The Long Dark

Ok, I am in and alive for 13 days - my best game so far. I've finally made a good start. I started slowly. Gathered supplies from the coastal area, made an empty home my safehouse. Hell, I had a fridge with 40Kg of food. I had so much food I was forced to stuff Chocolate Bars and Cooked Meat in Drawers... I even had a special Cabinet with Dog Food only. Then I had endless meds... my bathroom was a pharmacy, antiseptics, antibiotics, and so many bandages I could make a blanket with them. I also had a good trap-thing going on. Had snares all around the place, bagging game each time I went out scouting. Hares mainly. God, I had three shelves full of raw hare meat, ready to be cooked. I must have had 50L of water in the Freezer, and another 10L on me... I've fought wolves barehanded. Many wolves. I had gathered half the available resources of the game in one house. MY safehouse.

I played this in 2014 when it was early release. It was a great survival game and I had a fun time with it although briefly. It was original, fun, but unrelenting, and I died a bunch as if it were a roguelike. Each play was better than the last and my final playthrough was what I considered the most successful before I eventually died a cheap death (the cause of which has been patched out of the game). I uninstalled it, planning to return when it was further along, but even then I felt that I got my moneys worth. 3 years later, its on the verge of winter IRL, temperatures are low, and we just had a snowstorm, and I decided to reinstall. I'm glad I did. This game is no longer the early release game it once was - this game is a heavily polished title that could stand amongst AAA titles. Worth it before, but now with a really refined survival mode, story mode, etc. Story mode is half decen

Alright, ladies and gentlemen - I have just reemerged back into the real world, after almost 100 days (99 days 18 hours) survival in one playthrough. With that up my sleeve, I'll be bold enough to say that I know a thing or two about this game and ready to try and write an adequate review. So gather round, grab a cup of hot chockolate and have a listen to what uncle Chern's got to tell ya :) I'll split my review into three sections - pros, cons and things that are considered negative by some reviewers, but not necessarily are. Let us start with the cons, because this list is the shortest... and because I am grumpy old b*****d who likes to criticize. So... CONS: MAP - Map in the current version of the game is not very large. There are only a few points to explore and salvage from. So after you have visited them all (which can... and probably should... be done in the first few days of

The Long Dark is not for everyone. Far from it - it's slow to the point of being tedious; uncaring, and at times unfair. Only the most fundamental mechanics are explained, but most things you have to learn on your own. "Fundamental", by the way, means "use the action wheel for quick access, put on a bandage or you bleed to death." Things like "you can fix your clothes when you have a sewing kit, which will improve its protection against the elements" or "being outside during rain and snow can and will soak your clothes to the point that they can freeze", you have to learn the hard way. I still don't know what the consequences to freezing clothes are, but it certainly can't be good. So why, oh why would I recommend you buy it? Because your clothing can freeze if you are outside during -23°C. You can snap a rabbits neck to survive, but the kicker? Rabbits have a poor nutritional value.

This game deserves such a longer and more well thought out review than what I will write here today, but I've sat on this review for too long as is. I've been playing this game since it was in Alpha, and have long been in love with it. The story mode doesn't live up to what I think it could, at least in my thinking, but I'm not too fussed about that, because the real meat and bones of this game is and always has been the sandbox survival mode. Please don't be fooled by the term "sandbox" to think that it's some unfinished non-game-- the narrative that this game's survival mode always had from way back in Alpha was that your character is going to die here. All you're doing is trying to survive as long as possible. You might even succeed at making a comfortable home with renewable resources and live to day 500 with no end in sight--people have indeed done that, actually. But the point isn'

I've survived for way more than a month here. At this point I have a very well stocked house at mystery lake. I have almost 100kg of meat ready to be eaten, freezed on the snow for conservation. I have a ton of fresh water just sitting there. I've killed bears, moose, wolves. Anything that can be killed I have done it. I probably have more bullets than animals on the surroundings, and then a lot of arrows and a homemade bow too. I'm a master fisherman, hunter and I can start a fire easily in the middle of the storm. I make my own clothes from animal skins. It's clear that I've now beaten the game. There is nothing it can throw at me at this point that I'm not prepared for. At least that was what I thought, but I hadn't taken account of my own stupidity... One day, I was taking a walk to my favourite hunting area, with the hope of catching some deer to make me a new pair of deerskin p