The Long Dark

I love this game. It's one of my go-to games. I have issues with seizures and when I reached out to the company about accessibility options they worked with me and added the warning at the beginning of the game. I appreciate everything they put into the game and updates they have done. Survival is my favorite.

I bought The Long Dark when it first hit Early Access. Back then I had hopes, dreams, and cartilage in my knees.
Fast-forward many winters later and the game is still one of the best survival experiences ever made. The atmosphere is incredible, the quiet isolation is unmatched, and nothing in gaming quite captures the feeling of desperately lighting a match during a blizzard while a wolf judges your life choices from the tree line. It’s brutally fair, deeply immersive, and somehow manages to make a can of peaches feel like winning the lottery.
That said… I’m fairly certain the final episode of Wintermute will release shortly after the heat death of the universe. I started this story mode as a younger man. By the time Episode 5 arrives I expect to be playing it from a rocking chair while telling my grandchildren about the ancient times known as “Episode 3.” Still, jokes aside, the game itself is fantastic. Few survival games respect the player’s intelligence this much, and even fewer create such a strong sense of place.
So yes, I absolutely recommend it. Just be prepared to survive not only the Canadian wilderness… but also the development timeline.

This game has taught me many things. The most unusual one would be probably what it's like to slowly die.

Darkness, snowstorm, mounting injuries. Hypothermia. Exhaustion. You hear your heart slow down, letting out its final beats. And yet, you fight; look for shelter, warmth, anything that'd let you live just a moment longer. Desperately. Against all odds. Seconds feel like minutes. Vision gets blurry.

And then you ingloriously fade into the Long Dark.

...alright, that's a little depressing. Let's instead ask ourselves, why are we drawn to survival games? Why zombie apocalypse is such a popular concept? I'll tell you. It's because in a world where the social order has collapsed, you are ultimately the only person who has any degree of control over your life. No taxes. No reputation. No politics. The only thing guiding you - your basic needs such as hunger and sleep.

The Long Dark took the concept away from the overdone zombie world and brought it back to something a bit more grounded. Back when it came out in Early Access - 2014 - this was a very fresh concept. No monsters to fight? Just you and wild animals? Yes, and this is arguably what gives this game its weight. It feels so incredibly real - and the feeling of actually being the only master of your own fate in the face of extinction? Intoxicating. Especially in our present world, where all we see is massive systemic decay of literally everything combined with utter powerlessness to make any difference at all.

I should probably mention here: Almost all of my ~500 hours of gameplay are exclusively in Survival Mode. There is a story mode - Wintermute - but it completely failed to resonate with me. A friend of mine called it "a bit of a tutorial", so perhaps that's why. If you never played The Long Dark, you might want to start there? I don't know. I literally can't say.

While I consider this game to be one of the baselines of what other survival games are measured against, it certainly carries the "scars" of being in Early Access for a pretty long time. Some elements might feel out of place, but that's because they're what remains of systems that were given a complete overhaul. For example, Fir Firewood's description says "While not technically a hardwood, fir burns like one." Who said anything about hardwood? Well, 10 years ago foraging for wood was completely different, and you could choose whether to forage for softwood or hardwood.

Given all this development time, the mechanics are carefully refined. There are five difficulty levels, and they differ not only by things like damage or recovery but they have additional mechanics which change the way the game is played. The final two levels - Interloper and Misery - outright deny you loot and force you to rely on crafting, which requires specialised tools (that you can't take with you; they're location-bound). Stalker - level 3, my choice - forces you to hunt herbivores, as eating meat from animals that actively pursue you (e.g. wolves) comes with a very significant parasite risk. That said, it's all manageable... if you know what you're doing.

But everything you do merely postpones your inevitable demise. You ran out of canned food you looted from the abandoned camp? It's not coming back. You have to move on. Oh, you can fish? Sure, but eventually your fishing equipment will deteriorate, and you'll run out of spare parts. You can hunt? Indeed, but ammo is very precious, and that's assuming you found a gun. You can use a bow and arrows? Yes, but even the arrows will eventually degrade and break.

Entropy only goes one way. That's the deal; the only things - to my knowledge - that reliably respawn are animals and wood. But even then, chances are you'll hunt out everything in the area, and you will have to move on. Find a new place to settle for a week or two.

The world map is static - if you know the geography, you can get an idea of when you can hope to find the next shelter. There is no GPS map, and mapping in general requires resources, so you're better off relying on your orientation and memory. I thought that a static world would be a deal breaker, but after 500 hours I can safely say that it isn't. The world is gigantic; and even if you've already been everywhere, the loot is randomised anyway.

