It’s like listening to an album of a favourite band and it works perfectly with the settings. There isn’t any voice-over, but a haunting number of original songs play out over the course of the whole game. The opening credit sequence – an aerial view of the countryside, slowly moving forwards – sets the tone beautifully. The designers know the format well and craft a fantastic world out of these tools. The visuals of the game employ a real old-school pixel art form, one that I found stunning at times. But overall it’s a pretty simple system that powers The Longest Road on Earth. There’s also a section where you are fighting with toys and it’s all about hitting the button at the right time. Sometimes there are more “gamey’ sections where you are having to press the button longer to do sit-ups for example. You will get instructions on-screen, requesting that you press a button that will start an action on a new scene or will cut to what you are looking at. There isn’t a run button and it’s very slow going at times, but that I think is the whole point of the game. You move your characters left and right across the 2D world in front of you. The gameplay elements are pretty simple and rarely require much action. These moments I found poignant at times and it ensures that The Longest Road on Earth is one of the best comments of life and our mortality, much more than many other stories I have heard. One character works out, another child plays with toys, with a cardboard backdrop of adventure. In another, you are placing bottle tops on soda bottles in a factory.

In fact, in one you are journeying on a train for a while, all without anything occurring. All these stories have a beginning, middle, and end, but there isn’t anything major that happens at any point in these narrative arcs.

The longest road on earth game