I Love The Long Dark

I love The Long Dark, and I want to talk about why.

To do that, I need to first talk about the third grade. I went to a weird little private school, sent there when my strange and (to the educators of the early 1980s) incomprehensible behaviors proved too much for public schools to handle. In retrospect I was just suffering from the inability to focus on things that bored me that characterizes ADHD.

There were a lot of interesting activities. We learned some rudimentary Spanish. We raised caterpillars until they became butterflies, and released them into the field behind the church where the school was located. And sometimes the teacher would just read to us, one chapter at a time, from some childhood classic.

The one that changed my entire life, that has continued to inform my creativity and inspiration, was The Boxcar Children.

I don’t know why, honestly. I’ve reread it recently and I can’t see what about the writing or the story struck me so profoundly. But whatever it was, it gave me a specific hunger:

I wanted to create a safe and comfortable place for myself in a wilderness.

(An aside: if you’ve played Battletech, you’ve gotten to experience my obsession first-hand; there’s a reason the bulk of the Argo restoration focuses on the three habitation pods, and filling them with comfortable facilities.)

This turns out to be expansive: ‘wilderness’ can mean almost anything. I loved the feeling of being indoors in one of the catastrophic lake-effect snowstorms of northern Ohio, the house warm, often with a fire in the fireplace, if my dad felt like going out to the woodpile. I could sit comfortably in the living room in front of our wood-enclosed television, two walls almost completely dominated by windows with small panes, outside of which snow piled against the house. I loved being in the car while it rained, seeing the deluge outside while safe and dry inside.

I remember as a child turning on a fan in the winter, and then getting down on the floor with my blankets and a pillow to sleep in front of the fan. I’d huddle underneath the blankets and imagine that I was a lost explorer who had been caught in a snowstorm and forced to dig a shelter in a nearby snowbank and make do in the howling wind.

The Boxcar Children became the archetypal version of this story, for me. I had seen Swiss Family Robinson and while I loved it, it never embedded itself in my subconscious the way Boxcar did. Probably it was the scale, which seemed extravagant compared to the achievable and modest accomplishments in Boxcar. And, of course, as the title makes clear, the Boxcar Children are children, where the Robinsons were a whole family. Dad Robinson was an absurdly competent adult, recreating civilization out of nothing in no time at all. I preferred to imagine my wilderness shelter as something found and repurposed for my needs, furnished with what was already at hand: comfort extracted from the debris of civilization.

This is the desire that undergirds my tastes, my creative output, and in a sense my worldview. I want to make cozy spaces in unlikely places. For a while, I loved when a game would give me ownership of something — a house to decorate, a castle to restore. In Final Fantasy 7, you could buy a house in the town of Costa del Sol. This did nothing for you, was very expensive, and once bought you’d likely never return there. But when you walked in the door, Cloud would stop, hands on hips, and declare: “This is my house.” And I never really got tired of that, and would go in and out of the door to hear it again and again. There are dozens of other examples, game experiences that viewed through the lens of the Boxcar Children spring into focus as yet another pursuit of that fundamental desire, to make safety in a wilderness.

Gradually, though, I came to realize that it wasn’t just base-building that made my stomach flutter in anticipation. I never enjoyed building castles with wooden blocks. I never enjoyed building Lego houses with little windows. And over time I stopped enjoying building bases in games. I think Assassin’s Creed 2, with its restoration of Monteriggioni, was the point at which I realized how unsatisfying it had become.

It was restored, but to what purpose?

Purpose is what I kept circling back to. Why was I base-building? Why was I restoring a villa, or decorating a house? Base-building became a box to be checked in game development, and ever more elaborate systems of building up your base became standard features. But what was the point of doing it?

Enter Minecraft. My first few forays into Minecraft were typical, I think: it got dark, and then I died. But shortly thereafter I discovered that I could dig a tunnel and hide inside it, in the dark. I’d poke a hole in one wall so I could see the sun come up, and just idle there through the night. Eventually, torches; eventually I learned to build a house around myself, as well. But initially it was ‘dig hole, hide in hole, try to make hole into home’.

Make the hole into a home. Hobbit-style, I suppose. It was everything I ever wanted. You built walls for a purpose: to keep the zombies and skeletons out. You built roofs to keep spiders out, and to give the illusion of warmth and comfort when it rained. You moved all your crafting stations and storage inside, so you could access it at night while you were secure in your fortifications. You lit the area, you dug a moat, you built windows to see outside in relative safety. You decorated inside to create a pleasant, safe, usable space. Ergonomics were wedded to aesthetics; you built a basement and made it look like a basement. You built a castle and you gave it a throne room where you’d build a throne as well as the storage chests that held all your supplies.

