The best you can do is choose how you die. It's a matter of juggling losing propositions with as much grace and dignity as possible. The worse the constituent variables get, the faster your condition deteriorates, until the world blurs, you shuffle off to oblivion, and it's back to the start screen to try again. The correlations are individual, too, thus having a snooze won't calm your rioting gut, and chowing down on cans of beans or power bars won't make you any less ready to collapse from lack of sleep. Every yin has its yang: the more you exert yourself, the faster you burn calories the longer you go without curling up in a bedroll, the higher your fatigue climbs the longer you spend outside, the colder you get.Įating replenishes calories, resting reduces fatigue, staying indoors mitigates the cold and so forth, but it's a little like navigating a real-time strategy game, fiddling ever-collapsing metrics, fixing one leak only to find two or three more have sprung. Your biological imperatives appear as horizontal bars on a status screen, each moving resolutely from green to red. Locate a shelter and time remains your enemy, your body refusing to give something for nothing. There's no way to achieve equilibrium, no health-replenishing or biometrics-resetting safe harbors. If you find wood, matches and a sheaf of newspapers, you can build a fire.ĭon't expect to find such things easily, and certainly not without a lot of dying and retrying. If you find water-purification tablets, you can render polluted water potable.
If you find better clothes, you stay a little warmer.
It's also keeping tabs on environmental metrics like ambient air temperature (inside or out) relative to variables like wind and weather, the time of day, and whether you're in shadow or sunlight. The game wraps a biometric data cube around that nihilistic narrative, monitoring, in real-time, things like thirst, hunger, body temperature, fatigue, calories consumed, injuries (sprains, broken bones) and illness. And winter isn't coming, it's a bone-cracking fact. But instead of the collapse happening while you're traipsing through a balmy, subtropical clime replete with fruit trees, fishable waters and swinging hammocks, you're somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. As in Eric Kripke's Revolution, The Long Dark imagines a world in which a "geomagnetic event" turns out the lights forever, ending humanity's reign and repositioning nature for a comeback tour.
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