The Long Dark

[Bored of Canada]

A SURVIVAL GAME ON THE PC.



An absolute shower of 'em.
I've been playing the Long Dark, which is in early access. I'm really enjoying it.

The set-up is that your plane goes down in a storm, and you parachute out into the Northern Canadian Wilderness. It's absolutely freezing and you have some stuff off your back and some basics, like a bedroll, first-aid and a flare. No food or water and not dressed enough to combat the cold. There's two vast biomes at the moment.
One a forest. One a coastal region.

Basically, you need to survive, catering to the fundamentals. Staying alive consists of managing your hunger, warmth, thirst and fatigue. As well as your basic health, like trying to keep the blood inside your body instead of spraying it neatly across a frozen lake by letting a wolf tear you out of you. 

So far I really like it. It's really beautiful.
It's got this kind of crepe paper look to it with amazing saturated lighting. The fires are the best because they feel so warm.

It's hard to navigate the place. You'll likely start in the middle of nowhere and have no idea where to go. There's likely maps online but I'd highly advise you don't use those. I've been making rough maps of my own as I go, which feels overly more satisfying and keeping with the spirit of the game.

You'll be walking along, and you need to think logically, as you would when you were actually lost away from civilization. You might be surrounded by hills and trees for 360 degrees, so maybe you should climb high and check if you can make out absolutely any landmarks. A stump is sign of a cutdown tree, try and follow the stumps to shelter. Or maybe a road. But you need to move fast because it's cold and you're losing temperature.

My absolute favourite moment so far has been finding a main road after staggering about for a while, following that till I got to a bridge and finding a parked car.
I went to open the door, assuming it would just open my inventory to collect what was inside, like most games, but you actually climb inside and can look around in 360 degrees. And can rifle through the glovebox and check around inside for anything.

I found a crowbar and nothing else. Got out, hopped in the backseat to see if there was anything back there.

Nothing. 

Checked the boot.

Nothing.

And then I started walking down the road, and immediately saw a wolf, who saw me and started coming for me. I started sprinting like a mad man back to the car and jumped in. It's warmer inside the car than outside, and the wolf was waiting outside. So I just had a sleep inside for an hour. Went out and the wolf had moved on down the road a little bit.
So I started hiking down the main road again...and a blizzard started. You can barely see ten meters in front of you, and you lose temperature incredibly fast in that much snow and wind, so I just turned around and slept in the car again till morning.

I just really like the atmosphere of the game. I like the warmth of civilization you feel when you get out of wilderness. I'm in a really good position now, on my fourth attempt. I've found a few houses, and I've got myself a lot of food and a lot of water, replaced a lot of my clothes and repaired them to help me in the cold. Started stockpiling wood, food and potable water in the cupboards of the place, which again, is a really cool feeling. Don't need to carry it all when you just declare this place to be yours. And that's when you start mapping out the area, because if you go too far, and are caught in a blizzard or just walk out of sight and get surrounded by 360 degrees of trees, you can easily get lost and just never find it again.

I think my final judgement on the game really relies on if you can actually be self-sustainable in the game. I can get water from melting snow, then boiling the water.
That takes making a fire, which requires kindling and wood which you can collect from any place in the map if you forage for it. But you also need matches, and I don't know if you can make matches, or if there's an in-game method of creating the flame. If the game forces me to explore for matches, that's cool in a way, but it also means there's a finite amount of matches, which ruins the game for me. There's a few elements of the survival which are reliant on finding specific things, and you can find them if you explore.

It has made me want to go out bush again. I might do that this coming week for a night.

If it wasn't for the wolves, it'd just be a really nice camping simulator, where all the fundamentals are simulated and you get to be out in nature and it's beautiful. The wolves are a necessary evil, I reckon. Gives it the right tension and the forces you to think on the fly and change your course of action. There's also lots of dead bodies around and that is ruining it for me a little bit. It has a story component coming this year apparently, but I don't really want this to be some kind of apocalypse game about the "Gritty" nature of whatan will do to survive in a dead world.

I just want to be clever and self sustainable and exist in a world. Go hiking and explore. Setting myself up and as I get more and more equipped, going further and further out. Eventually setting up multiple outposts and campsites and living off the land.

My nice house has a little Canadian flag on the outside, which flaps in the cold winds, and it and it's opposite another house which is a double storey one but I live in the smaller cosier one because it has a little Canadian flag and it is totz adorbz.

[Thursday]

I enjoyed this video of people talking over the game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d09yU7XOPHU

[Hangthebuggers]

Played it a few months back when I was quite drunk. Enjoyed it to an extent, but am I right in saying there's no combat? Also there's no randomisation of items/locations?

I think the wolves got me about three times. I remember spending the night in a shitty hut on side of a frozen lake then stepping out and getting savaged and bleeding to death(?) I also remember finding a suicide victim in a house, I spent the night shivering by a fire and stepping outside and getting savaged again.

I think I should play this sober.