Minecraft was revelatory. It also sucked.

Once you built a box of wood or dirt or stone, once you put a door into a 2x1 opening in one wall, once you put a torch up to light the place, you were done. Everything else was just elaborations of that first survival impulse. The actual danger in Minecraft lasts about two in-game days, or about 30 to 40 minutes. After that, you’re fine. You might hear a zombie outside, and he might even come try to break down your door, but you’d never hit that initial high of racing against time to get tools and build shelter before nightfall.

But that initial high was so good. It was precisely what I wanted. It’s what my half-remembered dreams of the Boxcar Children were made of. I’d find a cave in Minecraft and look around its strange volumes and think, ‘that could be the kitchen, and that could be the bedroom, and that could be storage’ as though, in Minecraft, there were any need whatsoever for a kitchen or a bedroom. Every space suggested another boxcar, mine to decorate and live in, comfortable and cozy.

When I moved on, I moved on to Ark and Conan Exiles. My partners and I built walls and houses and castles and automation and fortifications and the bases grew more elaborate as the simulation grew more detailed. Some of the castles we built were truly phenomenal. We had an underwater dinosaur pen with lights and turret defenses and automatic doors. We had a black glass temple rising from a green field before snow-capped mountains. We built Jurassic Park. We built Camelot.

In every game there came a moment where we looked around at what we’d built and realized: the survival was over. Now it was just aesthetics. In a way, it was just wanking. Conan had ‘the purge’, a small raiding army that would come to sack your base, and it was easily handled — so easily, in fact, that I learned how to mod Conan just to make it harder and more likely to breach our defenses.

When I first played The Long Dark, I didn’t really get it. I don’t know if my experience is even close to universal, but my first trip onto Great Bear Island ended with me freezing to death while I tried to understand the controls. Other trips ended in being eaten by wolves, falling off high places, and getting completely lost and giving up.

When I first began playing, there was no custom difficulty mode. You couldn’t tweak your game settings to match your desired experience. I actually put the game down for a long time, because I was afraid of the wolves but bored by the lowest difficulty, where the wolves would no longer attack you. The addition of custom games brought me back for quite a long time.

In a custom game I could turn off the wolves’ aggression. But there was another set of configuration options that, once I began to play with them, changed my entire experience of the game.

You could make it colder.

You could make less loot spawn. You could make resources rarer. You could make all your various needs drain faster, so that you’d get tired more quickly, hungry more quickly, thirsty more quickly. You could change the looting so that most containers were empty, and every little scrap of clothing and banged-up can of food was precious and celebrated.

You could be a small child sleeping on the floor in front of a fan under her blankets in the dead of winter.

It would be another two years, more or less, before I’d finally overcome that last hurdle of wolf-fear, and start playing the game ‘for real’, on the harder difficulty settings with the aggressive animals. This was, like all the rest of the game, a process of learning how all the parts fitted together, and with some help from skilled players on Youtube and Twitch, I began to understand.

(I should note that I put ‘for real’ in quotes because every game of TLD is ‘for real’ in the sense that the difficulty you find most fun is the ‘real’ difficulty for you. I think of it in terms of ‘real’ only because I was deliberately ignoring a major part of the game’s mechanics, the wildlife. But playing without wolves was what kept me playing long enough to learn how to overcome wolves, so not only was it a valid playstyle, it was, in my case, a necessary playstyle.)

The game has four difficulty settings, aside from Custom, where you can tweak it how you like. In Pilgrim, all the survival elements of the game are easier. You can find plentiful supplies in the ruins of civilization, and those supplies will last a very long time. You won’t suffer from food poisoning or frostbite or cabin fever or animal attacks. In Voyageur, the game adds aggressive animals; wolves will now stalk you and bears will run you down and ruin your day. The survival elements are still just about as easy as Pilgrim, though, so it’s a nice step up where you can begin to practice against the wolves.

Up one more step and you’re on Stalker, which is the ‘hard mode’ of The Long Dark. On Stalker, you’ll be colder and hungrier. There are far more aggressive animals, roaming and spotting you from what seems like the whole width of a map. You’ll find and use all the weapons the game offers, because you’ll need them. In Stalker, you have all the tools you need, and you’ll need all those tools to survive. In Stalker, you learn how to take the game’s threats seriously.

I no longer play on Stalker. I play on Interloper.

Interloper was, I think, intended to be unfair. I say this not because of how much colder it is, how much more quickly you become hungry and thirsty and tired, how relentlessly the animals will stalk you if you have even the slightest whiff of meat or blood about you, how quickly a blizzard can spring up and trap you in a cave or, worse, out on a frozen lake with no landmarks to guide you to shelter.

