I, personally, am not a fan of survival games. They feel almost directionless to me with no greater purpose than to survive and craft tools and a home so that you can survive better. Because of this, I end up only playing about an hour or two before I get bored. That is why I was happily surprised when I played The Long Dark and had a fair amount of fun.
The Long Dark is a first-person survival game set in Northern Canada. It was developed and published by Hinterland Studio. After gaining funding from the Canadian Media Fund and a successful Kickstarter campaign, The Long Dark was released on Steam in early access in September, 2014. A full release came on August 1, 2017 on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4.
You play as a pilot who was brought down by a freak geomagnetic storm in the frozen Canadian wilderness. There are four difficulties; Pilgrim, Voyageur, Stalker, and Interloper. Along with the four preset difficulties, you can also create a custom difficulty with a variety of different settings like the behaviour of wildlife and how awful the weather is.
You choose one of eight regions you want to start in, each with a different difficulty in regards to the amount of shelter, wildlife, and resources in the area. Each region has several different spawn points that can vastly change how your experience begins.
When you first play, you’ll immediately notice the art style. While there isn’t a name for this art style. Hinterland Studio has said that “There is no ‘name’ for this art style, at least that we know of. We wanted the game to feel like playing a water-colour painting.”
This art style makes the frigid Canadian North look amazing. There were several times when I just sought out the best views I could find just so that I could look out and survey the surrounding landscape.
There are four stats that dictate how well you're doing. Hunger, thirst, temperature, and tiredness. Each is quite self-explanatory. Hunger is how many calories you currently have. Thirst is how thirsty you are. Temperature is your body temperature. And tiredness which is how weary you are.
Along with being vigilant of these four stats, you also have to make sure to take care of your health as there are many afflictions that can cause you trouble. Things like frostbite, infection, and bleeding to death. Each has a way to cure it through either first aid or simply finding warmth.
So as I previously stated, it is quite easy for me to get burnt out on a survival game, but the one mechanic in The Long Dark that kept me playing was it's journal system. In your journal, along with statistics of things like how many calories you burnt that day or how far you've walked, is a journal where you can write your own entries.
This gave me the ability to role play and really get into the game and the mindset of the player character. Being able to keep track of my journey kept me playing so that I could see what happened next in this personally created story. I made it part of my survival routine to make sure I catalogued everything that happened so that I could look back at how well or poorly I survived.
Because of the polish that Hinterland put into their game during the early access stage, I find a hard time find issue with the game besides nit picking at small annoyances that don't really ruin the game.
One of these small issues is the inability to jump. While I can understand why Hinterland possibly made this choice, trying to be realistic considering you can be carrying around almost 90 pounds of gear and provisions, it would be difficult for the player character to get themselves off the ground, but this can be quite bothersome when trying to climb up a steep hill or something of the like.
There are other things that were choices made by Hinterland that they made for the sake of realism that I can appreciate, but I wish there was a way to decide if we wanted to make our own map by drawing it out with charcoal or to have it be automatically generated during our exploration.
But with all those small things aside, I still love The Long Dark and would recommend it for those who wish to get into the survival genre as well as those who love survival games and are looking for another great adventure.
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