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

Was hovering over the buy button on this today but removed it from my cart at the last moment and got Rust and Miscreated instead

So many of these games currently and I'm working my way through them, none seem to quite get it right, but most are in alpha state

Dayz standalone just not doing it for me, nor 7 days to die or the forest

Have high hopes for Miscreated, Rust, H1Z1, Survive the Nights and Stranded Deep

[Bored of Canada]

Played it a few months back when I was quite drunk. Enjoyed it to an extent, but am I right in saying there's no combat? Also there's no randomisation of items/locations?

I think the wolves got me about three times. I remember spending the night in a shitty hut on side of a frozen lake then stepping out and getting savaged and bleeding to death(?) I also remember finding a suicide victim in a house, I spent the night shivering by a fire and stepping outside and getting savaged again.

I think I should play this sober.

There's rifles. Bullets are very scarce. And you can also fight back if you're attacked by wolves. You hammer on the buttons and it's easier to get away and you'll do more harm if you have a hatchet or a hunting knife.

Then you can follow the wolves blood and eventually it'll die and you have meat.

[Bored of Canada]

I've survived a good long time now. I feel I'm in a good state where I'm fairly self-sustainable if I ration properly. Only just found a rifle, hiked across three maps to get it. Have a huge amount of ammunition too from my travels. Still not yet even fired it. Not had a reason to. Got into a scuffle with a wolf and I badly wounded it with my knife. Had to patch myself up first and lost track of him...then he came back and I wouldn't be able to last another head to head against a wolf in my injured state, so scared it off by throwing a flare at it's big dumb face. Then I heard a yelping and staggered to find him bled out.

Got a hell of a lot of cooked wolf meat now. Also made my first snare for rabbits, and even found a firestarter, so maybe you can survive forever if you're very careful and constantly repair your equipment. I think there'd only be a finite amount of scrap metal though, so maybe not. Unless there's some other kind of sparking thing that can be foraged.

I've got four bases set up fully kitted out with stuff at great distances from each other, but once I've hunted a deer from my current one and prepare a bunch of cooked meat, I'm going to hike off in a random direction and see what else I can find. 

[Thursday]

50% off on Steam now. Trouble is by the time I get round to it, it'll probably be more finished and even cheaper at the next steam sale.

[mrfridge]

I played this for a while and got quite engrossed but I think there are some fundamental issues at the moment which will hopefully be ironed out prior to the finished version being released.

My first few games didn't last long after making some obvious mistakes; Falling off tall things, running out of food, being mauled to death by wolves, etc. I eventually found the Coastal Townsite and made a base at a petrol station where I could store all of my goodies and craft various useful bits. I spent a few days exploring this section of map collecting decent clothes, medicine, food and other gubbins before getting a bit bored and deciding to make a break for it and move on to the next map. I ended up in a scrap with a wolf which I thought I'd won when it ran off bleeding but when I made a mad dash for nearby shelter to rejuvenate myself the bastard chased me down and took what little health I had left.

I lasted 8 days and really quite enjoyed it but I can't be arsed going back to it. The lack of any kind of narrative inevitably spoils it I think, I do 'get' the fun in just surviving but with nobody else to survive with it's a very lonely experience, just spending hours searching for food, starting fires and fishing.

The wolves are a pain in the arse. Maybe it was me but I couldn't figure out the combat system so just twatted the mouse buttons madly when I got into a scrap and usually died. I had a hunting knife but I didn't seem to be able to select it when I was out exploring so I don't know if it made any difference to the fights. I found plenty of ammo but no rifle so there were a couple of occasions where I ended up trapped in a building surrounded by wolves for a couple of days at a time waiting for them to fuck off. Tedious to say the least.

The permadeath thing is new to me and it does create incredible tension, more than any other game I've ever played but it's the main reason I can't be bothered going back to it now. I spent maybe 7-8 hours playing through my 8 day session and I just can't devote that much time again when it can all be over in a second. Maybe I'm just shit at it but it's very unforgiving and as I mentioned before, the combat is bollocks so if a wolf sees you and you're not near a building you're basically dead. 

There are other issues, you can't jump which would be fine if your character could move over anything bigger than a thimble which means you can find a house and have to run around the really low fence on it's perimeter to find a gate to get through to it. Small snow drifts are often impassable without walking round them. Also climbing is a fucker; you can be making good progress up a pretty steep incline then all of a sudden you can't move any further. You've can see there's a path ahead but you've got to go back down again and find a way around. Also you are apparently a dwarf as your line of site seems way too low.

Overall it's pretty interesting though and if they sort out these issues and add a decent story I think it could be great. The graphics, sound and general atmosphere are great. Well worth a punt if you can get it on the cheap.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Sounds great but...when is it going to be finished?

[mrfridge]

Errrrrr... Dunno. I just checked their website and it doesn't appear to have a launch date.

[Thursday]

Yeah I don't have a problem with early access, it makes sense for a lot of games to go through that process, it's more that I see these games and think "But I want to play the finished version now!"