone, given its occasionally restrictive timer per run and the often busy rooms full of enemies and projectiles. But it’s definitely worth a shot if you get the time.