Hinterland Studios, the newly established game development company, have for their first project decided to deviate from the route that seemingly every other survival game is treading. Instead, what they have come up with is an even more challenging experience—they have pitted humankind against Mother Nature. There are no un-dead, robotic, mutated, diseased, bionic, mind-controlled Nazi freaks in uniforms that threaten your survival: that would have made the game a whole lot easier—and predictable.

Story

The Long Dark is set in a post-disaster milieu, where due to a massive geomagnetic upheaval, all electronic equipment has stopped functioning, and our character in the game, who is a bush pilot, finds himself/herself (depending on the gender you select to play as) in the middle of nowhere in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash. Guided solely by a radio voice and the sheer will to survive, you walk in the shoes of this stranded character, lost in an unchartered territory that is covered in snow and surrounded by wildlife—the geography and your situation working in conjunction to make life difficult for you.

The game refrains from using glossy overdone cinematics to explain how the global event occurred and simply starts off in the first-person view of the player. You can hear your character shivering in the cold snowy terrain where your primary instinct is to find anything that might ensure your survival for the night. Then all you do is move forward, hoping to escape the cold harsh surroundings, only to find yourself lodged deeper in the terrain. A dam, a bunker, a cottage or a train track constantly crop up, providing you with hope that you should soon be able to emerge from this environment where death seems inevitable. Unlike other game plots, there is no definitive narrative arc, except the one that unfolds with each decision you make. The story that unfolds is entirely dependent on the resilience of the player and whether you want to give it an ending or not is up to you.

Gameplay

The Long Dark features a sandbox gameplay, where you can travel back and forth in an open world. As in other survival games, you primarily rely on your supplies. A piece of wood or some warm clothing will make all the difference on whether you will be able to see another day or not. You will be counting your calories and consuming just enough to survive one day at a time. Scavenging is the name of the game and it will take a lot of patience and thinking on the gamer’s part to make it through even a single night; and you will have to do it all over again the next day. Your decision-making skills—specifically how you manage your supplies and have your wits about you—are the only tools to ensure your survival. A hasty decision might feed you to the wolves, while a laidback approach might result in your freezing to death.

The dangers offered by the creators are nothing out of the ordinary, yet the situations your character will face have been creatively crafted. You are pitted against raw nature and the situation you are in is no less scary than having a zombie jump out at you—you will be served with mortal fear, but on a tad more realistic platter.

And do expect the wildlife you encounter to be hostile as they too, just like you, are living in a terrain where nothing comes easy. Wolves are by far the most consistent of them all and their numbers and encounters vary depending on the difficulty level you select before starting the story mode. As if that was not enough already, players also have to keep in mind the condition of their health, and check up on it from time to time. As in real life, your game avatar is plagued by fatigue, cold, hunger and thirst, which in critical state can and will deplete your chances of survival.

What you have in your inventory will decide your fate and although there is a wide variety of things to collect—things that might come in handy sometime later—your carrying capacity is limited by your inventory slots, which depend on the total weight you can carry.

The added elements of combat make the game better for the thrill-seeker in you. You have the option of fighting the wolves with your hunting knife—after you find one—or even better, shoot them at sight. But ammo is very scarce, so do keep it for the worst situations, like if you were to run into bears.

Graphics

The art style is slightly primitive—as you are mostly dealing with less detail and minimum gradient textures—but surprisingly that does not take anything away from the game. In fact, the elemental representation complements the setting of the game and gives the game an artistic visual edge over other glossier titles. The snowy terrain and the rare moments of sunshine look serene without seeming too cartoonish, and despite the modest budget of the game, even the visual department comes through. You will not notice the jagged edges of chairs or of a fire even while running the game on medium settings and you need not own a high-end machine to enjoy the game on maximum video settings either. However, the frames-per-second seems to be poorly optimised, and getting more than 45 fps even on a more- than-capable GPU poses a challenge.

The Long Dark nevertheless proves that achieving realism in a game should happen through gameplay, rather than through fancy graphics.

Sound

What can I say? There aren’t a whole lot of background scores to speak of—or voice-overs from celebrities or insane, over-the-top characters begging for your attention. But when actually talking about the sound of the game—the ones that really matter to the gameplay—be it the howls of the wolves in the distance, the wind’s screeching in the blizzards or the crackle of burning wood—the execution could not have been better. I guess the game has been kept mostly quiet in order to underscore the point that you are, in fact, lost in the woods. Alone. It’s perfection, in my opinion.

Verdict

Although not the latest release, or the most popular one, this one is one of the most underrated and underappreciated games that, despite delivering excellence, remains over-shadowed by less interesting big-budget titles. The game is a true survival simulator and should make for a thrilling experience for any gamer.

9/10