In an Interloper game, you don’t go outside without careful preparation. What will you eat? Do you have enough water? How damaged is your clothing, and should you repair it for the increased warmth? How many matches do you have? How many rose hip and reishi teas do you currently have made, for medicine or just simple warmth? What’s your route going to be, and do you know if there will be wolves along it? What will you do if a blizzard comes up; do you have a place in mind to shelter if it catches you mid-trek? What will you do if you’re trapped wherever you’re header, perhaps for as long as a whole game day?

And listen, all of that’s nasty, but not unfair, really. It’s just ‘Stalker but more so’, and Stalker actually has more wolves and bears than Interloper, presumably on the theory that you have a lot of bullets and you’ll want targets. The survival elements of Interloper will kill you quickly and without warning. But it won’t kill you unfairly.

No, Interloper is unfair because there are two specific and necessary tools that simply do not exist anywhere in the world: the knife and the hatchet.

You need a knife to effectively skin and harvest carcasses. You need a knife to craft a bow and arrows. You need a hatchet to chop wood for fires. In a lot of ways, your game can’t really even get underway without these basic tools, and on Stalker and below, once you find a source of fire, your highest priority is finding a knife and a hatchet.

On Interloper, there are none to be found. They just don’t exist. (What’s more, there are no guns on Interloper, so you can’t hunt or defend yourself, either.)

Your Interloper run begins with you dying. Interloper spawns you in some of the harder and more desolate parts of the game world. It can spawn you at night; it can spawn you in a blizzard. You will never spawn indoors on Interloper. You will never start with the ability to make fire. You’ll have a few ragged clothes, but you’ll be going into hypothermia within a few game hours unless you find a way to get warm. You have no weapons; any wolf you meet will simply murder you. And you cannot find the tools necessary to overcome most of these challenges.

You have to make them.

First, you need to find a hacksaw. There are a handful in the world in Interloper; I think I’ve found four total in one run. It’s a big world and will take some time to search. Get inside. Find matches. Find clothing. Get a fire going. Boil some water. Loot to find food in cans, and eat what you find. You’re still dying but you’re dying more slowly.

You find a deer carcass that’s been torn apart by wolves; you can harvest it for meat, but you need something sharp to cut the frozen flesh. You make a fire next to the deer to keep warm (you’ll freeze to death trying to harvest it, if you don’t; I lost a very, very promising run to exactly this, because I wasn’t paying attention.) The fire thaws the deer, and you can harvest with your hands. Once you have meat, the wolves scent it and will come for you. You’ll need torches, and you’ll need to understand the mechanics of wolves and fire, and the mechanics of wind and fire.

You find a hacksaw, and cut some saplings to dry for a bow and arrows. A hacksaw lets you harvest frozen meat from the carcasses you find. Maybe you figure out how to drive deer towards wolves so that the wolves will do the hunting for you. Or you get good at throwing rocks to stun rabbits so you can kill them for their pelts and meat. You can’t cut firewood so you pick up every stick you find, and you’re carrying around six or seven kilos of sticks with you to start and feed fires. You pick every cat-tail you find, because cat-tail stalks are durable and lightweight food, but they’re finite; they never grow back, so you have to keep moving, or you’ll strip an area bare of resources and you’ll starve or freeze.

You need a hammer, which is about as rare as the hacksaw. You probably have one by now from when you were hunting for the saw, but you might still need to scour more houses and barns and gas stations, if not. You take your hammer to a forge; there are really only three of those that are accessible to you right now, and they’re all at the far ends of the world, in challenging regions. At the forge, you’ll use coal to make a fire hot enough to melt the scrap metal you’ve found and finally, finally, you can make an improvised knife and an improvised hatchet.

These are not sturdy tools, and you’ll be spending a lot of time maintaining them. On the other hand, you can now start the game in earnest.

Most Interloper runs end long, long before you make those tools. Hell, most Interloper runs end on the first day; there’s an achievement for surviving one day on Interloper.

And don’t think that having tools lessens the challenge at all. Tools just give you the ability to plan further ahead, to worry about surviving the next day instead of just the current day. To get a stock of food and wood, to start crafting animal-hide clothing. But the survival gameplay is still there, still applying a constant pressure to your actions. Do you have enough food? What about water? What about wood? Are you running out of matches? (They’re finite, after all, and not exactly plentiful; hope you’ve found a magnifying lens.) It’s still, even in your warm animal furs, cold enough to kill you with even a light breeze, and blizzards are still deadly.

Interloper waits for you to fuck up even once, and then it kills you. I had just passed 50 days on a run when I harvested a moose I’d killed without noticing that I was just a little bit too cold, and my warmth was decreasing. My screen went dark abruptly, and my run ended with ‘You have faded into the long dark.’

