Recent reviews by Lizzie the Snapping Turtle

If you don't buy it for the solid gameplay, buy it to laugh at Wehrmacht roleplayers crying when their expensive toys are killed because of their overconfidence.

The Long Dark is quite easily the best survival game I have ever played. I largely consider most survival games to be poorly made bandwagon trash, but The Long Dark really earns its place among true survival games.

To start, the game is very pretty, which is surprising for a game made in Unity. The graphics are stylized but convey a sense of realism at the same time, and it makes for excellent screenshots and videos.

The sound design is also very well done. Weather sounds are realistic and immersive, making you truly feel like you're in the middle of a blizzard or hunkering down in a building while the storm rages outside. The ability to hear nearby footsteps of predator or prey aids in hunting or evasion. Audio cues serve to notify you of your current hunger, thirst, fatigue, or cold status without having to check the UI.

On the subject of the UI, it is sleek and unobtrusive. Status notifications appear within the bottom left of the screen only when they apply (first aid required, overencumbered, shielded from wind, low status in the various needs) and current status of the needs only appear when you press tab, as well as time til sundown and temperature. The rest of the time, the screen is completely unobscured by text or icons, helping greatly with the immersion.

The gameplay itself is quite challenging, which really made me happy to see in a survival game. Too many survival games take the actual "survival" to be a secondary problem, focusing instead on combat (too often against zombies). In The Long Dark, the cold harsh winter is your biggest enemy (with wolves coming in second). The outside world is truly, bitterly cold, and fire, food, water, and time are all in short supply. I have only played the game on the hardest difficulty, so I can't speak to the challenge of the other difficulties, but my experience with this difficulty has been very rewarding.

There is a nice sense of progression, specifically with the clothes that you begin to make, typically after one or several ingame weeks. These clothes all come from the hides of animals that you kill (or scavenge) and cure yourself, which requires time investment. When you finally get them made, they provide a very nice bonus against the cold, even better than even the best clothes you find around. Each new article of hand-made clothing allows you to stay out longer, go out earlier, and generally survive against the cold. Because of this, they feel very rewarding, especially since they do require work to get to.

Most importantly, at least to me, is that the game's successes combine to form a very immersive experience. Even little features serve to make the experience better. For instance, wind is a common threat in your day to day life. Standing on the lee side of objects in the environment (such as buildings, ridges, even trees) blocks the wind and helps you stay warm. It also keeps the wind from hurting your campfires. This leads to situations of you hiding behind a cliff or a hill, stoking your campfire and staying warm while the storm howls around you, unable to hurt you. Walking into the wind makes you walk slower. The game really makes you feel the cold, and you will feel very cozy when you come back to your cabin in the evening, light a fire, and warm yourself by it while you cook the day's meat.

Even with my extreme apprehension regarding Early Access games, I can wholeheartedly recommend The Long Dark if you're looking for a challenging survival experience in a beautiful world with a chance to be truly comfy.

This game is really neat, but I imagine it's only for a certain type of person. The people who are going to like this are the people who like having to figure things out for themselves and create a working mechanism out of nothing in an open environment. The process of writing a program to solve a puzzle can be frustrating, but it's all worth it when you run the modified program for the umpteenth time and watch the correct answers come out. It's a great feeling when you finally solve the puzzle and get to check out the next set of longer, harder puzzles. If you like cerebral, slow paced games with great payoff, you're going to want to check this one out.

Playing as a dinosaur is one of the most child-like, entertaining things I have ever done in video games. Worth playing.