Interloper

Been playing a lot of The Long Dark lately. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a computer game that’s a survival challenge that I’ve written about before. Your character is lost in the eerily abandoned Canadian winter on an island in the vague northwest. You have to struggle to stay warm, find food and water, and manage your strength. Meanwhile you have to watch out for predators that are far more agressive than found in nature, like wolves and bears. Infrastructure like running water and electricity is down, although sometimes there is an aurora that causes electrical devices to be temporarily usable; unfortunately this also increases the agression of predators making it very dangerous to be out and about under the glowing lights in the sky.

There’s a story mode, too, where you can play as Will MacKenzie or Dr. Astrid Greenwood (voiced by the incredibly talented Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, respectively), estranged spouses who are trying to find each other and get to a town on the island with a mysterious briefcase. Four of the five chapters have been released for story mode and at least one more is coming. It’s interesting and goes into the weird Quiet Apocalypse that’s befallen Great Bear Island.

That’s not the mode I’m playing right now.

For as long as I’ve had the game I’ve enjoyed the lower levels of difficulty; in those modes the game is much less tense, you start with basic gear like decent clothing and matches (important for getting and staying warm, as well as boiling water and cooking food), and you have better loot scattered around to help you survive, like knives, hatchets, pistols and guns.

But I always admired the streamers and let’s players who played on the highest difficulty level: Interloper. Streamers like Tomasina, Zaknafein, Archimedes, among others. On Interloper, there are no guns, and you start with no matches at all. In that mode, knowing where you are and where to find matches and other good loot is paramount. The maps themselves don’t change, but the possible locations of gear is somewhat randomized. And you have to craft your own knife, hatchet, and bow — there are no guns in this mode. And without a knife or hatchet, you can’t harvest animals well, you can’t craft the best clothing in the game, and you can’t make a bow and arrows. You can’t even defend yourself from hungry wolves when they attack.

To give you a little idea of how the developers see this mode, there is a Steam achievement for surviving a single day in Interloper. It took me several tries, after doing my best to learn the maps on lower levels, before I achieved even this. When I wrote my earlier post I hadn’t even attempted Interloper. It felt too brutal.

I forgot to mention: this is permadeath. Dying in the game means your current save is deleted. Go back to Day 1, you have to start over. Make a single mistake and it can cost your whole run. And nearly every death in this game can be traced back to a mistake the player made. Get overconfident, go out into the cold without proper precautions, or just misjudge how much food and water you’ll need, and it’s over. You’ve faded into the long dark.

But I have finally strung together enough luck and skill that I am past Day 200 on a single run. Other players I’ve talked to have said the game gets boring at this point but not for me. I’m enjoying having a better chance (not a guarantee by any means) of surviving after the brutal first 20-30 days getting set up.

It’s far more than a walking simulator. It’s beautiful, meditative, and challenging. I love it.