Let’s get this out of the way. This is a five-star review of a game I recently discovered and have fallen deeply in love with. The Longest Road on Earth (2021) is an unusual and uniquely challenging game that is now among my favourite pieces of video game narrative art. It demands a lot of its players, but not in the ways one might expect. It does not require lightning reflexes, or the mastering of complex controls, or the working out of intricate puzzles. In a sense, it asks much more of its players than this.
Firstly, it asks for patience. Lots of patience. It is a quiet, pensive game, featuring lots of very slow walking and even some scenes of contemplative sitting. Just sitting. Observing. Secondly, the relinquishing of what we traditionally expect from a video game in terms of interactivity and player agency, to the point that many will, and indeed have, questioned whether or not it is even a video game. There are certainly very few traditional gaming elements in the game. By this point in the history of the medium, the ‘it’s not a game’ refrain sounds rather trite, but it’s a tenacious one nonetheless, so perhaps it has to be addressed. To be clear, I believe The Longest Road on Earth is a video game; it is just of a different kind, a kind that seems singularly suited to its medium. It substitutes complex mechanical interaction for deep imaginative engagement, and yet still feels like it’s doing what only video games can do. Let me try to explain.
The Longest Road on Earth is made up of four thematically linked short stories. An elegant framing narrative surrounds, connects and subtly introduces each of them. The game is presented in exquisitely detailed minimalistic black and white pixel art. The characters are all different types of anthropomorphic animals. I often wonder why so many video game characters are presented like this, aside from the cuteness factor. In this game, besides creating a certain sense of detachment, a lens with which to view our own behaviours from a distance, they become a beautiful metaphor for the uniqueness and yet essential unity and oneness of us all. Animals of all different species seem to live together peacefully in this world. They form friendships, marry and have children together, despite their physical differences.
While the characters go about their humdrum lives, players are, on one level, nudged into seeing the beauty in everyday activities and objects. This is very much a game about looking at the world again, seeing things as if for the first time, and noticing the beauty in the everyday world around us, be it a lamp, a tree or a pair of shoes. This is such a life-enhancing artistic aim, which is executed brilliantly. It’s certainly encouraged me to look more deeply at my immediate environment and notice the inherent beauty in the quotidian.
The gameplay in The Longest Road on Earth is very simple. You walk, very slowly, either from left to right or right to left, performing mundane tasks such as making a cup of coffee or mopping the floor. Sometimes you are simply walking down a street or even just sitting on a bus or a train. For minutes on end. There is one button to interact with objects. There are no achievements. There is no dialogue, and there are no choices to be made. This is a very on-the-rails narrative. If I were to attempt to assign it a genre, I’d perhaps call it a 2D walking sim. But this wouldn’t quite cover it, because it’s also a video game concept album, among other things.
And this brings us to the music. Oh, the music! The storytelling in the game revolves around the singer-narrator figure (who you never see), the songs and their heartfelt lyrics. (The singing of stories goes back a long way in the Western tradition, to Homer at least). The singer-narrator is omniscient, swooping in and out of the minds of the characters in audacious flights of free indirect discourse, reporting back on their innermost thoughts and emotions, and reflecting on them in relation to their own life.
In short, these wonderful songs – and every sequence of each story features a different one – work in conjunction with the visuals and the character’s everyday actions in a highly innovative and powerful way. They take us into the internal worlds of all the characters. What we see are their bodies, but what we hear are their souls, filtered back to us through the singer-narrator’s songs. And they are souls full of regret, pain, self-discovery, longing and loneliness. These are the main themes that echo through all the stories. (Aside from the thematic connections, each story is connected to the next one by the narrative frame, which is aptly set in a secondhand shop full of discarded objects pulsing with the memories of the people who once owned them). The game reminds us that profound emotions stir the hearts of even the most prosaic of lives. Herein lies the game’s magic.
The music is written and performed by Beícoli, a member of the Madrid-based Brainwash Gang (who, along with TLR Games, developed the game). Her songs put me in mind of Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst and First Aid Kit. Both the music and the vocals are gorgeous: deeply moving and tender, without veering into sentimentality. They are of such remarkably high quality that they stand up on their own, independent of the game. However, it’s important to note that they were written specifically for the game. (Or perhaps the game was made for them?). There’s a double album’s worth of wonderful songs here. The title track, which accompanies the astounding final sequence, is especially noteworthy.
On a first playthrough (which takes about 90 minutes), the connections between the songs and the stories are not necessarily immediately obvious. But as I played more, and in between playthroughs listened to the soundtrack (as I walked slowly around my city, noticing stuff I’d never noticed before), I gradually made many enlightening new connections. The storytelling in the game leaves plenty of interpretative work for the player to do. In this game both the author(s) – as mentioned above, it is a very authored narrative – and the player-reader are very much alive, and meaning lies in the meeting of minds between them. This interpretative work takes time, patience and concentration. And lots of imagination. Even on my fourth playthrough I was still noticing new things.
As this suggests, the kind of player agency we might usually expect in a video game – the mastering of controls to traverse obstacles or defeat enemies; the making of choices that influence the outcome of the story – is replaced in The Longest Road on Earth by interpretive agency. The meanings in the game are ambiguous, trails of breadcrumbs that might lead players off in different directions, but without these pathways ever becoming vague or indeterminate. It’s a deeply interactive imaginative process. But is it a video game?
People certainly seem reluctant to call it such. (I’ve watched and read as many reviews as I could find, and this hesitancy to name it as such is a clear pattern). The game has been variously described as interactive art or even more vaguely as an ‘experience’. The latter description is obviously far too vague. Of the former, I’d argue that this game is too structured in its artistic aims and in its specific mode of interaction to be classified under interactive art, which tends to be more abstract in both these areas. I prefer to widen what we mean by video games to include the kind of structured interactive visual-audio interpretive challenge this game presents.
And what of the lack of button inputs? Although you only use the analogue stick/gamepad and a single interact button, you are pushing the former either left or right for most of the game, moving with each of the characters, walking in their shoes. Your thumb is seldom off the analogue stick. You move them as their veiled stories move you. It is a simple interaction but a powerful one, this bond formed between hand, controller and the characters in the game. I suspect that this game plays much better with a controller. I played it on Steam Deck, with headphones, which created a satisfying sense of intimacy with the material. I often felt like I was playing them, like an actor playing a part. But also sometimes like an observer and interpreter of their actions and their submerged feelings. (It’s worth pointing out that another of Brainwash Gang’s games, Laika: Aged Through Blood (2023), features highly complex controls which demand precision inputs. The mechanical simplicity in The Longest Road on Earth is clearly an artistic choice.
This flitting between outside and inside is reinforced by the game’s use of different perspectives. Most of the time you see the characters from the outside, from a 2D perspective, but sometimes the point of view switches to first person, and you see through their eyes. There are also close-up character portraits – for instance, when a character looks in a mirror – that I found incredibly moving. Seeing – really seeing – other people is important in this game. As is letting go of control – the very thing that so often draws us to video games from the real world, where we often have so little. I controlled their movements, but not their minds, memories, or fates. They felt like independent beings, with rich past lives. (They, like all of us, are walking long roads). This lack of control creates a deep sense of empathy and helps you to cast off your gamer ego, which demands control. You lose yourself in them and truly see things as they see them.
This is a game where the player is not always in charge; it does not serve up the power fantasy we often demand from our video games. But it remains a deeply interactive audio-visual experience. A video game with a clearly defined objective and an overarching challenge: to empathise with and interpret the lives of others. And, as we know from our own lives, this is perhaps a more difficult endeavour than, say, beating a boss in a Soulslike.
