I can’t help but think The Long Dark and I got off on the wrong foot. Do not expect a deep analysis. No actually, whatever the opposite of a deep and thoughtful analysis is, you are reading it right now. I will only recount my experience. If you like the game, you’ll probably hate me after reading this.

It opens with a beautiful and atmospheric montage that seems to foreshadow a lot of the things to come. Then we’re introduced to the protagonist. He has a really red nose and red cheeks, and I thought this was meant to show he’s an alcoholic. After a moment, a woman appears and she has the same red nose and cheeks. Perhaps they’re both alcoholics or maybe what it’s really meant to show is they live in a cold place.

Despite the people looking a little like Anpanman, I like the art style. However, I think it would have been better off as still frames. Everything is slightly animated. The way their mouths open and close looks like when you’re moving things around with the liquify tool in Photoshop. If it had been still frames, my mind would have filled the gaps, but this way it looks robotic. Or maybe this is another way to show us how cold it is, their facial muscles having gone stiff.

The woman, Astrid, asks the protagonist (who’s a pilot and has a plane) to take her somewhere, carrying a mysterious package. But we can’t know what’s in it. Later, on the plane, they talk a bit about their past or so. I can’t tell because I could hardly understand what they were saying. The plane noise drowned out the dialogue. They were talking to each other through a radio, even though they sat next to each other on the plane, and it made their voices really tinny. (My subpar audio setup is also at fault. I admit it.)

Then, the plane crashes and the game proper starts.

When I took control of the protagonist I saw an on-screen text telling me to “start a fire”, which made me laugh because all around me were parts of burning wreckage from the plane crash. Likely the text was a bug, because I had already lit a fire during the short tutorial section earlier. Still funny.

Anyways, the game was still half in tutorial mode. I had to apply some bandages to treat an injury from the crash, and then my next task was to lie down and sleep in the nearby cave. Wait, what?! Astrid, the woman who had been with me on the plane was nowhere to be seen, perhaps badly hurt and barely clinging to life somewhere nearby. The plane wreck was still burning up above on a cliff. And the protagonist… goes to sleep in a cave.

I didn’t have a choice, so I went to sleep and the game fast-forwarded to the next morning. (Or perhaps early afternoon? Perhaps he slept in?) Now the task was to climb the cliff up to the plane wreck. This wasn’t too difficult, at least for me as the player. The protagonist groaned, grunted and huffed a lot whenever I gave the command to scale one of the walls.

Up on the cliff he wondered where Astrid was, and I needed to find hints of her whereabouts. This was when I noticed my health was low and still declining. I found some disinfectant and applied it. I found a flare gun and shot it at the sky in an attempt to signal Astrid. My health drained and soon the screen became distorted with chromatic abberations and the view became shaky. I hoped this was meant to be part of the narrative, that the protagonist would collapse only for Astrid to find him. Good that I had used the flare, right? But no. I fell over dead and the game reset to when I had arrived on top of the cliff.

I repeated some tutorial steps while looking more thoroughly for any kind of medikit or health item. There was some food, and the disinfectant I mentioned earlier. I consumed it all, but my health kept dropping. I tried hurrying along and the game gave me more tutorial hints. It taught me how I could pick up rocks and throw them at rabbits to procure food. With my FOV already swaying I attempted to do this and the rock arced into the snow nowhere near the rabbit. I died a second time while the rabbit hopped away.

Again, reset to the check point near the plane. Health keeps dropping. Same tutorial hints that say nothing about how to stop whatever it is that’s killing me.

If I had bought the game on Steam I probably would have refunded at this point. Actually it was a giveaway on the Epic store, so I have it for free. This is not a good premise, because receiving a game for free doesn’t make me very invested. I don’t feel like I have to get “my money’s worth” from it. More like “meh, let’s see if this is any good…” which is an arrogant attitude to go into a game with.

Honestly, I think The Long Dark probably isn’t a bad game but my experience with it was overshadowed. If I ever get back into it, I might update this. Thanks for reading.