Oh, you’re going to die. Best to think of what you’re doing as ‘runs’, because you’re going to make a lot of them. Some will be lucky and you’ll get your feet under you; others will be unlucky and you won’t even make it to shelter on the first day. And no matter what kind of luck you have, you will die, eventually. You see, there’s no victory condition for The Long Dark. You can’t win. No rescue is coming. This is it, this daily round of activities to prolong your survival just a bit further.

What we’re talking about here is a kind of first-day-of-Minecraft experience that never ends.

If you’ve read up to this point, you may imagine that this is something like rapture for me. This is everything I want. This is making a cozy place livable, stocking wood by the iron stove, laying in supplies of medicine and cloth and tools and water, hunting for pelts and guts and meat for crafting and cooking.

I go out further and further, looting the remnants of civilization — cars, cabins, rough shelters — and bringing my spoils back home. I set up satellite bases, each a whole new and exciting project, each necessary to give me a place to hide from the storms and the animals, another warm and cozy island in an ocean of frost and night. Each regional base needs to be stocked with food and water and wood and tools. Each region needs to be thoroughly scoured; do I have replacements if my hacksaw breaks? If I lose my magnifying glass? Have I found all the matches, each one an invaluable source of fire at night or in storms, should I be freezing to death in either of those common scenarios?

You can’t build your base in The Long Dark, but I never wanted to build, anyway. I wanted a boxcar to live in, and The Long Dark has boxcars everywhere.

So how does The Long Dark accomplish this magic trick, of creating and sustaining a constant survival pressure, of keeping you balanced perpetually between comfort and ruin? There’s two answers to that, and I’ll give the short one first:

It doesn’t. Sooner or later you’ll either die or you’ll reach a stable equilibrium of resource gathering and consumption, and you’ll ‘win’ in the sense that there’s nothing left to do. To its credit, the game pushes that moment of equilibrium out further than any game I’ve ever played. I know there are people who have survived a thousand days; I’m still struggling to reach a hundred, and a hundred is already a lot of time in game. I’m north of 800 hours played in The Long Dark so far, and I still think of myself as an Interloper novice. That’s a lot of play time to not yet reach equilibrium. So functionally it’s balanced for all likely players, with the handful of people over 500 days marking an extreme of skill that probably doesn’t apply to you, and certainly doesn’t to me.

For the long answer, we’ll assume the game is perpetually balanced, because for our purposes it may as well be, and we’ll look at what it’s doing to make that happen.

There are five basic killers in The Long Dark: cold, fatigue, starvation, thirst, and injury. We’ll set aside injury for now, because it’s not mechanically similar to the others.

Cold will kill you the fastest. If you’re cold, you’re draining a little thermometer-indicator, and when it drains fully it will turn red and Astrid, the protagonist, will say something like ‘I’ll die if I don’t warm up,’ her teeth chattering and her voice hoarse and trembling. Once it empties out, you’re losing Condition, which is basically hit points. Cold will drain your Condition fast once it starts to inflict damage on you.

Thirst is the runner-up in the murder contest, and it will also do tremendous damage to you if you let it drain fully. Thankfully, as long as you can make fire, you can make water to drink, so thirst is rarely a problem, other than providing an ongoing need for fire; we’ll get there shortly, though.

Hunger is more likely than thirst to kill you. It’s slower but food is harder to come by than water. You can eat from scavenged supplies, but you might get food poisoning, depending on how old the supplies are. You can eat meat, but you need to cook it or you’ll get sick. You can get calories from gathered food, but aside from cat-tails it’s all meager, and you’ll still need fire to make the teas that let you live off birch bark and rose hips. (The latest DLC added acorns, which are edible when gathered, and are presumably comparable to cat-tails. They’re only found in the new zones, though, and I’m not settled enough in my Interloper run to go look for myself just yet.)

Fatigue is rarely fatal, because you can almost always find a place to nap, and it does very little damage over time. It’s therefore the meter I’m most likely to allow to drain, continuing to work at tasks even after I start to take damage from pulling an all-nighter. When you’re badly fatigued, you can’t move quickly and your carrying capacity drops, though, so becoming fatigued out in the wilderness, and thus unable to get to shelter, can be lethal indirectly.

How do you address these needs, and keep them from killing you?

Fatigue is mostly a non-issue, except early on when you haven’t yet found a bedroll. There are regions with few beds to sleep in, potentially only including a few conifer branches laid out in a rough mattress in a cave. In the first few days, fatigue is always going to be red, as you struggle to find the other resources you need despite your exhaustion. The critical pressure fatigue applies, then, is the need to find a bed, and the need to use a bed in a sheltered place. You can’t just sleep in a snowbank. You’ll die of cold. You need shelter from the wind and the ambient cold, and that usually means indoors or a cave. So fatigue is the meter that drives you back to some kind of camp or base or hideout. When you address your fatigue, you’re bringing in cold, thirst, and hunger as your possible killers.

