The Long Dark
The Long Dark is a survival video game developed and published by Hinterland Studios. The player assumes the role of crash-landed bush pilot Will Mackenzie who must survive the frigid Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic storm. The game received seed financing from the Canada Media Fund, and further funding was secured through a successful Kickstarter campaign in October 2013.
An alpha version was released through Steam Early Access in September 2014. The alpha version was later launched on the Xbox One as one of the first two launch titles associated with Microsoft's Game Preview Program in June 2015. Early reviews of the alpha release were generally positive, and the game went on to sell around 750,000 copies by April 2016. It was officially released on all aforementioned platforms on August 1, 2017, as well as for PlayStation 4. In 2017, it was announced that a film adaptation of The Long Dark was in the works. A Nintendo Switch port was announced and released on September 17, 2020.
On December 12, 2024, a sequel titled Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 was announced.
Gameplay
The Long Dark is a survival game which takes place in the frigid Canadian wilderness, and is played from a first-person perspective. The player must manage their body temperature, calorie levels, hunger, and fatigue. The Long Dark has three game modes available to the player: story, survival, and challenge.The game's map is divided up into 12 main regions: Mystery Lake, Coastal Highway, Pleasant Valley, Forlorn Muskeg, Desolation Point, Timberwolf Mountain, Mountain Town, Broken Railroad, Hushed River Valley, Bleak Inlet, Ash Canyon, and Blackrock Mountain. Alongside these are transition regions, which are significantly smaller and whose purpose is to connect these regions together through a small region. They are: Crumbling Highway, Keepers Pass North, Keepers Pass South, Ravine and Winding River. The Tales from the Far Territory DLC added four regions: Transfer Pass, Forsaken Airfield, Zone of Contamination, and Sundered Pass, and a smaller connecting region being the Far Range Branch Line.
Survival mode
Survival mode is set in an open world environment where the only objective is for the player to survive as long as possible, with permadeath or a "cheat death" system, although in Misery mode, permadeath is the only option. To survive, the player must manage their body temperature; calorie, hunger, and fatigue levels; avoid dangerous wildlife; and manage illness and injury. Fire is used for warmth and cooking. The game simulates a full day/night cycle, where night is significantly colder.Survival has five game difficulty levels modes: pilgrim, voyageur, stalker, interloper, and misery, as well as customizable difficulty levels. Difficulty levels affect resources that can be found, wildlife, and weather.
Story mode (Wintermute)
Story mode is an episodic adventure game, with survival elements, and does not have a permadeath feature. In Wintermute, the player switches between roles of a crash-landed pilot or his physician passenger as both struggle to survive after a geomagnetic storm and cannot freely travel across the game world, each being restricted to certain geographic regions.Story mode was initially planned to be released late 2014, but was pushed back to late 2016. Development was pushed back again and the game was ultimately released on August 1, 2017, with the first two episodes of the five-part story released together. The episodes are:
- Episode 1: Do Not Go Gentle
- Episode 2: Luminance Fugue
- Episode 3: Crossroads Elegy
- Episode 4: Fury, Then Silence
- Episode 5: The Light at the End of All Things
Development
Planning
Following completion of his work as director on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Raphael van Lierop left Relic Entertainment to work on projects which he felt were "more personal" and "more representative of values". Van Lierop also left Vancouver, moving his family from the city to the Comox Valley in the northern part of Vancouver Island. Inspired by these new surroundings, he formed Hinterland and began to work on The Long Dark, a game about surviving the Canadian wilderness. Hinterland wanted to explore a post apocalyptic world from the fringes, away from the urban apocalypse, which "we've all seen a million times" and away from "B-movie cliches like zombies". Van Lierop was also keen to impart a Canadian identity upon the game, having been frustrated with homogenised AAA video games which sacrificed character for mass market appeal, he summed up his approach with, "I'm Canadian. This game is Canadian. Deal with it."When van Lierop announced the Hinterland team in September 2013, members included Alan Lawrance, formerly a lead at Volition, Marianne Krawczyk, writer of the God of War series, and David Chan, BioWare's first audio designer. A year later, they were joined by Ken Rolston, the lead designer of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Hinterland operated as a virtual team, with its members remote workers. Lawrance cites remote work as a crucial factor in his decision to join Hinterland.
