First Impressions: The Long Dark

I got this game from the latest Humble Montly because I was curious (and it was a really good deal) and it ended up really surprising me. I have not really played any survival games because feels like most of them are zombie/horror type stuff which I hate, but The Long Dark was just about surviving in nature so I decided to give it a try. Note that this is really my first impressions of it because I’ve only played a bit over 2 hours so far!

First thing I learned: I’m absolutely terrible at surviving! I’m one of those idiots who will try walking into a fire in games just to see if it’ll harm me or not. It does. Within the first half an hour I had burns on top of the injuries my character already had from his plane crash, I accidentally drank dirty water because I didn’t know how to purify it and I probably wasted most of my antibiotics trying to figure out how to treat all my issues. This game does not hold your hand too much so I had to do some trial and error to figure my life out.

Like I said, I’ve only played a little bit so I’m not very far in the story yet, but basically you’re a pilot and a woman called Astrid makes you fly her somewhere in horrible weather and you obviously crash in the middle of nowhere and get separated on top of that, so you have to survive on your own. This backstory is shown in little cutscenes which I really enjoyed because of the art style. Everyone has a red nose! Probably because it’s really cold but it’s still cute. (I actually just found out that all the episodes for the story aren’t even out yet, so I’m definitely not going to rush with this.)

I was really surprised how much I’ve enjoyed this game despite being terrible at it. Taking care that my character doesn’t freeze to death is hard. It took me a long time to realize I didn’t even have a proper coat in the beginning! No wonder he was freezing, poor guy.

Now, finding food and keeping warm I can deal with, but then I ran into a wolf! I don’t have any kind of weapons yet other than small rocks, so I’ve been kinda scared to keep going because I’m sure I won’t survive an encounter with one. I’m sure I’ll work out the courage to keep going some day though! I’ve decided I’m not going to touch the survival mode until I’ve finished at least the first episode of the story because it apparently has permadeath and I want to learn to do things in peace.

If you enjoy survival games and you haven’t tried The Long Dark yet you definitely should give it a go!