Balloons are one of the weirder inventions accepted as normal. They don’t do much but float there and be colorful, and somehow that’s enough. They’re wasteful of an irreplaceable and rare element and are an environmental hazard, but somehow all a balloon has to do is bob along like a cheerful festive freeloader and all is forgiven. The utter impracticality is completely ignored as a childlike sense of playfulness gets the imagination running, and all of a sudden it’s easy to pretend you can strap a few on and go flying through the air. Or, in the case of Beyond the Long Night, the darkness of a labyrinth of underground caves.
Beyond the Long Night is a whimsical and lovely twin-stick action roguelike featuring a voyager trying to make it to the surface world and away from the storm that consumes the caverns and resets time. Every day is the same day except different, generating a new set of caverns while the inhabitants within remember what’s come before. The monsters don’t seem to care too much but everyone else has to put up with it, but at least it’s a weird kind of immortality. While there are a fair number of residents in the caves the only guaranteed meeting on each journey is the guitarist Pickles, who’s content to hang out in a room above where the traveler wakes up daily in his hammock. A little friendly conversation starts the day off right and he also provides a couple of powerups to begin the next attempt up the inside of the mountain, and then it’s time to shoot down a few monsters while keeping an eye out for points of interest along the way.
Combat is your semi-standard twin-stick roguelike action, with the right trigger for a basic slow bullet and the left bumper for dash. Superpowers are limited-use attacks that are recharged by taking down enemies, and at the speed they recharge they’re designed to be used rather than hoarded. The demo features a good variety of enemies, some of which fly after you while others clutter up the screen with firepower, and while the initial few areas and super-chill (and absolutely excellent) soundtrack make it seem like a relaxed adventure it doesn’t take too much exploring for the rooms to fill up with critters. Taking them on means, in standard action-roguelike fashion, gathering as many powerups as possible and making them work for you as their various effects stack in different ways each new run. The demo isn’t actually all that hard once you get the hang of it, but it’s also only a short part of a larger game that’s been specifically tuned to give a quick overview of the adventure ahead.
Beyond the Long Night is currentlyrunning on Kickstarterand at the time of writing is very obviously going to clear its funding goal. Whether you decide to become a backer or not, though, the demo is absolutely worth a play-through, or maybe a couple play-throughs to mine it for secrets. The game is built around replay, after all, and successive runs reveal new secrets, characters, and conversational paths for the various cavern residents you meet along the way. You can get the demo here (on Steam) or here (on itch.io), or at least give the trailer a watch and kick back to the beepily-boopily beats.