Cold is the most pressing issue. You can fight cold in three ways: through shelter, clothing and fire.

Shelter is a house, or a cave, or a shack, or any other place that’s considered ‘indoors’. Some of them, particularly the ones that are very exposed, like the Mountaineer’s Hut in Timberwolf Mountain, will not be warm enough to keep you alive on their own at the start of the game. Most caves won’t be warm enough without fire or clothing to supplement them. Insulated structures like trailers and cabins are generally enough to keep you above freezing, though. Early on, you end up hiding out in these places at night. Generally, assuming you have access to shelter, you can handle this part of the cold problem, though it may need supplementing.

Clothing is your primary line of defense against cold. As you find more clothing, warmer clothing, and more wind-resistant clothing, you’ll put on more and more layers, becoming less and less mobile. It’s a tradeoff worth making, though, for the ability it gives you, one that you take for granted on lower difficulties: the ability to go outside and do stuff. Without enough clothing, you can’t spend more than a game hour or so, at best, outside of shelter or away from a fire. Clothing is how you extend your time outdoors to be many hours instead of just one. On Interloper, clothing is rare and generally in poor condition, needing repairs to even be marginally useful. And no matter what you do, until you’re able to make animal-hide clothing, it will never be enough. You can’t dress warmly enough to solve the cold problem. You will need shelter and fire, and a blizzard will still kill you in short order.

Also, clothing degrades over time, so it has to be constantly repaired to keep it effective and keep it from breaking. For animal-hide clothing, you’ll use animal-harvested resources, which are renewable. But for scavenged clothing, you have to use cloth to repair it, and cloth has to be harvested from other clothes, from towels and curtains in houses, from tarps and canvases. It’s finite. You will deplete the cloth in your local region, and eventually the world (though that will take a very long time). Boots are a luxury that you soon replace with deer-hide, because boots require cured leather to repair, which is even more scare than cloth. And there are several necessary items of clothing — socks, thermal underwear, sweaters — which are simply not available as animal-hide options. You’ll need to keep those items in particular repaired for the entirety of your run, consuming cloth resources as you go.

Fire is a universal tool that applies to almost every survival aspect of the game. With a hot enough fire, you can get warm, even if you strip naked in the snow. A cave that just isn’t quite warm enough to keep you above freezing will become toasty and comfy with a fire burning inside it. Fire, however, requires a few things to be usable: you need fuel, and you need a source of ignition, and you need kindling. And making fires is non-trivial. You’ll fail a lot early on, and if you’re unlucky you may run out of matches or other sources of ignition. And once you have a fire, you have to feed it to keep it going. The more fuel you add, the hotter the fire gets and the longer it lasts. And fuel, unlike almost every other resource in the game, is sustainable; more sticks and branches and tree limbs fall after every blizzard, so you can go back out and gather more. But you do have to go out to gather it, and that means leaving your fire and shelter, and relying solely on your clothes. You can carry fire with you as a torch, but any strong wind will put it out, and torches don’t give much warmth. Fire is your most precious resource, and starting and maintaining a fire is the first task you absolutely must accomplish to survive in Interloper.

You’ll never beat cold, not really. Cold is always present throughout the game, and in Interloper the world becomes gradually colder over time, until it levels off at day 50, having become (I think) 25 degrees colder overall. Which is a lot. At that point, without animal hide clothing and layers, you’ll be risking hypothermia every time you go outside to do anything. Cold can’t be defeated, only recovered from, over and over.

Cold is the fundamental survival pressure.

Thirst is a simple problem with a simple solution, though there are a couple of complications. First, you cannot eat snow off the ground. You’d die of hypothermia. You have to melt it to make it water, and boil it to make it safe. This means fire, and that’s the main reason you cannot survive in perpetuity without fire. If you run out of ways to make a fire, you might still be able to survive the cold, but you will eventually run out of water and you’ll die of thirst. The other complication is that water is really heavy, which means that carrying around a lot of it impacts your fatigue levels, which means you’ll need to find shelter and rest more often. You can just carry only the water you need for your current expedition, but that means you’ll need to be prepared to light a fire when you arrive at your destination, because you’ll need to make more water.

When I talk about ‘stocking up’ a regional base, I’m mostly talking about water. I make a fire and boil 10 or more liters of water, just to leave there in the base as a supply cache. If I make enough of it, it saves me matches overall, and solves the thirst problem for a while.

