You’ve fallen through the ice at -20°C, turning a normal supply run into a fight for your life. Your clothes are soaked-through and beginning to freeze, you have no choice but to throw them off and scramble to safety, praying you have enough useful consciousness to make it there. Building a fire can be difficult at the best of times, and your shaking hands and soaked supplies aren’t making it any easier. It’s all going to come down to the resourcefulness you can show in these agonizing minutes that will make the difference between life and death.

Stories like that are exciting, right? That’s what this game should be about, those moments of survival where you’re perched on a knife’s edge and have to be smart to survive. But oddly enough, The Long Dark has such a weird balance with its survival gameplay that players are never really put in situations where these moments could occur.

The best way to break down the problem is to analyze the game’s five meters: heat, energy, hunger, thirst, and status. To keep your heat up, you can just stay inside, rest near a fire, or wear clothes to slow the drain when you’re outside. Your energy level drains proportionately to your physical activity and replenishes upon sleeping, and hunger and thirst work in a similar way. Status is essentially the catch-all score card, being diminished if you’re overworked, hungry, dehydrated, sick, or injured. That sounds sensible, but consider what this incentivises players to do: minimize physical activity and stay inside. This solves the heat, energy, injury, and sickness problems, and it also kinda solves the hydration problem. Water can be easily melted from snow, and since your environment is so snowy, you aren’t even required to go outside to collect it. If you’re in a house with a stove, you can boil enough water to last roughly two weeks in an hour, trivializing this requirement entirely. So, the only reason to ever leave your house is to gather food, in a process which still doesn’t prompt the sort of player-driven stories the game needs. Simply following a road and cleaning out settlements gives an abundance of food, and you can even survive about four days with no food before your status drains to zero. So, the optimal way to survive is to do nothing for three and a half days, eat a big meal, then do it again. When you’re out of food, move to the next settlement, pick up endlessly respawning sticks along the way for building fires, and do it again. In each settlement, there will be more than just food too, so the ammo, clothes, and other supplies you find make it easier and safer every time.

The immediate argument to be made against that is “of course you want to stay inside, this game is meant to be realistic”, but realism isn’t interesting on its own. What is The Long Dark’s realism in service of? It’s interesting for a few hours as you learn the ropes, but after that there’s nothing left to maintain the engagement. Players can make the game more punishing with the impressively comprehensive custom difficulty sliders, but if they don’t change the fundamental dominant strategy of sitting on your arse, then that’s all the game will ever boil down to. To test that point, I decided to pretend the goal of the game was to traverse the longest route from one end of the map to the other, and this was a journey I found incredibly enjoyable. I set personal rules like not allowing myself to overburden my pack or store items in safehouses, and it ended up being a tense and interesting experience that I genuinely enjoyed. It’s this sort of challenge that would let players build personal stories, not the blank sheet of paper that is its main survival mode or the bland fetch quests of its story episodes. I may have had a great time making my own fun out of it, but I can’t recommend a game where I had to invent my own objectives, set my own rules, tweak difficulty sliders manually, and hold myself to those limitations in the face of their artificiality. Crafting games just shouldn’t require you to craft the game itself.

A first person shooter in which you won’t get a gun for the first 50 hours and there is only one enemy: Canada.

By the time you do find a gun, you will feel quite foolish to be holding it. For one, you won’t know how to use it, and you’ll have only four or five bullets to learn; your aim will sway and shake from the cold as you look nervously down the sights. For two, what are you going to do, exactly? You can’t shoot a Canadian winter to death.

And by this point, perhaps you won’t want to kill Canada anyway. The snowscape is haunting and beautiful, and every time you stop to get your bearings, each frozen scene looks like a perfectly painted postcard… except for the wolves moving like shadows at the far treeline… except for the thudding of heavy snow from the pines that might instead be the thudding of a bear just over the next hillside… except that every moment spent admiring the scenery is bought with your calories, with heat, water, fatigue… and now there are terrifying gray clouds scudding in from the west…

Do you truly want to take that shot now? With those wolves nearby, with the blizzard coming on?

Or do you break for your cabin, and try to survive another long night, hungry in the dark?

The Long Dark might well be my favorite game of all time. It came along in the post-Minecraft boom of lonesome survive-em-ups, but after a decade of constant development it’s still unsurpassed in the genre. Every time I install, for instance, a survival mod for a game like Skyrim, I find myself thinking “I see you’ve stolen a bunch of stuff from The Long Dark, but I wish you’d stolen more.”

Here the basic mechanics are tuned as taut as violin strings, working in concert and in conflict with each other to always leave you feeling pressured, and make every small gain feel like a hard-fought epic win. The sound of the snowy woods is wonderfully authentic, the art style is painterly and original. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard [i.e. Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer] plays the Canadian voice of your internal monologue, and it’s weirdly perfect. Much like the real Canada, it’s occasionally monotonous but sometimes breathtaking.

I played over two hundred hours on the early Steam builds before switching to the PS4 version, since it looks gorgeous on a big tv and it feels more fun to chase for trophies on a console. I think the game is best on the second-hardest difficulty (“Interloper”) though I dial it down to play on the slowest day-night cycle, because I like to have a bit of time to think and chew the scenery between life-and-death decisions. (That said, it’s worth noting that nearly all of the games trophies can be unlocked on any difficulty level. Faithful Cartographer, here I come.)

You may not enjoy it as much as I have, but I absolutely would recommend this to anyone. It’s been a five-star game since about 2014, and Hinterland’s ongoing updates just keep making it better.

For a bit of context, the last time I played this game was in 2016, when it was still not fully released (I even have a bugged out Steam Achievement that doesn't exist anymore). To some people this review might be unfair because of this, but that was my experience with the game. I remember being really interested in the game's atmosphere and it evoked feelings of fear/anxiety as I struggled to survive. At one point, I encountered a deer, and the game crashed. That meant that my run was dead and I had to start from the beginning. I was not happy about that, but I started a new run, in which the same thing happened again. I closed the game after that and never opened it again. It's been a long time since then, and the game is now fully released so I should give it another try sometime, but until then, this is my experience with The Long Dark.

I really enjoyed this game. It’s probably one of the few games that captured what Jack London first wrote about when it came to the horror and beauty of the cold. The game became so engrossing that I would spend hours doing mundane tasks like lighting a fire in a small rocky depression while hoping the howl in the wind wasn't another timber wolf.Going through inventory and panicking as I realise I don’t have enough food and only a few bits of ammunition left to go hunting. Should I risk hunting rabbits in the cold with a broken jacket or should I trek back over the hills to the valley where there are plenty of deer? But will I be attacked?

I can go on. I have a million stories that are unique to my experience. That total immersion is fantastic.