The Long Dark Critic Reviews

An essential survival game keeps the perfect balance between playability and realism, which drags you in and won’t let you out. The game’s cold atmosphere couldn’t ruin even a few little mistakes and a slightly weaker story.

The Quiet Apocalypse isn’t without problems, but Hinterland's commitment to adding new content, while refining the experience over the years, has positioned The Long Dark at the top of the survival genre’s pecking order. The Long Dark is a must-play for anyone who is even remotely intrigued by it.

Deep, brutal, and hauntingly atmospheric, The Long Dark is a survival game done right.

The Long Dark‘s long-in-the-making story mode was worth the wait. And with an eventual total of five episodes each looking to last between seven and ten hours, it looks like it may well prove a truly epic survival experience.

The Long Dark is imperfect, but it could be one of the best experiences in the survival genre. For the impatient, single-player gamer, The Long Dark holds little promise. However, if you relish the challenge of isolation and the feeling that you’re fighting against an environment that isn’t trying to kill you, but rather just doesn’t care about you, then you must try The Long Dark.

The Long Dark is a survival game, one of many some will say, but with its interesting story and a touch of mystery, we’ve got a very good game before us.

Probably one of the best survival simulators out there. But please ignore the single-player campaign — it’s too shoddy and even less exciting than those simple challenge missions.

The art and the well-thought-through presentation make The Long Dark an excellent survival genre. The cold, the hunger and the danger of the Canadian countryside leave a big impression. It is too bad the story is not as well made.

While the story mode leaves something to be desired, the survival mechanics of The Long Dark's sandbox make it worthwhile. We have three more episodes of Will's journey to weave a wider story throughout the alternately unforgiving and inviting Canadian terrain. In the meantime, I'll be sitting back with my coffee mug, reflecting on my own small stories within The Long Dark.

With its stellar survival mechanics, The Long Dark makes for a brutal experience that requires patience and micromanaging to fully appreciate. However, it’s brought down by some bugs and a story mode that leaves much to be desired. It’s nonetheless a satisfying test of survival in a gorgeous setting – as long as you can brave the frigid cold.

The Long Dark: Wintermute is a great survival, but the campaign does not convince.

Survival experience at its best – that is an episodic adventure, The Long Dark. It could even be a great adventure in RPG style if it improves the storytelling and technology in upcoming episodes or updates.

A beautiful simulation of wilderness survival.

The Long Dark is a masterful survival game that manages to craft a rich and emotional experience but lacks in providing objectives and narrative hooks to keep the game interesting and meaningful.

The Long Dark’s long-awaited story mode, ultimately fails to stand on its own. It rather serves as a tutorial for an extremely robust, utterly unforgiving and uncomfortably realistic extreme winter conditions survival simulator game, that transcends Unity’s limitations to deliver a unique experience aimed at a very narrow and specific audience. Future episodes may tweak the story mode into a cohesive entity that can stand on its own, but in its current state, the Long Dark is aimed exclusively at the hardcore survival enthusiast.

It's important to remember that The Long Dark is just waking up from early access. It's cold, hungry, and huddled somewhere under a rock face, but it's just gotten the fire started. Another three story episodes are still due, so there is time to turn things around for Will and Astrid. However, because the best parts of The Long Dark are already alive and well in survival mode, perhaps Wintermute's weak beginning is reason enough to stick to what's worked for the game all along, blemishes and all.

The result is something that feels like the game I wish The Walking Dead could have been – a free-form, free-roaming tale of brutal survival, but with a story to experience too. The two conflict as you play, knowing that the game has deliberately supplied you with what you need to follow its threads, but then also let you wander off into the wilderness at your own discretion. And it handles this well, letting you hunt and forage to scrape by when stepping off the path. With a better, more involving path, this could have been really something. As it is, it’s the glorious The Long Dark with a reason for surviving, and that definitely proves enough.