Hunger is probably the most complicated issue, with the most ways to have something go wrong in your resource management. The basics go like this: on a day where Astrid goes out and hikes around or hunts or carries loot from place to place, she burns about 3500 to 4000 calories. On a day indoors spent crafting and repairing clothing, she burns 2500 to 3000 calories. Cat-tail stalks, the most reliable and easiest source of food, and the one you tend to use for the first week or so, give 150 calories per stalk.

You’ll be stripping the lakeshores and river banks bare of life, like a swarm of locusts, trying to survive on cat-tails alone. The supply of cat-tails is what keeps you moving, leaving shelter to risk cold and fatigue, rather than just holing up in a safe home base. You simply don’t have enough food to stay in one place for long.

You can scavenge food, at least for a while; eventually, all the food left in the remnants of civilization will decay until it’s inedible. It’s also not very filling, in the grand scale of things; in Interloper, the most calorie-rich scavenged food you can find is maple syrup, which has 850 calories in a bottle. I don’t think I’ve ever found more than four or five bottles total of the stuff.

Also, food that’s been decaying and has lost condition carries a risk of food poisoning. You might eat a dozen moldy candy bars with no trouble, and then that unlucky 13th will leave you sick, draining Condition, trying to clear it up with antibiotics and bed rest. Food poisoning ruins your whole night.

Eventually, the cat-tails run out, and so does the scavenged food — and honestly, it’s better to consider scavenged food as a bonus treat, and cat-tails as emergency rations, and move directly to hunting.

You can hunt rabbits with thrown rocks. Their meat can be cooked and eaten but it’s not particularly high-calorie, and you’ll run out of rabbits before you’re full. Still, early on, this is a renewable source of food; rabbits respawn relatively quickly, for rabbit reasons.

You need a bow to hunt deer, and arrows; you can also, with some practice, learn to get wolves to kill deer for you. Deer meat is reasonably high-calorie food, and generally a staple when nothing else is available; deer are plentiful and once you get the knack of it, they’re easy to kill with an arrow. If you hit one, it will start bleeding, as well; this will eventually kill it even if you don’t get another shot off.

Moose is the best food you can get, because a moose will have 40+ kilos of meat, and it’s calorie dense for its weight. But moose are scary and hard to kill, aggressive and territorial. And they don’t bleed when injured; you can’t shoot a moose and wait for it to bleed out. You have to keep shooting it over and over till it dies, while it’s charging angrily at you.

Bears are like moose in the sense that they’re extremely dangerous but have a lot of meat; they’ll also ruin your gear and potentially kill you if they maul you. But bears, and wolves (which are relatively easy to kill but far too small to really be worth it) have an added twist: carnivore meat carries a risk of intestinal parasites. Unlike food poisoning, which you treat over 10 hours of rest, parasites take 20 days to clear up, and require treatment every single day. On the other hand, if you’re going to starve otherwise, how much risk are you willing to take? It’s only a 1 percent chance at first, after all.

You can fish, as well, but fishing requires a lot of time spent keeping a fire going in an ice hut, and fish is low calorie density for its weight, as well as smelling awful and thus attracting predators from everywhere when you pick it up. A last resort, really.

Generally food has to be cooked, which means making a fire. As well, hunted food has to be harvested from carcasses, a long process that has to be done outdoors in the cold. That also means a fire, right next to the corpse, both to keep it from freezing and to keep you from freezing. Once it’s cooked, you need to transport it to somewhere accessible; the deer or moose probably didn’t die near your base. That means fatigue, as you overburden yourself to move all that meat around, stinking the whole time and drawing wolves out of the hills to investigate.

A buck will feed you for three or four days. A doe, maybe two. And unless you’re lucky with the weather and the location you brought the animal down, you’re going to spend a lot of those calories on the hunting and harvesting necessary to get them in the first place.

A moose will last you 15 days. You can see why the moose is the best possible hunting target.

Finally, injuries. You get these from wolves and bears attacking you, and from moose to a lesser extent — moose generally just break your ribs and leave you to die, which is very unpleasant but not necessarily a run-ender the way a bear mauling can be. You can also get injuries from falling and walking on excessively steep slopes, which leads to sprains.

Injuries are potentially lethal, especially if you don’t have the tools to stabilize them; early on I was caught by a wolf within sight of my base’s front door and I died trying to make it there, bleeding to death because I had no bandages left to stop the flow. Largely, though, what they are is resource-intensive. To clear a sprain, you can sleep overnight or you can bandage it. Bandages are crafted from cloth. Every bandage you craft is one cloth you no longer have to repair clothing. But if your wrists are sprained you can’t use weapons, and if your ankles are sprained you can’t run.

Blood loss from bites is treated with bandages, but also comes with a risk of infection. You’ll need antiseptic or a poultice made from tree lichen to handle that; both of those, like cloth, are finite and non-renewable.

