Outside The Cave — The Long Dark
Certain experiences belong to certain genres. That is to say, certain mechanics service certain types of gameplay. For example, the experience of being a detective, gathering clues, evidence, and exploring locales, has always nestled itself snugly within the point-and-click genre.
Wilderness sandboxes, however, seem to have been gobbled up and owned entirely by the survival genre. You can see other games dabble in this — the reboot of Tomb Raider comes to mind, before it got distracted by demonic samurai — but rarely are the places, tones, and stories of the wilderness better expressed than in survival games.
However, stories are a flexible thing in gaming. The rule of thumb for many survival games has been to cut that fat entirely. When thinking about the construction of a survival game, to bake in a set path on which a player must travel will at best have them getting bogged down by mechanics, and at worst show just how unrelated and truly undynamic those mechanics can be.
I suppose it’s not surprising then, that one game; having weathered the storm and uncertainty of early access to find it’s way into fully fledged commercial release — along with it’s varied sandbox maps and dynamic gameplay loops — now presents us with a story, of all things. Voice acting, cut scenes, quests and characters, an early access game has finally had the gall to step out of the cave and into the narrative.
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If you’ve played The Long Dark, like, at all, you’d probably be a bit surprised to hear that their big explosive entry into the world of ‘proper’ commercial existence is…this. This strange, ham-fisted, compelling unification of The Long Dark’s fairly polished survival experience and a map based fetch-quest-y apocalypse drama.
Here’s the cast. You play Will Mackenzie, an emotionally damaged wilderness pilot who, after accepting a job from his equally emotionally damaged ex-wife Astrid, crashes helplessly into the Canadian wilderness after a massive, mysterious natural catastrophe, the bounds and understanding of which eventually become the focus of the game, aside from your need to find your ex and survive.
Depictions of survival in films, books and video games often go one of two ways — either the experience exists to fuel internal struggles and realisations of the characters, or the experience itself is realised in a stark brutality so as to communicate a broader message about humanity and it’s place in nature. I understand that doesn’t apply to ALL stories that involve tales of survival, but these tropes are common, and The Long Dark does it’s best to communicate both, flitting between its gameplay loops and story beats in an attempt to provide a visceral yet reflective experience.
After surviving the plane crash, Mackenzie awakens to find himself, and the remains of his plane, strewn about the side of a mountain. This is the first phase of what will be a long learning experience; basically the entire first chapter of The Long Dark: entitled “Do Not Go Gentle”, serves as a tutorial for the basic mechanics of the game — and I mean basic; you’re still getting taught stuff deep into the second chapter of this game which we’ll talk about later.
Managing your temperature, food and water intake, fatigue and any medical conditions all return from the sandbox to dog you as you trek your way through the pre-fab mountainous environment. You’ll say goodbye to the plane that got you here; perched precariously above where you originally awoke after the crash, and find a sealed case belonging to Astrid, who is nowhere to be found.
This period of hand-holding survival is ham-fisted but understandable. There is no lack of pop ups and tool-tips that’ll tell you exactly how to manage your condition. Traces of someone, perhaps Astrid, are found along your path. You’ll skulk through caves, snap a few rabbit necks, and duck between cars avoiding wolves on a bridge while you make your way towards the nearby town of Milton. At the town limits, you can stop by in a church that lays silent and abandoned, snow drifting in between the torn roofing. Holing up here for the night is an opportunity for the atmosphere of the game to truly show itself, the glow of the fire bouncing of the shattered insides of the space.
Small moments of atmosphere like this, ever so slightly constructed, are a big part of what makes The Long Dark worthwhile at times. Often, the demands of the mechanics overcrowd the game, but every now and then there is a chance for calm and solitude.
Trek through the last few acres of snow and the bridge to Milton greets you. Like the land surrounding it, the town is abandoned save for some wolves, but there is one other; an old blinded woman inside her home overlooking the town. She calls herself Grey Mother, and she’ll be your mission source for the remainder of the chapter.
Grey Mother gives a pessimistic outlook on the world. The quiet apocalypse did nothing if not confirmed her opinions of the other residents of Milton. As is the way of things, situations get dire, and people make choices. Your interactions with Grey Mother will drip feed you information about the town, the island of Great Bear, and the lifeless husk of a town you now trawl through. You’ll gather wood for the fire, food for the pot, and eventually go further out of town to some farmland in which Grey Mother says there is something important to her that you need to retrieve.
