As a fan of the fantastic 2011 movie The Grey, the one writing this was intrigued by the snow-filled post-apocalyptic setting of survival game The Long Dark. There are no monsters to kill here and no soldiers to fight against – just mother nature in all its unrelenting brutality, with hunger, low temperatures, as well as simple wounds being almost as dangerous as a pack of wolves. Sadly, Hinterland Studio’s game has a few drawbacks that limit its overall appeal, is in a way incomplete and, most importantly, the Switch port isn’t exactly the best amongst the available options.
Whether playing the story-driven “Wintermute” or the standard Survival mode, The Long Dark drops the main character into the Canadian wilderness and asks them to endure. Hunger, thirst, fatigue and body temperature constantly tick downward as they scavenge abandoned buildings, forage for supplies, and attempt to stay alive for just one more day. Sadly, boredom will make most turn this off long before hypothermia does the deed.
The experience feels less like a tense fight for survival and more like a slow, joyless exercise in meter management. You break some pallets down to create fuel for your fire; now you are hungry and must hunt; now you are cold again and must return to the fire; now you are sleepy – you sleep, and, guess what? You are hungry again. Oh, sure, that’s how pretty much every survival title plays, but in practise the whole thing is a dull, tedious loop. And it’s slow. Not just in how your character moves, but in how everything unfolds.
The Long Dark makes two mistakes regarding immersion. The first? Nearly every meaningful interaction is handled through not-that-user-friendly menus. Building fires and crafting essentials lacks any tactile or visceral satisfaction. Instead of feeling like a battle against nature, it feels like an accounting exercise where every action pushes you closer to death anyway. No, it’s not that the game is hard, it’s just that the process kind of feels futile rather than challenging. Exhausting and not in a rewarding way.
The second reason why this game struggles with immersion? It’s terrible with showing people the ropes. You need to melt snow in order to create water. How is that done? Do you scoop snow and throw it into your empty container? No, you are supposed to light a fire where containers can be placed. Okay, which is the button for gathering snow? Oh, it’s automatically in the container…but it needs to be activated somehow – and then placed in a bottle!? Almost every action besides walking and picking up items is unintuitive, nothing is ever explained, and since mistakes aren’t exactly forgivable, irritation is a certainty during the first hours.
The story mode feels like a missed opportunity. Instead of serving as a proper introduction to how this works, it delivers a muddled narrative, awkward pacing, and frustrating design choices. Key mechanics are poorly explained, NPC interactions feel disconnected from the core survival experience, and early sections can be confusing to the point of outright failure. Rather than easing players into the adventure, this mode often pushes them away. Would-be survivalists are advised to go straight to the Survival mode.
Concerning the port at hand, it doesn’t run that well on Switch. No crashes, freezes (pun unintended) or anything like that – it’s just that the frame rate is a bit low…and without real reason for that to happen. It doesn’t help that The Long Dark was never that good in terms of looks. Ugly? No. It has a certain charm and atmosphere, but it’s underwhelming, and doesn’t do much with its minimalist art style. The cursor is also a tiny dot, and since there’s no aim assist to pop it into hotspots, it increases aggravation when doing simple things like picking twigs or simply searching around.
As a final note, The Long Dark is a project that, after more than 10 years in development, is still not a complete product, and judging from the interactions between players and the team behind it, there will never be a completion. There’s nothing missing in terms of mechanics and such. The game is complete if you only care about Survival mode. This is only about the Story. As an indie afficionado this critic is okay with giving simple folk the time to do what needs to be done…but 10 years and counting is a bit too much, especially as the developer has the audacity to create freaking DLC before actually finishing this. Do what you will with this information.
