Small, sensible tasks, just keeping yourself on the brink of alive.
Search through the debris for first aid equipment, forage for wood (which, for those who played the game in 2015, now means just picking it up or breaking it down, rather than a daft menu choice), start a fire, bandage your wounds, sleep. You're given tasks to complete and an incredibly small play area, on a frozen plateau sticking from a cliff, in which to complete them. The game introduces the most important elements: heat, health, water and food. You have, as ever, crashed your plane into the snowy wilderness of Canada, although this time matters of how, or why, are going to be more important. But you also want to be true to the survival challenge of an incredibly difficult game.Īs the story opens, it can afford to be slightly more generous than its sandbox mode ever would be. And while both are necessary, getting that balance right is essential - you don't want a multiple-hour tutorial, not after the game's been available for three years. It needs to both, you know, tell a story, but at the same time, introduce players to the concepts of the game to hopefully guide them through to the larger, more open sandbox that lies in wait after their scripted tales are over. Of course, a story mode in a sandbox survival game has two roles. Goodness me, that's a lot of build up for it to deal with. Well, the first two of five episodes are, far longer than previously promised. And now, some three years later, it's here. Updates kept coming, Adam took over from me in the Being In Love With The Long Dark duty, by the beginning of this year creating his own stories within. Delayed to become bigger, more elaborate. That December it received a trailer, and hope returned! Its first part of a first season would arrive in spring 2016. Come September 2015 I went back yet again, and yet again concluded that the story mode was what I was "achingly waiting for". In February 2015 I went back, and concluded, "Once a story mode appears, goodness, this could be The One."īut instead of a story, the game just kept growing larger. The game grew much bigger over the next six months, but no story mode appeared. Coming back to it a short while later I chronicled my uncanny ability to be eaten by a wolf. Back then in 2014, I wrote about how the story mode was due by the end of that year. It's been three years to the month since I first played The Long Dark.
I'll be back with more details about episode two ("Luminance Fugue"), very soon. Due to review code only showing up yesterday, I've been able to complete the first ("Do Not Go Gentle") of the two eps before launch, so below am reviewing that episode on its own. Well, the first two fifths are, of what developers Hinterland are calling the first season.
The Long Dark's story mode, Wintermute, is finally with us.
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