The Long Dark

[dope_danny]

I've always enjoyed the rare survival game. Not the streamer screamer bait "survival" games where its some eternal early access crafting and zombies trash fire but the rare game set in an actual 'real world' scenario where you play a character in a survival situation. Its more common in japan with a more disaster style focus to the genre with games where you survive in a city after a huge earthquake or something but every so often you get on in the west like The Flame in the Flood which i already made a thread gushing about.
But i've still always wanted a good 'frozen north' wilderness survival game and thats never really happened till now. What lead to this was the lead director of Warhammer: Space Marine being disillusioned with THQ's demise and went home to vancouver and recruited the sound designer from all of Biowares best titles, the Lead Designer of Morrowind and a few other names that get unrecognised but deserve similar praise to make a canadian funded 'wholly Canadian game' based on survival in canada. Thats where we get a Kickstarter for The Long Dark.

The pitched game was a first person survival game dubbed a 'quiet apocalypse'. No monsters, no zombies -even the PSN page specifically points out its not another zombie survival game- just wolves, bears, disease and the cold. You play a character that crashes his plane on a trip over the canadian north and you need to survive.
The kickstarter lead to an early access permadeath 'survive as long as you can' only experience. While that is still there with a selection of levels to survive in with multiple difficulties as of August 1st they have launched the retail build on pc and consoles with an episodic story mode based purely on survival.

Imagine the last of Us, the Flame in the Flood and ALIVE all got thrown in a blender and all the monsters got sivved out.


Personally i'm enjoying it a lot, but this is the rare sub genre i already adore so i have a bias, but if you want a game dripping atmosphere where its more a 'could i pull off the life below zero scenario?' experience than another online multiplayer griefing simulator full of zombies. I wont over sell it but if thats something you want then i can recommend checking this out.

[Darsithis]

Yeah now that they added a single-player mode it was worth picking up. It's been pretty interesting so far.