This, disappointing, is the overarching structure of The Long Dark’s story missions. Apocalyptic drama can explore a lot of different narrative avenues, but ‘bring me 20 pieces of wood and I’ll tell you about my dead daughter’ isn’t a terribly engaging one.
There is a dissonance here; between the nature of the story, Mackenzie’s struggle, Grey Mother’s grief, and the gameplay demands that The Long Dark has constructed for itself. Obviously, in survival mode, you collect wood and food to see the sun rise and fall just one more day, to see just how far you can get within the games systems, but in story mode, the player has already been given so much to care about, why this busy work crowding out the experience? It feels tacked on, undercooked at the best of times and mind-numbingly tedious at the worst.
However, Milton does serve as a fairly solid introduction to the kind of experience you’ll be having within The Long Dark, the loop of receiving your chore, venturing out, and doing your best to complete it within the added loop of trying to survive within the games systems. I feel stupid saying that I didn’t expect to be doing so much surviving in a story mode about survival, but there it is.
Often, you’ll receive a mission, say, catching fish from a nearby frozen lake, and it seems straightforward. You’ll just do a bit of trekking, smash the ice, grab the cod, and everything is gravy, but The Long Dark doesn’t want to make things that easy. Smaller ordeals emerge within this overall experience of fish murder. Perhaps you’re beset by a wolf on your way over, now you’re bleeding out, alone in the snow, oh, and you’re pretty parched too — before you know it, you’re spending the night in a cabin you stumbled across in the dark, huddled in the corner of a dark room of empty cots and overturned furniture; all for a goddamn trout.
Dealing with these crises as they occur, and the aforementioned tiny moments of atmosphere that eek out of them, can be both a joy and a bore, depending on how worn down by the games incessant mechanics you are.
Eventually, you’ll have done all you can for Grey Mother — nothing left to hide, she’ll reveal the tragedy that left her sitting alone atop a hill as the world ended around her. After accepting her deceased daughter’s climbing gear you’ll make the climb down a nearby cliff face, through the mountain pass and on towards the nearby town of Perseverance Mills. A weirdly abrupt cinematic will introduce both a massive black bear and the character of Jeremiah, who seems to have gotten the chip on his shoulder from the same place Grey Mother did.
Chapter two, Luminance Fugue, leans much harder into the expansive, slow burn pacing that The Long Dark can present. After bundling Jeremiah back to his cabin, he explains that with that black bear still out there, you’re good as dead if you try to make it any further towards Perseverance Mills. What follows can only be described as something of a training montage, shown in intense minute detail, as you gather the resources necessary to not only keep Jeremiah alive, but prepare yourself for the chapters bear-hunting climax. This leads to what I consider to be the strongest phase of the game, a massive, multi-map trawl across the frigid Canadian landscape, all with the goal of repairing an old broken rifle. This is where the game truly flexes its artistic muscle, with vast water colour skyboxes filling your view with burning oranges and endless purples in the Forlorn Muskeg region, a large ice-field that made me feel my most exposed and paranoid yet.
It’s not uncommon for the danger and unpredictability of nature to be expressed through some form of supernatural threat. As interlopers in the order of things, survivors like MacKenzie might see the world’s concentrated effort to lay them face down in the snow forevermore as something more fantastical than simple natural brutality.
The Long Dark takes this opportunity to develop it’s apocalypse narrative and weave it further into the games survival narrative. Each night — and during this rifle-driven trek you’ll experience a few of them — there is a chance the sky will glow and shift with a display of northern lights. It’s visually stunning, but the game changes in more ways that one. The soundtrack sparkles and swoons with the sound of something unknown, something alien — for a moment, the tone almost shifts towards sci-fi.
Street lights, dead since the beginning of the game, flicker and crackle to life and the wildlife in the treeline begin to take on a strange green glow. As you coast along the edge of a frozen lake, marching to the resting-place of the rifle in an old log cabin overlooking the waters, you’ll have to duck into the light to avoid the onset of wolves. If you’re caught out, their new sensitivity to light will make flares and flashlights than much more useful.
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This is as far as I got with this. The Long Dark seems to be stuck in a kind of mid-series development funk, with delays laid upon Episode 3 every now and then. I doubt I’ll return to the series until all the episode are available — if that happens, it’ll be exciting to see how Hinterland Games develops the story.
Thanks for reading,
Nicholas
