The Long Dark

2026-02-23
Made the mistake of opening the front door of my house this morning. Door blew right out of my hand immediately followed by a spray of snow to coat my surprised face. Yep, it’s a blizzard out there alright here in Massachusetts. My partner likes ‘em for the vibes, she says they’re cozy and romantic. Me, I just like the challenge, the labor. Trudging through the winds and snow with shovel and snow blower to fight back against the powers of nature. It’s not about some grand story or Lifetime movie about finding love in a storm. It’s just about one man looking at a seemingly insurmountable amount of snow and slowly overcoming it. It’s not quite survival but in my pedestrian, suburban existence that’s about as exciting as it gets around here.

I disliked and then liked The Long Dark for the same reasons. First I started in the story mode. Big mistake. It's so uninteresting and tedious. The way they set up the gameplay you're basically taking part in an incredibly slow tutorial–one of those ones where you’re ready to do the next thing long before they let you–where all the stuff you're tasked with doing is basic fetch quests. And what's wrapping it? An uninteresting story about trying to find your ex-wife/friend-person who gets lost. And oOoOo spooky the world has ended. I got so bored I bailed right into the second episode.

But then I started a survival mode game. That’s right, fuck the world. It’s over and I don’t care. I’m here to scavenge and survive off tins of crackers someone squirreled away in a sock drawer. I’m here to fear the dark and the cold that it brings. I’m here to be enveloped in the howling winds but always be listening for the howling of wolves that will almost certainly kill me and my seemingly always unloaded gun.

It’s a really good core loop of keeping warm, watered, fed, and unwounded. It’s all paced just right so that I always felt like I was 1 day away from dying but then I’d find a cache somewhere, ravenously scour its resources, and feel blessed. It’s so tight that it converted even my normally anti-survival-games attitude over to playing for 20 in-game days.

Well, the wind's howling again outside. Ripped a screen off one of the windows sometime last night. I should really get back out there.

???
I normally am not a big survival games guy but this one I was actually really enjoying the core loop of just trying to stay alive in the cold.

When I first started it up I went for the story mode. Big mistake. It's so uninteresting and tedious. The way they set up the gameplay you're basically taking part in an incredibly slow tutorial where all the stuff you're tasked with doing is basic fetch quests. And what's wrapping it? An uninteresting story about trying to find your ex-wife/friend person who gets lost. And ooo spooky the world has ended. I got so bored I bailed right into the second episode.

And thankfully I immediately went and started a survival mode game. This has no story and you're free to just explore and try to survive how you please. The core loop is making sure you're warm, eating, drinking, and free of injuries. This means lots of slowly trudging through the snow trying to find settlements to scavenge supplies and hurriedly finding cover when a storm comes along.

It's a pretty gorgeous game. Minimal but with the right color scheme and feeling. Everything is paced extremely well so most of the time you feel like you're maybe 1 day away from dying and then you'll find a huge cache and feel blessed.

I got to like 20 days and then kind of stopped because I could see what it was going to be like as I continued to survive. Maybe I'll come back some day. Maybe not. Either way I had a blast in survival mode.