The Long Dark Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

The Long Dark gives Felix Bernard’s enchanting lyric ‘walking in a winter wonderland’ an entirely different meaning in a bitter romance forged from ice and fire, solitude and unhinged desperation. Unlike your cozy woodland tale, The Long Dark wants you to fail. It sews a series of clues and breadcrumbs into the snow, but then immediately palms them into the dirt and asks you to traipse barefoot through ice and sleet to unearth them. It doesn’t give you a warm blanket, and it doesn’t load your backpack with proteins to keep your energy levels at an all-time high. Rather, it just drops you into a frosty world, and it tells you to, well, survive.

In ways, The Long Dark is a game that you either get or you don’t. It’s one of those sorts of adventures—the kind that restricts you from finding a foothold on the ladder, but also one that vaguely preserves a reward on the far end of a turbulent journey. It doesn’t hand you the tools to make ends meet, nor does it fill your pockets with insider knowledge about surviving in the wilderness. Simply, it just stands to one side, and it carefully spectates as you learn to put one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t exactly pat you on the back for making small improvements to your routine; it just nods its head, and it presents you with another task to complete. And you, being at the heart of it all, simply roll with the punches in the hopes that the pain will eventually subside and clear the way for brighter skies to emerge.

It takes less than ten minutes to decide whether or not a game like The Long Dark is for you. In that time, you are only given a small glimpse of the world—a brief window into what could be a prosperous future, should you be willing to brave the cold and stare death directly in the eye. And believe me when I say, you will die — a lot. But, annoyingly, that’s all part of The Long Dark’s irresistible charm. You fall, but at the same time, you learn from your past mistakes. The bitter taste of disappointment soon becomes more tolerable, and before long the wilderness begins to feel less like a hostile environment and more of a homely place for you to hang your coat, if only for a while.

Like most survival games of its kind, The Long Dark doesn’t hesitate to hurl you into the wilderness and saddle you with a whole host of problems. Warmth; hunger; and of course, energy, naturally, all play a major role in your journey, and it soon falls to you to figure out how to juggle them. A plane crash leaves you with little to no chances of making it through the first night, but the horizon illuminates just a slight glint of promise. It’s getting to that point, sadly, that’s the tough part. But hey — welcome to The Long Dark.

In the immediate aftermath of a planet crash, you, a reclusive bush pilot, find yourself bound to the bitter scapes of the Canadian wilderness. Lost, and without the aid of a close acquaintance—Astrid, a doctor who is hell-bent on delivering a mysterious briefcase—you begin your journey into the unknown, on a quest to reunite with Astrid and unlock the mysteries of the “Quiet Apocalypse”—an event that pulls humanity to its knees via a conduit of a geomagnetic disasters.

As I mentioned earlier, The Long Dark doesn’t force a habit of highlighting your objectives or nudging you in the right direction. Instead, it gives you a world, and it invites you to tread carefully through it over five short episodes. In each of said episodes, you have needs to fulfill, environmental hazards to overcome, and an underlying storyline to gradually unravel. You need to source your own food, fashion your own clothes for warmth, and retain items to build structures that can withstand the climate. Again, like a textbook survival game, but with a harsher emphasis on the bitter side of the Canadian wilderness.

While the general act of holding your head out of the proverbial freezer can feel awfully daunting at times, The Long Dark does do a remarkable job of keeping you engrossed in its natural habitat — especially when the training gloves begin to disintegrate and the world opens up its doors to vast possibilities. Granted, the opening chapters can feel burdensome. However, like any good survival flick, once the motions begin to feel like second nature, the journey soon becomes more of a brisk walk in the wilderness than a constant fight for survival. And with a storyline that is both compelling and canonically more-ish, it propels you to linger on that next all-important beat.

I won’t pretend that The Long Dark is a fun game, because it often takes a lot of legwork and patience to truly enjoy. The world is brutal, and the needs can be a little too demanding even during the best of times. Moreover, most of the things that you need to do in order to usher the journey forward are often stowed behind even more trial and error shenanigans. Death is inevitable here, yet it somehow finds a way to entice you into believing that a silver lining hangs in the balance, between a rock and a hard place, and beyond several long and excruciating hours of hard labor.

With all of the above said, The Long Dark deliver a brilliant survival experience that is both visually striking and narratively engaging. It might not appeal to everyone in the field, but for those who enjoy the strenuous work and the occasional perk, it’s a journey that I’d say is more than worth taking.

Verdict

The Long Dark delivers a brilliant yet challenging survival experience to the forefront of the ice fields, with a compelling narrative and just enough intricate gameplay sequences to keep you pondering the ifs, buts and boundaries of your own fragile mortality. It might be an absolute nightmare to solve, but it’s also an adventure that, like any good expedition, is often met with more diamonds than lumps of coal. Stick with it long enough, and you should be able to find the beacon of light that faintly illuminates the dark.