Tag: the long dark

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Is it time to stop using the term “walking simulator”?

The history of the term “walking simulator” is short but heated. It’s only seen wide usage over the past few years and is often applied frivolously. There’s a lot of uncertainties around it but the one thing that’s for sure it it’s a divisive term. Some people see it as a useful way to bunch together a group of games with similar interests—typically slower games, ones about exploration and contemplation. While others abhor it and wish it would go away. But it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, at least, not any time soon. “Walking simulator” seemed to come into popularity around the…
Feature

The Long Dark and the legacy of Canadian literature

Your plane has crashed in the wilderness of the Canadian North West. The houses are empty, the cars won’t start, the radios are silent. If you seek shelter or answers in the nearby Hydro dam you are greeted by neither. Instead, a rabid wolf is likely to tear you in half. This is The Long Dark, a Canadian survival game where you play as bush pilot Will Mackenzie. In this otherwise realistic game, wolves—who normally avoid humans—have become Will’s top concern. The mysterious geomagnetic disaster that the game depicts has disturbed the minds of all the wolves. Okay, but that…
News

The Long Dark’s latest update makes surviving in the wilderness more like home

It’s the little things that I value most in survival games—those small, but important details in the environment that let me make reasonable predictions based on my surroundings, or the ability to place items in the world so that I can actually feel settled in my makeshift home. The Long Dark, a first-person survival sim from Hinterland, is as committed to building out these minute aspects as much as they are the larger, more complex systems that make The Long Dark great. A new update from the team, called Desolation Point, gives equal priority to both, bringing a ton of…
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Starve to death in the Canadian wilds next month with The Long Dark

The Long Dark is set to hit Steam Early Access on September 22. The game is being developed by Hinterland Games, which founder and creative director Raphael Van Lierop told us is situated in “an old mining town nestled at the foot of a mountain range” in Cumberland, British Columbia. The cold creeps into the game: it’s at once a brutal post-apocalyptic survival game and a celebration of the Canadian wilderness. The game’s art style is equally stark—not quite low-poly, but spare, with a painterly sense of color.  So: what will we actually be doing in this brutal, beautiful expanse?…
News

The Long Dark’s new trailer is ice cold

Back in February, we showed you some gorgeous screenshots and officially labeled The Long Dark “a game we give a shit about.” Now, that may not sound like a lot. But when we say we “give a shit” about a game, what we mean is “we think this game has the potential to be something great and meaningful.” And today, The Long Dark doesn’t disappoint those shits we gave it (yeah, I know, it’s getting weird for me too. I’ll stop). The trailer Hinterland’s launched today, entitled “Echoes,” permeates with a sense of loss for a world that’s been replaced…
News

These screenshots from The Long Dark are breathtaking

“This is a game we give a shit about,” was the note I got from my editor. The name, The Long Dark, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. After checking up, this was indeed a game we give a shit about. That’s because it’s a game of vivid Canadian wilderness, stippled with salmon sunsets and daubs of evergreens, striving not so much for realism as it is for the way you feel when you enter a scene of overwhelming beauty: like little bells are jingling. It’s painterly. We have a feature on it here. But I’ll shut up…