Video Game / Long Gone Days

Long Gone Days is a role playing game written and illustrated by Camila Gormaz, with Pablo Videla also as writer and Camilo Sáez as programmer.

The game follows Rourke, a sniper of the military of an underground nation named "The Core", who deserts together with a medic colleague Adair upon realizing the horrors he was being forced to commit by the military.

The game ran a successful campaign in 2016 on Indiegogo. It's demo, originally fully developed by Gomez is available together with the Early Access version of the game on itch.io and Game Jolt. The game is also available on Steam. The game also has a Twitter page. It was fully released on October 10, 2023.

Not related to Seven: The Days Long Gone.

Tropes present in this game:

• Animal Motif: Ravens. The squad of The Core is called The Raven Squad, which is where both Adair and Rourke are in the beginning of the story, and ravens are also used as save spots in the game.
• Animesque: The writers and artists are Chilean, yet at a glance it can be mistaken as a translated Japanese work.
• Bilingual Bonus: Players who can understand Russian and/or German will be able to read the untranslated dialogue without an interpreter. A text message in the hostel in Kiel is in Spanish.
• Bottomless Magazines: Rather jarringly, no one reloads during combat despite everyone using firearms.
• Central Theme: The horrific acts that happen in a war, as well as what a soldier can be subjected to, both mentally and physically.
• Child Soldier: The soldiers from The Core are trained from childhood to become soldiers. In his narration, Rourke mentions knowing how to use a rifle ever since he was young. One of the earliest quests in the game lets Rourke find a room that oversees a number of incubators with babies.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Once Rourke is separated from the party in the Aldebaran casino and the player can no longer control him, Lynn's thoughts are denoted in purple. Once Rourke does join up with them again, his thoughts are denoted in a light blue.
• Corrupted Character Copy: The Core is this to Outer Heaven. Both are large soldier nations that participate in global conflicts, but where they differ greatly is the underlying reason behind their creation and how their ranks are populated. Big Boss conceived Outer Heaven as a way to give a home to soldiers who had been abandoned by their governments, ensuring they always had a battlefield to be on, with its membership primarily consisting of adult soldiers who had either become disillusioned with their own superiors or were swayed by Big Boss's natural charisma. Whatever children made up their ranks were those Big Boss personally rescued from various warzones, and he openly opposed artificially creating an army of Child Soldiers. On the flipside, The Core's main armies consist entirely of children born and raised in The Core's underground bunkers, taught only how to fight and to follow Eugene's orders above all else. Rather than be a place intended to give soldiers purpose, The Core is just a cultivation ground for mindlessly obedient drones made to bring about one megalomaniac's vision of world domination. That is to say nothing of The Core replenishing its ranks by kidnapping civilian women and turning them into Breeding Slaves.
• Death of a Child: A kid, the only survivor of the place that the troops just ravaged, is killed by Lt. Gareth in front of Rourke.
• Dramatic Irony: In a Kaliningrad quest, Ivan and Rourke help a little girl find her missing music box, which was a gift from her father before he moved to a nearby small town. Ivan promises the girl she will see her father again. Rourke stays quiet, but he wonders whether her father is one of the people he killed.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Core is a massive underground structure underneath the Earth's surface with tunnels leading to every continent and built with the intent of hosting humanity's largest army.
• False Flag Operation: This is described as soon as Rourke wakes up in the infirmary. At the time, he's weaing a Polish uniform and attacked civilians.
• First-Episode Twist: The very first mission Rourke is given in the game, and what makes him run away from The Core, is the fact that the mission is a False Flag Operation and the victims of the attack were innocent people.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The fact that Rourke is shooting innocent civilians is foreshadowed pretty quickly, as, through his lens, its possible to notice that the silhouettes of his targets look nothing like soldiers and just look like normal people and the fact that the area looks nothing like an enemy camp.
  • In their first night in Germany, Atiye tells the group that the fact that Horst Weber is leading the polls is upsetting to her. On the next day, she reveals that his party is a heavily prejudicial one against minorities and especially immigrants, and that they had been harassing her and Zoe for reporting on it.
