The Long Dark – Lunar Obverse

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.

A Quiet Apocalypse — The Long Dark Appreciation Post

Gaming, reviews

Point of view shot from the computer game The Long Dark. The character holds a torch in their right hand. It's night, and snowing. — “I probably shouldn’t be out at night in a snowstorm. Pleasant Valley is a killer.”

I died today. Permanently. While hiking towards safety, hungry, cold, and tired, a wolf attacked me. I ran to the nearest shelter, an abandoned church, chased by a whole pack of wolves. Inside, I realized I had no bandages, nothing to stop the blood loss of my painful bites and scratches. Woozy, fading, I tried to tear up my socks and staunch the bleeding.

I was too late. After 106 days in the northern wilderness, I faded into the long dark.

I laughed and then started a new game.

Death in The Long Dark Survival Mode is permanent. There’s no going back. You can only begin anew, on Day 0. The game, from Hinterland Games, is meditative, methodical, and I find it compelling and immersive.

We Do What We Must

The game is survival. Your character is dropped somewhere on the fictional Great Bear Island, the victim of a plane crash, with only the clothes on your back and a handful of items. If you’re lucky (or on lower difficulty levels), you have matches and a hatchet or knife. If not, you’re nearly naked in the snow and ice, far from any shelter. The only score that matters is how many days you can live, looting abandoned human structures or hunting and killing the abundant and often aggressive wildlife.

There are four needs you have to watch and maintain: rest, warmth, thirst, and hunger. Every one of them responds to the actions you take, as well as the environment in which you find yourself. For instance, warmth goes down slower when you’re bundled against the cold, or when you’re inside a house, it goes down faster if your clothes are soaking wet or if the wind is blowing. The game gives you plenty of options to manage all four needs bars—except they’re scattered across the map and randomly placed, with very few exceptions.

Every tool you can find has a purpose. Can opener? You can get more calories from the cans of soup or peaches you scavenge. Prybar? Great for breaking into car trunks or lockers—or for beating up an attacking wolf. You can use the charcoal from burned-out campfires to map your surroundings. Oh, right: you don’t start with a map. Learning the layout of the various regions is part of the learning process of playing the game.

Some tools can be crafted, but only at workbenches or, for the more critical items, at one of the three forges. When you can’t repair your machine-made clothing, you should have been curing hides and guts that are needed to make animal-skin replacements.

It’s long stretches of silence, just the wind, and your character’s footsteps and breathing, punctuated by bursts of intense action as you stab and try to dissuade a predator from making you a meal. The games’ vistas are beautiful; seeing another sunrise after enduring a long cold night in a blizzard is just as rewarding in the game as it probably is in real life. Many of the elements I enjoy from games like Skyrim and the Fallout series are here distilled down to one compelling narrative and milieu: resource gathering and crafting, exploration, management of opposing needs.

Death Is Always An Option

My first real survival mode playthrough was on the second-easiest difficulty level, called “Voyageur.” I wanted to learn the layout of the various regions in the game and see how far I could get. I expected to die much sooner than 106 days, to be honest, even on that level. And there were several points where I very nearly did.

Once, I was trying to reach one of the aforementioned forges by crossing a frozen lake when I attracted the attention of a wolf. I didn’t have a rifle with me (too heavy for this trip); all I could do was light a flare, hoping the flame would keep the wolf at bay. I didn’t want to turn my back to the creature, so I walked backward, waving the flare, only occasionally turning to make sure I was headed in the right direction.

Except… I hit some thin ice, which cracked and plunged me into the frigid water below. I was instantly at risk for hypothermia (on a greater difficulty, it wouldn’t have been only a risk), but the salt in the wound was that the wolf opportunistically savaged me as soon as I was able to climb back out. That time, however, I survived by running carefully across the remaining ice to reach my goal, the forge barn.

What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

It’s OK to loot all these houses and shops because you’re all alone. It’s just you against the environment. If there’s an answer to why no one is there, it’s found in Story Mode, called Wintermute. In the two episodes that have been released, “Do Not Go Gentle” and “Luminance Fugue,” you play as Will, a bush pilot. You find out your plane crashed due to a massive electromagnetic pulse, accompanied by the strange behavior of electrical items when the Northern Lights are in the sky., and your goal, on top of survival, is finding your passenger, Astrid, your ex. Both characters are voiced by veteran actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale (also the voices of male and female Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect trilogy, another series of games I love.)

The third episode, “Crossroads Elegy,” follows Astrid’s adventures after the plane crash, and it will drop in less than two days, on 22 October 2019. I can’t wait to play it. The beauty of the game, the thought, and care that the developers have obviously put into balancing all the interconnected systems, and the talents of the writers and actors will make for compelling storytelling.

It might be difficult to tear myself away from struggling to survive in the sandbox, though. This time I’m playing on a harder mode—but not the hardest. Not yet.