Get your parkas and boots ready, because the post-apocalyptic survival sim The Long Dark has hit Steam Early Access. For $20, players can freely explore the game’s highly-anticipated “Survival Sandbox” mode, which allows players a glimpse into what the team at Hinterland Games has in mind for the full, upcoming release.
The Long Dark takes place in what the team calls a “post-digital” world and pushes players to survive in the extreme cold of the Canadian wilderness, kind of like a brutal, heavily-stylized Jack London short story.
Bush pilot Will Mackenzie has to make an emergency landing in a vast, excruciatingly cold landscape. A “geomagnetic disaster” has occurred, knocking out all forms of power and rendering communication as humanity knows it entirely moot, including all form of electricity.
Being in the Northern Wilderness without supplies and environmentally-appropriate threads, players must find immediate and resourceful methods for short-term (and eventually, long-term) survival. Intrepid gamers can wander the rocky, snow-covered landscape in search of food, warmth, and protection, and it never becomes dull. The art style is provocative and subtly done, truly one of the best-looking games I’ve played all year.
The Long Dark isn’t merely a walk in the woods, however, because it maintains a pretty rigorous set of statistics as well. The gauges, statistics, and meters keep players on their toes, pushing them to keep moving, foraging in the unforgiving environment for items to stave off hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and cold, among other things. Get too low on any one of those elements, and Will reminds you that it might be a good idea to pack it in and start a fire or take a nap (which is how the game saves).
The game has no traditional HUD, but tapping Tab brings up a user display that presents information for the various elements mentioned above, and then some. Not only is the player’s level of cold charted, but the changing weather conditions are also on exhibition to cause added anxiety. If you’re as panicky a survivalist as I am, then all the information can easily be reduced to “Welp, I guess I’m dying again, aren’t I?”
Story Mode will introduce some actual narrative elements, but playing in the Sandbox is just that, a largely free experience. Every time players die — and it will take some time to learn the systems well enough to get beyond the first day — they are placed in a new area of the map, at a different time of day. Once, I found myself in the woods in the middle of the night.
Surrounded by wolves, without a lamp.
As someone who writes about video games on a semi-regular basis, I find it generally very difficult to endorse an incomplete game, but The Long Dark’s Sandbox mode is well worth the $20 point of entry, not to mention the fact that the team only plans on being in Early Access for 2-3 months, depending on the community’s feedback.
It’s a beautiful, lush environment, and the mechanics make traveling about and trying not to die plenty of fun.
Also, the game will be changing quite a bit, and Hinterland Studios says explicitly that the price point will likely increase once the game is out of Alpha. The game is available for Mac and PC.