• In Medias Res: The story starts with Rourke being asked by Lynn to snipe some enemy drones from the top of a church. When they are both backed against a wall by an invading enemy, the story goes about 2 days back to reveal how they got to that point.
• Language Barrier:
  • The briefing commander mentions that there's normally a quick training in the local language, but since contact with the local population is prohibited, this will be skipped. This is used as a means to ensure the soldiers won't be able to communicate with locals.
  • One of the key themes; Rourke and Adair cannot understand what non-English speakers are saying and vice versa. In order to talk with people in non-English speaking nations, they need to find someone who can translate it for them.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Rourke, as a last minute addition to the group that is responsible for the mission, is not told that it's a False Flag Operation and they are attacking innocents.
• Missing Child: One of the Kaliningrad quests revolves around a mother whose daughter goes missing while their town is at risk of a terrorist attack. Another one has a mother with a sick baby to whom she can't get the medicine because she can't leave a safe environment or leave her other child behind to get the medicine.
• Morale Mechanic: The game uses character morale to buff your characters in combat when it's high. Certain sidequests require you to have high, or even low, morale.
• Multiple Endings: The game has two, with the divergence point being whether or not the player kills Coyle during his boss battle near the end of the game, with the dialogue options needed to spare him only being available if morale is high enough. If Coyle is killed, The Core will persist, forcing Rourke and Adair back into the lives of soldiers as they spend the foreseeable fighting off The Core's retaliation. If Coyle lives, he will dismantle The Core after Weisner's death, allowing the war-torn regions The Core affected to finally rebuild.
• Rainbow Speak: Certain key phrases, such as describing morale, are shown in yellow.
• Series Establishing Moment: Rourke realizing the only person left to kill is a young child, as well as the fact that he just killed a lot of innocent people and that his companions know about this and that child is killed in front of him.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Glossophobia achievement has the description "Me fail English?"
  • The Impromptu achievement has the description "You like jazz?"
• Show Within a Show: If the player picks to room with Lynn in the Kiel hostel, she'll introduce Rourke to one of her favorite cartoons, a drama about three high school girls and their struggles with life during and after high school. The two discuss which characters they relate to, with Lynn suggesting that Rourke would be like Kate or Emily, while Lynn relates the most to Alex, for being in a similar situation regarding drifting through life.
• Training Dummy: These are holographs found in the training center in Day 1. They only do Scratch Damage. In-game, they appear after you've done a more dangerous battle in the prologue, but are used to describe how combat works.
• Two Girls to a Team: Atiye and Lynn are the only two girls in the party.
• Undying Loyalty: Deconstructed to hell and back. The only characters shown exhibiting absolute loyalty towards their leaders wind up committing a ton of atrocities in their name under the belief that they're ushering in a better world. In reality, their loyalty is nothing more than Blind Obedience, and the ones they follow see them as nothing more than replaceable drones. Those on the heroes' side all actually bothered to question their actions and decided that their morals weren't worth compromising regardless of what the majority around them advocated for.
• War Is Hell: Basically the game's premise is based on Rourke realizing this once he takes part in a mission for the military and is made to kill innocent civilians. The overall narrative does on to condemn the authorities advocating for and inciting war under the excuse of bringing peace and security while demonstrating just how damaging the threat of war is to civilian society, only serving to create a world where everyone falls in line under megalomaniacs out of fear.
• You Are Number 6: Each soldier has a number assigned to them. Officially, their name seem to be the number, and their given names are chosen and used as identifiers, and nobody born in the Core has a surname. Rourke and Adair are slightly befuddled when asked for theirs, and go with "Weisner" since it's Father General's name.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Adair and Rourke, when running away, try to do so quietly, and the original plan is just to lead Rourke to a hospital so he can sit the mission out. Thanks to their conversation in the infirmary being bugged, their desertion gets found out and they are hunted by their own former comrades and can't go back.

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