The Long Dark

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 best games, 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.

No. Let's not be ridiculous. But there are so many examples of bad survival games that it’s important to remember the good ones. So that’s what we are doing on the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We're breaking stones over the heads of rubbish survival games, but cooking, salting and eating the delicious ones. Adam wraps himself up in The Long Dark but…

Tagged with charlie cleveland, feature, Podcast, The RPS Electronic Wireless show, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Celeste, Dead State, Dying Light, Frostpunk, I Am Alive, Project Zomboid, Rain World, Slay the Spire, Subnautica, The Forest, The Long Dark, The Red Strings Club, The Solus Project, UnReal World.

Toss another podcast episode upon the fire, stranger. The cold is closing in but the Electronic Wireless Show will keep us warm. Pip, Alice and Adam gather round the podfire this week to talk about the lies (Adam tells) at Gamescom, the icy reception to The Long Dark's story mode, the cleansing rain of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, and the deadly climates of No Man's Sky. We…

Tagged with feature, Gamescom, Gamescom 2017, Podcast, The RPS Electronic Wireless show, Deadly Premonition, No Man's Sky, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, The Long Dark.

The coloured lights flaring across the night sky in the frozen Canadian wilderness were one of the most anticipated elements of Hinterland's survival game, The Long Dark [official site]. Since the Kickstarter we've known they would do more than brighten the night, playing a key part in the game's episodic story mode, but now they're in the game I find myself braving the uptick in…

Tagged with Art, feature, Hinterland Studio, interview, Raphael van Lierop, State of the Art, The Long Dark.

After a save game mishap I've tagged in for the WIT of The Long Dark's [official site] second story mode episode. Don't worry – the save game thing was a review build issue, not a thing for regular game owners to fret over! But it's meant I've needed to try to marshal my frustrations and pleasures with the game into something approaching coherence. Stay with…

Tagged with feature, Hinterland Studio, review, The Long Dark: Wintermute, The Long Dark.