The Long Dark

There's an old saying in gaming monitor circles that once you've gone ultrawide, there's no going back. Indeed, having had the vast Samsung CRG9 hogging my desk for a bit last month, I'm inclined to agree. But what do games actually look like on a screen this wide? It's one thing looking at lovely wallpapers, but another thing entirely to have a game occupy your…

Tagged with Bestest Bests, feature, Hardware, Monitors, Abzu, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, American Truck Simulator, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Batman: Arkham Knight, BioShock Infinite, Destiny 2, Dishonored 2, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, Far: Lone Sails, Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Firewatch, Forza Horizon 4, Frostpunk, Gears of War 5, Grow Home, Half-Life 2, Heaven's Vault, Hitman, Hitman 2, Metro Exodus, No Man's Sky, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rez Infinite, Rime, Sea of Thieves, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, The Long Dark, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Thumper, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Warframe, Yakuza 0.

Right now, there’s a room in Buffalo Grove, Illinois that's as quiet as a grave. The power is off, the robotic limbs are becalmed, and the once thumping presses are depressed. The Steam Controller assembly room is assembling no more, and with the recent Steam sale clearing out all the stock, the grand experiment is over. It’s the final part of Valve’s great Steam Machines…

Tagged with feature, Steam, Valve Software, Arma 3, Brawlhalla, Fallout 4, Overwatch, Stellaris, The Long Dark, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

‘Tis the season / use a brolly / tra la la la / la la la la. Hello, it's me, the list goblin, here in this festive first week of December to deliver a big black bin bag of presents to you. And by presents, I mean a single irrevocable inventory of the most disastrous and terrible winters in the videogames of recent history. Yes,…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Frostpunk, Life Is Strange 2, Metro 2033, Northgard, Papers Please, Red Dead Redemption 2, RimWorld, The Long Dark, Tom Clancy's The Division.

I was homeless when I discovered Minecraft -- not homeless in the street-sleeping sense, thankfully. Only in the sofa-surfing sense. I had a bed, even. The creaking cabin bed of two friends who took pity on me and let me crash for a few months in their house, while I sullied my fingertips with sambuca in a dank Yorkshire nightclub for part-time pound coins. My…

Tagged with Brendy made me cry, feature, Game DNA, 7 Days To Die, Ashen, Dark Souls: Remastered, dofus, Else Heart Break, GTA Online, Habbo Hotel, Minecraft, Second Life, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, The Long Dark, Urban Dead.

In Vectorpark’s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It’s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we’ll…

Tagged with feature, Arma 3, BioShock, Fate of the World, Frostpunk, Half-Life 2, Sandcastles, Sea of Solitude, Sid Meier's Civilization II, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, The Long Dark.

To this day, the jaunty static of the opening jingle to Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town brings me back to a simpler time. Summer evenings spent hunched over my Game Boy SP, a pane of glass between me and nature’s suburban bounty as I tilled my little squares of land, pet my happy little chickens, and bribed a town’s worth of reticent heartthrobs…

Tagged with feature, Harvest Moon, Fallout 4, Project Zomboid, RimWorld, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Starbound, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Long Dark.

Sorry to make this quick, but Christmas is coming toward me at thirty thousand miles per hour, and frankly we're running out of time. I've not managed to play through both chapters of the redux version of The Long Dark's story mode, Wintermute, but I don't want to wait until the new year to tell you that - OH HOORAY - it's sooooo much better…

Tagged with feature, Hinterland Studio, review, wot i think, The Long Dark.

 The world ended this week. We documented the whole thing. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will not go quietly into the abyss of human history. It's not going to be felled by the atomic blast of Fallout 76. It’s going down screaming. Screaming about the best post-apocalyptic games out there, that is.

Tagged with Apocalypse Day, feature, Podcast, Post-Apocalypse Day, The RPS Electronic Wireless show, Fallout 76, Metro Redux, The Flame in the Flood, The Long Dark.

Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you -- there’s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This…

Tagged with feature, GSC Game World, Hinterland Studio, Ice Pick Lodge, Pathologic, Pathologic HD, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat, The Long Dark.

We’ve been battered by wave after wave of survival romps since Minecraft popularised the genre, with its deadly nights and groaning zombies, almost a decade ago. In its wake, we've been introduced to a cavalcade of punishing, persistent environments intent on putting us in an early grave. The masochistic impulse to put ourselves through the wringer for entertainment has spread to RPGs, management games, cosmic…

Tagged with Bestest Bests, feature, Ark: Survival Evolved, Astroneer, Darkwood, DayZ, Don't Starve, Don't Starve Together, Frostpunk, Neo Scavenger, Project Zomboid, RimWorld, Rust, Starbound, State of Decay, Subnautica, Sunless Sea, Terraria, The Forest, The Long Dark, This War of Mine.

The thing I thought I wanted most from The Long Dark proved to be the thing I wanted least. For the many years I've been returning to this truly brilliant and most brutal of survival sims, I so wanted them to deliver on the Story Mode the title screen would always promise. To have a narrative motivation to persist against the odds and the elements…

Tagged with feature, Hinterland Studio, review, survival, The Long Dark.

As the Steam Charts slowly attempt to reassemble themselves after last week's complete collapse under the weight of Far Cry 5, think of this week's compilation as the moment the thought-destroyed terrifying monster is halfway through its grotesque reforming. Witness as its undulating viscera twists through recongealing flesh, a bleak but ghoulish moan emanating from deep within its darkest soul.

Tagged with feature, Steam Charts, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Far Cry 5, Grand Theft Auto V, PixArk, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, The Long Dark, Warhammer: Vermintide 2.

The blizzards of Siberia have gone on holiday to the United Kingdom this week. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, doesn’t do snow days. The pod squad have trekked hard through the whiteout (from their bedrooms to their computers) to gather on their respective microphones. To what end? Well, to talk about the weather. Blizzards, thunderclouds, sandstorms and, er, night-time? In videogames, it…

Tagged with feature, Podcast, The RPS Electronic Wireless show, All Walls Must Fall, Assassin's Creed Origins, Northgard, Sailaway, Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, The Long Dark, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.