In the dead heat of August, I often find myself longing for the depths of winter. With the tail-end of summer upon us, I’ve been satisfying that longing by playing Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark, a video game set in a seemingly endless Canadian winter on an abandoned island where you are forced to fend for yourself. Perhaps survival isn’t your idea of escapism, but The Long Dark offers something much more unnerving than an idyllic tromp through the snowy woods. Specifically, The Long Dark’s horror as a survival game rests on the premise of ecophobia, the ever-present threat of nature, the very real limits of the human body, and the intrusions of the past. The Long Dark reveals that survival is a constant confrontation with the mundane horror of homeostasis.
The Long Dark is by no means a new game—it was released in 2014 as a sandbox-type survival game, and it is the survival mode that this piece will focus on. Later, Hinterland added a story mode, and by then it had gained a loyal following of fans. Survival mode has varying degrees of difficulty: Pilgrim, Voyageur, Interloper, and Stalker. While Pilgrim is fun for new players who want a more atmospheric experience, Voyageur is a good mix of animal-threat and atmosphere that will frequently push your character to its limits.
The premise of survival mode is that your character wakes up on Great Bear Island after their plane is downed by an electromagnetic storm. The island is cut off from the mainland, and the only person there is you…plus a random smattering of frozen corpses. Your character is forced to survive by looting empty buildings and corpses for supplies and food, traversing difficult terrain, dealing with hostile wildlife, and insulating against the ever-present cold. If at first you may be content to camp out in a centrally located building, the game will eventually push you to explore different regions on the game map as you search for and exhaust resources. It is also worth noting that the condition of these resources degrades as soon as you spawn into the map–you must move quickly if you want good gear and food.
The concept is simple enough, but The Long Dark does a lot of work to make just about every day in the game random and therefore terrifying and anxiety-inducing. Great Bear Island is inhospitable, and while some days are good, some of them can be very, very bad. A key way TLD produces horror is by training its players in the ins and outs of ecophobia: as a player, you start to fear nature and its unpredictability even as you become more comfortable with the game mechanics. The animal life in TLD is one of the greatest generators of ecophobia throughout: while animals will spawn in particular areas, wolves, Timberwolves, bears, and moose are not to be trifled with and will ruin your health and your gear. Sometimes, you won’t even know they’re near you until they’re right on top of you, and by then it might be too late to avoid a struggle.
Struggles with bears and wolves are particularly gruesome. Losing a struggle with either results in a cut scene where you are very much aware that the animal is injuring you, and there’s nothing you can do. If you survive an attack, the animal walks away and your character is left to quickly deal with lacerations, blood loss, and infections as you stand in the bloodstained snow. After a few hours of playthrough, my heart leapt into my throat whenever I heard a wolf howl in the distance. I learned very quickly to give big predators their space and always carry a flare or a rifle to keep the wolves at bay. Various confrontations with wildlife demonstrate the very clear danger they present and often shape the day-to-day activities of the player. Not only must you consider your own needs, but you must figure out how to meet them while maneuvering around other dangerous actors.
In addition to wildlife, unpredictable weather conditions add to the ecohorror of Great Bear Island. While you may be able to kill a wolf or a bear, your character can’t do anything about the elements. Certain regions on the map boast irregular and punishing weather, like Pleasant Valley and Forlorn Muskeg, but the threat of the cold is present in all regions. For instance, my character woke up in the Mystery Lake region in the middle of a blizzard that quickly sent her into hypothermic conditions while she wandered around in the dark and the snow, unable to see more than vague outlines of trees a few feet ahead. As a new player, this introduction to The Long Dark made me hesitant to leave shelters—I slowly developed a fear of the environment outside of my established bases. Depending on your selected difficulty level, your fear of the outdoors may come back to haunt you, as the game also has a “cabin fever” mechanic which knocks your sanity levels if you spend too much time inside, quite literally forcing you outside and into confrontations with nature.
While these game mechanics are outside of the player’s control and therefore enhance the horror of the game, the limits of the human body also play an integral part in enhancing that horror. More often than not, you are locked in struggle with your own needs, not just the threats of Great Bear Island. While hiking the island, you are made to constantly monitor your own warmth, energy, thirst, and hunger. While warmth and energy are easily dealt with by looting warmer clothing or stepping into a shelter to sleep, thirst and hunger are the real devils in the details. You need food and water to survive, but you can’t drink water without boiling it. And you can’t boil water without a fire. If you don’t have the materials to start one, you’re shit out of luck. The same goes for food harvested from hunted animals. Eating raw meat runs the risk of food poisoning and parasites (both of which will kill you–slowly). While you can forage packaged food items, they degrade over time and become dangerous to eat as well—food poisoning galore.
In a particular confluence of bodily weakness and environmental mechanics, the most terrifying situation I’ve experienced in-game was food poisoning combined with a blizzard. My partner’s character consumed a degraded can of peaches only to get food poisoning in a shelter far away from his home base. Thinking he could sleep it off, my partner put his character to bed for ten hours, only to wake up on the brink of death in the middle of a blizzard. Risking death from hypothermia and using two emergency stimulant shots, I watched as my partner’s character blundered down a mountain in the snow, using a flare for light, eventually finding his way back to his base with his health on the brink of expiring. Oh, and almost dead from hypothermia and low energy. The situation was quickly remedied with antibiotics and sleep, but only after ten minutes of harrowing gameplay, both our stomachs in knots (and more than a little screaming on my part).
Coupled with the constant need for resources, you must also grapple with elements of the uncertain past and future in the world of the game. Journeying through a place once populated and seeing evidence of that population generates a distinct unease. Coming across frozen corpses, notes from the past, and stacked cairns only amplifies the dread, serving as a constant reminder of your character’s own mortality and lonesomeness. Despite this, your character will often muse, as they loot bodies and buildings, “I hope no one else needs this,” which becomes a stark reminder of just how alone your character really is. No one is coming to save you, just like no one came to save the other human popsicles littering the island.
In all, The Long Dark is equal parts beautiful winter scenery and vicious, indifferent nature. Its appeal rests on negotiating those horrific elements, making sound decisions, and ultimately surviving as long as Bear Island will let you. If you’re looking for a cold, wintery apocalypse to distract from our own looming and much warmer one, look no further than this gem of an indie game.
Shelby Carr is a Ph.D. student in English at Lehigh University, where she studies 19th century American literature and Gothic literature. She has previously written “Ten Women Authored Ghost Stories from the Gilded Age” for Horror Homeroom. You can follow her on Twitter @CarrShelb.