Food poisoning and intestinal parasites both take antibiotics or tea made from reishi mushrooms to clear; these, too, are non-renewable. Broken ribs take painkillers or rose hip tea to clear, and it’s the same story: finite resources.

No injuries are all that serious (though you’ll want to stop the blood loss immediately or it will very quickly get serious) but all of them use up resources, and at the same time stop you from doing the basic tasks of survival. You can’t hunt with a sprained wrist. If you don’t have tree lichen available, you have to go find some. If you’re food poisoned, you’ll need to stop and make a fire to make reishi tea. That’s all time you’re not spending on gathering resources for the future. It’s time you can’t really afford.

And that, ultimately, is the real resource in The Long Dark: time. What’s really killing you is time. You’ll starve over time. You’ll die of thirst over time. You need to sleep a portion of the time. You can’t solve any of your survival problems without spending time, and as you spend time, all your survival meters slowly deplete (or quickly, if it’s a blizzard and you’re cold).

Your resources are decaying over time. Your clothes are degrading over time. The food you scavenge and the meat you’ve hunted is rotting over time.

Everything you do is killing you, because everything you do is costing you time.

So, all that’s pretty bleak. Here’s how the systems fit together.

I’m cold, so I need clothes, which means I need to scavenge. That means going outside, so I need fire to take a torch so I can get warm when I get where I’m going, and to drive off wolves along the way. To make fire I need fuel, which I can gather outside in the cold, or I can gather slowly indoors by breaking down furniture. I can get better clothes by hunting but to hunt I’ll need tools.

I’m thirsty, so I need water, which means I need fire. Fuel for a fire means getting cold; raising the thirst meter means, at least, draining the cold meter. And it takes a lot of time to boil the water, and during that time I’m getting fatigued and more thirsty and hungry.

I’m hungry, so I need food, which means I need to hunt, which means I need a weapon. To get a weapon I need tools, which means I need a hammer and a forge. That means scavenging, which means going outside in the cold, and spending even more calories, and getting even more thirsty. Hunting also gets me pelts, which I can use to make clothes, but it’s a long, slow process, so I’ll also need a lot of extra food to stay alive while I craft.

All of the above are spending fatigue. The more physically intensive the activity, the more fatigue I’m spending. Going outside and facing down wolves? That’s expensive. Running is expensive. Hunting is expensive. Carrying a lot of weight from place to place is very expensive and exhausting. Also, heavy physical exertion is spending calories faster than sitting around at the camp office reading and crafting. To get fatigue back, I need to sleep, which means I need a bed with enough shelter to keep me from dying of cold, and potentially I need a fire if there’s no indoor shelter available. And if I don’t yet have a bedroll, sleep is only available at specific places in the world, places I need to walk to, which spends fatigue and hunger and makes me colder.

Hunting requires arrows and a bow, which are made from saplings, which require a sharp tool to harvest. They’re finite and non-renewable. Arrows degrade every time they’re fired, and so does the bow that fired them, and they can’t be repaired, so I need to keep a supply of them on hand so I can craft more arrows and bows.

All my metal tools deteriorate as I use them. I can sharpen the knife and the hatchet with a whetstone but those are finite, get used up quickly, and while they’re common they’re still not going to last all that long. And the hacksaw can’t be sharpened at all, and has to be repaired with a toolbox and scrap metal. Toolboxes are finite and non-renewable. So is scrap metal (though it’s so plentiful that its renewability hardly matters). So I need to have whetstones and scrap and tools on-hand, which means I need to go scavenge to get them, and see above for the costs of scavenging.

And in the longer term, I will run out of both tools and whetstones, leaving me with only one option: the milling machine in the cannery in Bleak Inlet. That’s in the coldest zone in the game, which is infested with packs of timber wolves, which are substantially harder to handle than regular wolves. To get to the cannery I need to be warm and well-fed and I need weapons in good repair, and I’m probably going to have to sprint a lot so I need to be well-rested and probably need to leave a lot of my normal inventory and gear behind to stay light.

The astonishing thing about all these systems, the thing that drives home to me just how much work has gone on under the hood of this game, is that even given all of that, you can still succeed. Interloper is unfair but you can succeed. The tuning of the systems is brutal and unforgiving, but there is enough margin in those systems, enough give between their uncaring absolutes of temperature and hunger, to find a path through, to survive.

This is an absolutely astonishing feat of game design and game balance. How fast does each meter deplete? How much fatigue is each calorie worth? How much cold damage is a single piece of cloth worth? How long can a blizzard continue before it must relent or the player will die?

