The Arctic environment is wonderfully rendered: beautiful, but deadly. I collapsed and froze to death halfway up them. Footsteps slowing, vision blurring, I was almost dead but confident I’d make it inside by the time I reached the top… only to see that the structure was a fire lookout, at the top of a long set of stairs. It was too windy to light a fire and I started freezing to death by the time I found the path. Then the wind picked up and the temperature plummeted, and I couldn’t find my way up the hill. My first death came as I trudged across a snowy valley, low on food, but confident I could reach the structure I’d seen on top of a hill by nightfall. One wrong move and you’re gone, your save file erased. With every passing day, as you slowly add to your collection of tinned food and meagre weapons, you feel more confident.

The landscape (there are currently two maps: a shoreline and a forested lakeside area, connected with each other) is scattered with cabins, logging camps, forestry lookouts and fishing huts, and you can ransack these for supplies. There are also wolves about, excessively keen on ripping your throat out. The game gives you four meters to keep an eye on: hunger, thirst, cold and fatigue. You’re a bush pilot who has was flying when the pulse went off, and survived the plane crash only to find yourself stranded in the Canadian wilderness: cold, hungry, and completely cut off from whatever’s going on in the outside world.

An electromagnetic pulse of some kind has caused all of the world’s electronics to fizzle out forever.

The Long Dark is a post-apocalyptic scarcity survival game. Early access simply provides two sandbox maps, rather than the fuller story mode. The Long Dark, fortunately, is completely bug free. I’m always wary of early access games it seems like a cheap and lazy shortcut for developers, especially when some of them charge what seems like a full price for an incomplete game. I heard about this yonks ago, when somebody linked me to the Kickstarter, but it wasn’t until Christmas that I realised an early access version had been released.

The long dark save file