Locate a shelter and time remains your enemy, your body refusing to give something for nothing. There's no way to achieve equilibrium, no health-replenishing or biometrics-resetting safe harbors. If you find wood, matches and a sheaf of newspapers, you can build a fire.ĭon't expect to find such things easily, and certainly not without a lot of dying and retrying. If you find water-purification tablets, you can render polluted water potable. If you find better clothes, you stay a little warmer. It's also keeping tabs on environmental metrics like ambient air temperature (inside or out) relative to variables like wind and weather, the time of day, and whether you're in shadow or sunlight. The game wraps a biometric data cube around that nihilistic narrative, monitoring, in real-time, things like thirst, hunger, body temperature, fatigue, calories consumed, injuries (sprains, broken bones) and illness. And winter isn't coming, it's a bone-cracking fact. But instead of the collapse happening while you're traipsing through a balmy, subtropical clime replete with fruit trees, fishable waters and swinging hammocks, you're somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. As in Eric Kripke's Revolution, The Long Dark imagines a world in which a 'geomagnetic event' turns out the lights forever, ending humanity's reign and repositioning nature for a comeback tour.

The long dark sandbox