Still, it follows certain rules - you are more likely to find hunting equipment in locations related to hunting. Tools - probably in industrial areas. Food and medicine are stashed in abandoned human dwellings and so on. But sometimes things are found in unexpected places - so keep looting.

Now, you're probably thinking: "Wait, so you can't win, since stuff is non-renewable?" If by winning we assume "ensuring continued existence", then you can indeed win. There are ways to get things that are otherwise non-renewable. There are people who have ridiculously long runs, we're talking thousands of days. So if you know the game well, you absolutely can wrestle it to its knees. That's probably the goal of everyone playing it.

But dying is also a part of the learning experience. Sometimes the hopeless situation can be turned around. Sometimes you do find a cave in a snowstorm. Sometimes a corpse of another survivor will grant you the tool you desperately need.

And sometimes you fail to notice the giant pawprints of a bear, and you learn that these guys can run very fast. Faster than you.

Eventually, you'll learn the laws of the frozen wastes. You'll acquire clothing that will allow you to shrug off the biting cold. You'll see the world through the eyes of a crafty hunter, and the wolves will know that there's a bloody price for crossing you; their furs warming you, now. Their guts used as string for your bow. Their fat boiled into oil which you use to fry delicious Canadian pancakes - maple syrup included! The game has a quite robust cooking system.

Or, you know. You'll fade into the Long Dark.

I only review games I've either beaten or ditched, but for this one I had to make an exception

Survival Mode — 10/10
If you're into sandbox and survival games, I definitely recommend this. You're looking at 200+ hours of slow, quiet, and atmospheric survival in a winter setting with a great ambient. You absolutely need to buy the DLC, as it adds a ton of new content. One of the best gaming experiences I've had in years.
Wintermute — 4/10
The story mode, however, is a problem. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend it to either newcomers or experienced survivors. The main issue is that it's genuinely hard to cram survival gameplay into a standalone, often linear story mode where the events only span about 4-5 in-game days. A lot of the survival mechanics are designed for the long haul, so you simply don't get to fully enjoy all the elements of the game.
While the first few episodes could barely be called "survival," by the end, it turns into a completely different genre. It's anything but The Long Dark. The final episode was really disappointing in this regard. During the entire 5th episode, I started exactly one fire, didn't melt snow for water even once, and didn't hunt a single animal... Even on the hardest difficulty, you just have a ton of loot, food, water, and so on. The game feels very linear, with zero hint of a proper open world. On top of that, there are a lot of dumb, cringe-inducing moments. For example, the icebergs near the ship in Desperation Bay; enemies missing you point-blank with a rifle from 5 meters away; Mackenzie being scripted to lose all his loot and weapons just as he reaches Perseverance Mills; or the fact that Jeremiah and Molly could have shot an unarmed Mathis and his entire gang a hundred times over, but they just don't — just to screw over the main character and bait a TLD2. I also hated that in Chapter 2 you literally can't sleep and are forced to use military stims. And that's not even mentioning the mountain of bugs (which will probably get patched, to be fair).

This criminally underrated masterpiece of a game taught me a lot about myself. The premise of The Long Dark is one of letting go. So many other survival games make you focus on the grind. You run around collecting things, and soon enough they stack up at your base. The Long Dark is different, in that it forces you to keep exploring. The best way to play this game is to not have a home base, but rather carry just enough on your back to get to the next town. The next landmark. The next cave. It teaches you that the journey is the joy, not the destination. This game will punish you for carelessness, and reward you for focus. I highly recommend anyone who plays this doesn't do so lightly, as you will have an uncomfortable experience. If you are able to find how the devs designed this game to be played, your hours spent on Bear Island will impact you in ways you didnt think possible for a video game.

9/10 – I Went Outside Once and Immediately Regretted It
The Long Dark is a survival game about being alone in the frozen wilderness.
It succeeds.
You are cold.
You are hungry.
You are tired.
You are constantly one bad decision away from becoming a snow-covered cautionary tale.
There are no zombies. No monsters. No aliens. Just weather, wildlife, and your own terrible planning.
Every match you strike feels important. Every can of food feels like treasure. Every blizzard feels personal.
The world is beautiful, quiet, and deeply hostile. You’ll spend hours carefully managing calories and temperature, only to die because you walked five meters too far in bad weather.
Is it slow? Yes.
Is it stressful? Constantly.
Is it immersive? Completely.
If you enjoy survival games that respect realism and punish optimism, this is a masterpiece.
Highly recommended. I will never go camping.

I had bought this game a while back. Played it once, then stopped.
One day, I started to dislike playing video games, then I saw this in my library and went, "What the hell, why not?"
Several months later, it's one of my most played games on steam. It revived my love for video games.
Thank you Long Dark, for showing me how to enjoy this hobby again.