Yay a survival game without zombies
I’m going to guess around ten minutes once I start playing
If TV has thought us anything in the last few years it’s that taking a trip to the great outdoors may not be as romantic an idea as we once though. On the other hand if indie games have though us anything, it’s that survival games are very popular at the moment. With that in mind we have The Long Dark, Hinterland’s first ever game but it’s a survival game with a difference.
The first big difference you’ll find with The Long Dark is that this game takes place in the snow-covered Northern Wilderness. This makes for a refreshing change since we’re used to survival games taking place in bright areas like forests and islands. Sure there harsh environments but they feel overused compared to The Long Darks snow-covered world.
In The Long Dark you play as bush pilot Will Mackenzie, who after a crash in the Northern Wilderness needs to scavenge in order to survive these harsh conditions in a post-apocalyptic world.
Like all survival games this means managing your food which in this case means managing your calories and how many you burn through in an hour. However unlike most other survival game you also need to find cold resist clothing and wood because here you can and will die from cold in your sleep if you’re not careful enough.
Sure we called them majestic before but now there just food with legs
Will you waste valuable time and calories looking inside buildings and hoping to be valuable supplies or will you instead head into the woods and gather wood and risk getting killed by the wildlife like the wolves while hunting deer for food?
This these decisions that will make managing your supplies necessary as you’ll have to juggle find food and wood, depending on what sort of person Will is to you this can be as easy or hard as you want once you start running into other people.
Throughout the game Hinterland promise that you’ll run into other survival and this is where your game can change completely for the better or worse. Do you try to keep your humanity and help other survivors in their time of need or do you play the bandit and live by the rule of might make right?
The Long Dark is due out in Steam Early Access this September and while the story mode won’t be available start away, you’ll still the entire world to explore and die in countless times. If you want to learn more about The Long Dark than check out Hinterland’s website here.