Funding and alpha release
Hinterland obtained seed funding from the Canada Media Fund, and in September 2013, launched a Kickstarter campaign for The Long Dark to raise C$200,000 and build a community around the game. The campaign was successful, raising C$256,617 upon its completion in October 2013. PayPal contributions following the Kickstarter campaign pushed the final total to over C$275,000 by March 2014. Hinterland announced the game's voice cast during the Kickstarter campaign, allowing The Long Dark to capitalise on the actors' individual fan bases; the cast announced were Mark Meer, Elias Toufexis, Jennifer Hale and David Hayter. An alpha version was released through Steam Early Access in September 2014. Hinterland were mindful of the game's scope, not wanting to expand the team's size and increase risk, and so limited their Kickstarter stretch goals to those that added quality, rather than those that added in-game content. Van Lierop spoke of their studio's approach to early access at the 2015 Game Developers Conference where he warned against allowing the player community to dictate the game's direction, with Hinterland deciding to stick to their original vision.Full release
In April 2016, Van Lierop posted an update about the Story-mode release, explaining that Hinterland had elected to delay the launch of Story mode until it contained 4–6 hours of initial gameplay instead of the originally planned 2 hours. He also declined to set a release date, saying, "You won't get another promise from me about when it will ship, until we are close enough to being done with it that I can say with 100% certainty, and give you a definitive date that I know isn't going to end up with us pushing out an experience we aren't 100% satisfied with". He pointed to the evolution of Sandbox mode as another reason for delay, saying that its popularity had grown to the point that Hinterland decided to bring back regular updates for it, even though it was originally conceived merely as a test-bed for the Story mode. His post also provided a developmental road-map with short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals for additions and improvements. In May 2017, Hinterland announced the full release of The Long Dark with a well-received trailer, fittingly set to Agnes Obel's moody song "The Curse".In February 2020, the developers asked Nvidia to remove The Long Dark from GeForce Now, a cloud streaming service, shortly after the service exited beta and went "live". The developers said that their game was improperly placed on the service without any sort of licensing agreement; Nvidia agreed to remove the game. The game returned to GeForce Now in May 2020 after Nvidia announced they would switch to an opt-in policy for including games on their platform.
Expansions
In October 2022, Hinterland announced the development of their first paid content expansion named "Tales from the Far Territory", a paid expansion pass, for users to gain access to redesigned gameplay systems, regions as well as new Challenges/Tales, that would encourage the player to explore new regions added by the expansion. Additionally, Hinterland released free content along with each update of the paid expansion. On December 5, 2022, Tales from the Far Territory officially released. The first update, called "Forsaken Airfield" added three new maps, the Forsaken Airfield, the Far Range Branch Line, and the Transfer Pass.The second part to the expansion pass, "Signal Void" was released on March 31, 2023. The "Signal Void" update added the first Tale/Challenge, known as 'Signal Void'. The third expansion, named "Frontier Comforts," was released on June 21, 2023. This expansion did not come with a new map, but introduced a host of new cooking and crafting recipes.
The fourth expansion and second Tale/Challenge were both named “Buried Echoes.” Released on the 5th of December, 2023, this update added a new region "Zone of Contamination" and related gameplay changes, such as 'toxic zones' and 'poisoned wolves.' The fifth expansion was named “Last Horizon" was released on June 24th, 2024. The "Last Horizon" update added a new map, "Sundered Pass" and was the cameo of the Cougar. The cougar was removed three days later, on the 27th of June, 2024. This quick backtracking was due to poor player reception to the Cougar. The sixth and final installment of the Expansion, known as "Broken Silence" was released on December 2nd, 2024. This final update added the fourth and final Tale/Challenge, "Sutherland's Tale" and was accompanied by a slew of new gameplay mechanics, tools, and clothing crafting recipes.