Character limits are the bane of my existence. And yet, I still choose to use Twitter as my social network of choice. I do it to myself, really.
Speaking of verbose nonsense and thoughts on games, I feel like talking a bit about The Long Dark, since a few had asked me my thoughts as I played it over the blizzard weekend.
Contrary to what the store page says, The Long Dark is actually a game about me searching the vast wilderness for a Canadian to help me score a copy of The Witness for a few bucks cheaper. With the death of the Russian Bear and Brazilian Sloth, one has to go to extreme methods in order to save money on their games. This struggle is represented in whole by the every day demands required of the player in The Long Dark. In my 22 hours with the game, I've yet to find another living human being, which accurately mirrors my inability to find actual Canadians. Trudeau's really done a number on the country in these past few weeks, hasn't he?
Bearing in mind that the game is still in Early Access, the only mode available at the moment is the popular survival sandbox. I hit open world burnout years ago, and find that a game really needs to give me something to chew on as I explore beyond the simple, yet lustful, pleasure of discovering whatever's on the other side of the massive hill I'm facing at any given moment. My first nights were rough, with no tutorial to explain to me each of the systems and how they all tied together. But I emerged, leaner, possibly easily mistakable for the Cryptkeeper by day 3. I thought this a cunning plan to evade being hunted by the local wildlife. What wolf would want to expend the energy to kill me when one of the local rabbits had more meat on their bones? Well, the wolf who did me in expended that energy. I admire their tenacity.
Despite my personal reservations against both the tedium of survival games and inherent blandness of open world titles, I could not stop exploring The Long Dark's maps. Landmarks were few and far between, but each one felt unique enough that I never felt like I'd been there before. It generates a sense of place in the mixture of industrialized areas and naturally overgrown sideyards that I felt hasn't most games haven't designed nearly as well since the STALKER games proudly made their mark. I think this speaks highly on the hand-made nature of each map. I also never felt lost, even in the midst of the most powerful of storms, because of the unique setups of each area. There's no in-game map to speak of, but I also didn't need to resort to drawing my own. I just always knew where I was
without the need for triangulating myself.
Mechanics will make or break a game quite easily, and for something that enforces permadeath, the entire game's design is even more fragile than usual. Other than the insanely enhanced passage of time, I found each mechanic to be both present and perfectly sensible in its demands on the player and sustainability in the sandbox. There were multiple options for hunting, gathering materials for fires, bountiful troves of clothing and other man-made materials, and so on. I do take issue with the game's depiction of books as merely stacks of paper to be burned, but that's neither here nor there. Once you crawl over the initial hurdle of understanding The Long Dark on its own terms, you can hit a stride fairly easily. Or... so I feel.
The randomly generated nature of every box, cabinet and corpse you stumble upon means that you could, potentially, end up with a very bad run. There are some necessities that may not appear for very long stretches of time, and I can see this easily stepping in your way and causing you to stumble into an early end. In my current run, I've been playing for about 15 hours or so, and I've yet to find a hacksaw. Yet, there are items everywhere which require one for me to deconstruct into useful parts. I also lacked a whetstone, tools or cleaning kits for quite a while. I managed to persevere without, but RNG is a factor into your experience, so you may not find yourself as comfortable as I was.
And comfort is the key word here. With 22 hours in the game total, I've decided to shelf the game. I think it's probably the best survival game there is, with perhaps exception to Arma 3 mods or a community-run version of DayZ. It honestly wowed me that I felt compelled to play as long as I did, and I imagine for fans of the genre, they'll have a lot more meat to chew on than my frail and withered bones could offer Mr. Winston Wolf. What has finally given me pause is that I'm actually afraid of dying at this point. With so many hours invested in this run, I don't know if I'd care to start all over again should the world see fit to strike me down. Again, this is an aspect of the game I think fans will enjoy, and is absolutely integral to the overarching credo of the game. I once locked myself out of a building and thought I was trapped on a part of the map I never knew was even there. I spent two in-game days in a total panic, trying to think about where I was relative to the rest of the map, and where I could possibly go to get back to my established base. Without the threat of losing everything, this situation wouldn't have been nearly as harrowing as it felt at the time. But, I'm hanging up my Winter Coat Pro and deerskin boots now, before such a fate falls upon me. I never did find a living Canadian to help me, either.
Guess I'm waiting on Firewatch for now, then.
A (and i'm glued to this great game!). Or maybe buy Witness (but i still not beat The Talos Principle DLC!)
