I’ve made a huge mistake, and I’m probably going to freeze to death because of it.“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”- Carl Sagan
Not to worry – my IRL existence is safe, but my virtual self is in big trouble. I’m currently playing The Long Dark, a challenging survival game set in a northern Canadian environment, and making the wrong decision in the game’s virtual winter can easily be fatal.
In this case, I’ve taken some time away from the game’s storyline module to play in Survival Mode, which I’ve actually found to be more interesting than the plot-driven version. There are a lot of computer games where the name of the game is to stay alive, but generally it’s as a part of some other goal. The Long Dark strips that pretext away and reduces the gaming experience to its most fundamental challenge: survival.
The concept for the game, officially released in 2017 by Vancouver-based indy game developer Hinterland, is that your small plane has crashed on Great Bear Island due to a geomagnetic disaster* that has disabled all electronic and electrical devices. In the story-based version, the player attempts to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of their sole passenger following the crash. In the Survival option, the player is simply dropped into one of the nine connected maps that make up the island, where they attempt to survive in the hostile winter environment for as long as possible by raiding cabins and lumber camps for supplies and clothing, foraging for edible plants and meat from dead animals, or attempting to trap or kill the island’s wildlife. The opposition: the remorseless Canadian wilderness in wintertime.
The game’s interface is elegant in its simplicity. Four gauges and a health bar located at the bottom of the screen provide the player with a dynamic overview of their constantly changing statistics. There are five ways that you can die in The Long Dark: hypothermia, exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, and trauma – things like falling off a cliff or having a fatal encounter with a wolf, moose or bear.** Cold is a constantly gnawing opponent: different weather conditions will drive the player’s temperature down to a greater or lesser degree depending on their clothing and the last time they had a hot meal, and wet snow will soak through your protective layers and reduce their efficacity.
The more supplies you carry, the more calories you burn, and the faster your stamina goes down. Thirst is always a problem: melted snow is an easy solution, but you need to boil it in order to avoid illness. Food offers the same danger – food poisoning from a moldy chocolate bar or uncooked deer meat will exhaust or even kill you if you don’t immediately treat the symptoms with antibiotics, rest and herbal tea.
However, the player has a variety of survival tools at their disposal. Cottages, fishing huts, trailers and abandoned vehicles contain a wide range of useful items: food, clothes, water, beds, fireplaces and stoves, simple tools such as knives or hatchets, and, most importantly, a refuge from the weather. The winter landscape is littered with firewood, edible plants such as rose hips or cattail reeds, and the occasional frozen deer carcass – a good source of meat, as well as hides that can be cured to make durable clothing, or gut that can be dried to make a bowstring.
If your archery skills are good enough, you may be able to shoot one of the winter hares that sometimes make an appearance, and if you’re very fortunate, you may find an abandoned rifle and ammo that will let you hunt for bigger game. Be careful, though – the smell of fresh meat may attract wolves or bears, and encounters with either one are likely be fatal, although lighting an emergency traffic flare will keep them at bay for a while.
My current incarnation has survived a couple of wolf attacks, and has recently had ribs broken by a charging moose who came at me a lot faster than I expected. Those broken ribs have slowed me down, but I've kept moving regardless - once resources run short in a given area, I feel a need to move on before I become desperate for food. I'm also overladen with supplies, which can slow your progress to a crawl. Up until now, I've been happy to trade mobility for resources, but I may begin judiciously editing down my load, in hopes of picking up some speed.
That aspect of gameplay is one of the few reasons that I might not recommend this game to everyone. The Long Dark requires a lot of patience. Even when unburdened by equipment and clothing, travel is time consuming, and anyone who wants to stay alive is also going to need to spend a lot of time sleeping, crafting, cooking and in some cases, just waiting out bad weather in a convenient building. And there's a lot of bad weather to wait out - welcome to northern Canada in the winter.
The weather, good and bad, is the most impressive part of the game. Although the game's graphics are rendered in a deliberately abstracted, hand-drawn style, the combination of visuals and sound effects create a completely plausible environment, to the point where it's hard not to shiver in your chair when the wind picks up. The game's weather physics are both evocative and – pun intended – deadly accurate. Having spent my formative years in Ontario's snow belt, I've had the dubious pleasure of experiencing the full range of winter weather: blizzards, thaws, gentle snow, fog, and -40 degree weather, when the sun is bright and the cold is like a knife in your back. The Long Dark recreates all these options far too well - it's not a surprise to discover that Hinterland is a Canadian company.
The game's designers are obviously happy to make their Northern connection part of the action. Maple leaf flags are a constant part of the landscape, and there are several little Canadian jokes scattered throughout the game, including a comment about leather shoes*** that would be fine for Bay Street but not for the snow, and a helpful guide to the correct pronunciation of the word “toque”. (Tuke, if you ever need to explain that phonetically.)
The Long Dark accomplishes its goals as a survival simulation so well that it's difficult to think of anything they should change. Skis or snowshoes might be a useful option to speed up travel, and it would be interesting to include the false remedy of alcohol for those times when you're starting to shiver. There's another option that they've ignored entirely - every now and then I find the corpse of a fellow traveller who has failed the test, but unlike discovering the carcass of a deer or wolf, there's no option showing the amount of meat available for harvesting. It's a grim reality of survival that desperate people have resorted to in the past, but perhaps it's just as well that they didn't feel a need to recognize that kind of desperation in a computer game.
That being said, my current survival situation is desperate enough. I was exploring the abandoned Carter hydroelectric dam when I innocently went through an emergency exit that put me outside in the path of a blizzard. Like most Emergency doors, there's no return access, and now I’m trapped outside: exhausted, freezing, and unable to start a fire in the howling wind and the driving snow.
Surprisingly, I manage to survive the storm. I find a spot in the lee of a storage shed where I’m able to light a fire and warm up a bit, which allows me to take a quick nap in my sleeping bag without dying from the cold. As I search for a way up to the top of the dam, I stumble upon a hidden entrance point that lets me back into the calm darkness of the facility’s generator room, where I’m able to get some real rest and bring my temperature fully up to normal.
However, my respite is short-lived - literally. A couple of days later, I'm repeatedly mauled by a bear while scouting for a route down to a river, then a wolf ignores my defensive emergency flare and finishes me off, ending 35 days and six hours of staying alive.
Oh well, as the saying goes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you. Either way, 35 days (and six hours) is the new record to beat. Let's see...Start A New Survival Game...
- Sid
* This may not be as unlikely a possibility as you might think, apparently the Magnetic North Pole has been moving around quite a bit recently.
** The game’s creators acknowledge that wolves rarely attack humans, and that they have exaggerated the perils of being attacked by a wild animal in the interests of game play.
*** I originally typed this as “leather shows” which might also be fine for the Bay Street finance crowd, who knows.
