Stupidly I've picked some vast open worlders that take forever, but hey. This time I'm not going to talk about those, I'm going to talk about The Long Dark.
It's had to say whether I have completed The Long Dark, for two reasons. Reason one is that though I have completed Chapter 3, I haven't totally completed the game because it's not finished (there will be 5 chapters, but 4 and 5 aren't done yet). Reason two is that the story mode is only one part of the game, with survival mode providing many more hours of tense wilderness adventure.
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| Finished Chapter 3! |
The premise of both story and survival mode is that a weird geomagnetic event happens and your plane falls out of the sky, landing in the Canadian Great White North. In story mode you have a particular adventure to go on, but in survival you're just basically trying to survive for as long as you can. (Though there are also challenges you can do - I am nowhere near good enough a survivor to manage those.)
I have completed the first two chapters twice, since by the time Chapter 3 came out Hinterland had redone the first two, so it made sense to do the whole thing again. It's wasn't exactly a hardship! The game is immense, suspenseful, terrifying in places. Beautiful artwork and music. You can almost feel your toes freezing up as you trudge through the snowy woods and across the frozen lakes, through whiteouts and eerie nights filled with those magical 'northern lights'. It's so well written - I really, really want to find out what happens to Will and Astrid.
Surviving the weather is one thing (getting warm clothes, food, water, and shelter), surviving the wildlife is another thing entirely. The animals' aggressive behaviour is explained by the weird geomagnetic phenomenon (apparently it has made the wolves angry). Chapter 3 introduced some HORRIBLE timber wolves that gave me a lot of trouble. The most annoying bit for me, however, was a set piece thing with a bear, which seemed to be incongruously stuck into the game as a kind of boss fight.
Despite nominally 'completing' the game (in that I completed Chapter 3), I have only managed to get 28% of the original PS trophies and 77% of the Chapter 3 trophies. If you're interested, the rarest trophy I've managed to get (so far) is this one:
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| I found a bunch of supply caches, woot! |
This is definitely a game I'm going to keep going back to. Survival is compelling, though you spend most of your time looting, hoping for those cardboard matches, or that elusive crowbar. I also like watching/listening to people playing the game on YouTube, particularly Accurize2, Meatwagon22 and Paul Soares Jr. Despite the tension of surviving, most of the game is a slow and relaxing trudge around, looting everything within sight - as such it's a restful thing to listen to whilst working from home!
If you haven't played this, try it! It's only £8.99 on the PlayStation store at the moment. An absolute bargain. :-)
So that's game number 3 out of 10 completed!
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