Replaying The Long Dark.

Do Not Go Gentle

The first episode introduces the two protagonists, and sets you playing the pilot (briefly before takeoff, as a tutorial) following the plane crash in the mountains.

The whole episode is largely about getting your snow-legs and setting up the story. The wolves near Milton are mostly avoidable, and outside of needing to look up how rabbit snares operate, I didn’t spend too long before making my way down the mountain.

Luminance Fugue

The second episode puts the pilot in the lakes where he has to fight a bear. The old trapper also wants help with his radio and with recovering from the bear attack.

I finally assembled my rabbitskin hat using the trapper’s workbench. Crossed the muskeg, forged the spear, got the new hat ruined by the bear, and said I was sorry for killing it.

Crossroads Elegy

We finally get to play as the doctor. As the episode revolves around a community center, it’s appropriate that it also introduces the wolf packs. These are easily the most annoying part of the game to me. I don’t find them challenging, but I do find them something of a crapshoot. Their irregular navigation of terrain, how much effort to scare them, how much ammo I’ll waste…

I killed plenty of wolves, gathered up the four skins required for the coat, only to realize that the recipe doesn’t transfer?! No coat for me. I returned a church artifact that won me a new rabbitskin cap without killing a single rabbit.

This episode definitely adds some cool interactions aside from the wolves. It also turns up the challenge the weather poses.

Fury, then Silence

In episode four, it’s back as the pilot, this time being let out of a prison (the next cell over holds the warden) run by criminals to run errands for them.

This region was new when it was added, and I never actually played in it in survival mode, so navigating required more attention, but it was not that difficult. The main difficulty and annoyance remained the wolves, which are in both pack and lone varieties here.

This episode goes big on character, between the prison goons and the mysterious helper.

The Light at the End of All Things

You jump between the doctor and the pilot throughout the episode. The doctor starts out in a spooked coastal town, where it’s up to you to try to figure out what’s killing people. To that end you make your way inland to look for missing people. After that, you switch to the pilot still not far from the prison, but with a companion.

Again these are new areas, so a bit more difficulty finding my way, but nothing extreme. The trickiest part is at transitional geometry that doesn’t look safe. You can do a lot of weird mountain-goating in this game, so it can be hard to tell what’s intended, what’s possible, and what’s dangerous.

This episode definitely held more story than survival. That’s okay. I can understand if some players were frustrated by it, especially as the gameplay techniques veterans of the game have built up don’t really matter too much versus prior episodes. (Other than dealing with wolves.) The story itself was fine, though the long-winded exposition felt a little tedious to me, it may have hit for people that needed that full explanation. A beginning, a middle, and an end would have been enough for me.

Survival Mode

I played a lot of survival mode years ago, but eventually the lack of an end-goal put me off it. For those who want to see how far they can go, it’s great, but I think for a lot of players having some middle-ground between story and survival would be best.

Even if it was something like a single-player capture-the-flag mode, where you survive while you have to gather all the flags (they could make it more meaningful, like picking up radio parts to call in a rescue, or not) would give a lot more motivation to it.

I enjoyed playing survival. There are a lot of places to explore and they have shown it a lot of love over the years. I just lost motivation to play an open-ended mode like that.