When I imagine how these systems link together, I envision a vast node diagram, linkages expressed in terms of calories or an underlying point value that’s concealed from the player. Currencies plotted out and transactions flowing through the network of nodes. The cold cost of a deer steak. The calorie cost of a repaired sweater. The scrap metal equivalence of a bleeding wolf bite.

What I’m saying is, as a game designer and as primarily a game system designer, who builds that sort of elaborate structure professionally and also as a hobby?

I cannot begin to wrap my mind around the systems that drive The Long Dark. I can only let them sweep me along, trusting that the designers know what they’re doing. So far, I have not been disappointed.

What I’m trying to say is that this is a work of genius. This is an unparalleled piece of game design that I’ve never seen equalled by any game I’ve ever played. It is phenomenal and awe-inspiring. I wouldn’t know where to begin, if I wanted to build something comparable. The best I can manage is to wield awkward analogies and pre-existing frameworks like fireplace tongs, touching the game’s brilliance at arms’ length.

So, let’s do just that. Here’s a familiar framework that I think will let us at least begin to understand why the game works so well, why it has so much to say, and why it is still the best survival game there is, even nine years after its release.

This is my thesis: The Long Dark is a game expression of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Let’s look at the hierarchy:

At the bottom, we have the obvious stuff. Food, water, warmth and rest are all the basic survival meters of The Long Dark. Handling those is the first thing you have to do, and is the ongoing background task of your entire run. You’ll always be hunting and gathering food and sticks, returning to shelters to sleep and boil water.

Above that level is safety, and we’ve also seen how that manifests. You need a bow to hunt, but you also need it to defend yourself from wolves. You can (and will) use fire for this purpose as well, but that’s an additional use on top of the ‘warmth’ need. Weapons for security, and medicines for safety. Maintaining weapons is complicated and involves a lot of steps and a lot of resources, and it will stress the level below it in the hierarchy. If you don’t have food and shelter managed, you can’t do the work to get and maintain weapons.

The next level seems inapplicable, but I want to propose that it’s actually present in the game, manifesting as the various clues and hints and mementos and environmental storytelling that are everywhere on Great Bear Island. There are letters to find, telling the stories of the people of the island; there are cairns of rocks with messages submitted by Kickstarter backers of the original release, reaching out across almost a decade to wish you well or just have their voices heard.

The world is frozen, but it’s a human world that’s frozen, with humanity written all across it. And when the aurora starts, all the broken technology comes to life, and the lights of distant radio towers come on and begin to blink, and you’re reminded that you’re a survivor in a place that was once someone’s home. The picture next to the bed you’re sleeping in shows a mother and daughter, and you don’t know either of them, but you’re in their bed, in their house. The detritus of their lives is all around you.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t ever live in an abandoned house in The Long Dark without thinking about the abruptly-concluded stories of other people’s lives that it represents. Sometimes there’s a cooked meal in the oven. Sometimes the table is set. Sometimes clothes have been laid out on the bed.

It’s a meditative game in a lot of ways. You move slowly; if you’re used to action games, it will feel interminable to you, going from one place to another. It’s quiet, the snow muffling almost all sound. All the human activities that fill our world with a constant buzz have been silenced by the disaster that’s emptied the island of people. You’ll be alone with your own thoughts, and I, at least, spend that time thinking about the implications of this empty world. Is it like this everywhere? Am I the last woman on Earth?

The next layer is provided by the game, in the form of feats and achievements. There are mysteries to be found, computers that come to life in the aurora and whose last flickering images can be read if you find them, telling the story of the island’s gradual death in the grip of endless winter. You can use charcoal to make maps, and mapping the entire world and every significant location in it — an absolutely enormous task — carries with it an achievement. It will also teach you the geography and resource distribution that you’ll need to survive, so that’s an added bonus. There are hidden caches of loot everywhere, strongboxes tucked into rocky clefts and hidden pathways to secret ledges with unexpected supplies. Every region is complex and I don’t think, in 800 hours of playing, I’ve really completely mastered any one of them.

And the capstone of the hierarchy is… I suppose it’s this. This essay. Me writing about this game I love. Me telling you about it, because I think it has a lot of things to say, and underneath its bleak and frozen premise is a tightly balanced work of game system design genius. It serves as a framework around which to structure very real questions about what it means to ‘win’ a game, what it means to ‘survive’, and how you can find joy in joyless circumstances.

And maybe, you can see the magic implied in a wide-eyed little girl imagining the transformation of an abandoned train car in a thick wood into a place of comfort, safety, and family.

I’m standing on a cliff overlooking the Forsaken Airfield, and to my right the sun is coming up; to the left I can see the golden glow touching the peaks of the mountains. Far below, no bigger than specks, wolves stalk towards a group of deer. I’m struck by the beauty and loneliness of this place, and I think: this was worth seeing.