Two regions open out onto the coast and an immense ocean beyond. The artist John Brett captured this same geologic enormity in his painting “Glacier of Rosenlauib”, where a sedimentary sea of ice and what looks to be a few rocks and pebbles-which are in fact ancient boulders-dwarf the mountain and its miniature pine trees. The rocks and mountains, “children of elder time”, along with the wind-ravaged valleys, frozen lakes, rivers and falls, all appear in ceaseless motion. These hostile processes at work create a dizzying effect. Most games are content with modelling nature as a backdrop, but in The Long Dark it has become dynamic, reactive a central conflict upon which the entire experience orbits. Its landscapes tick to a deep time-the rocks, snow and shifting skies betraying a form of geological horror.Įnclosed in tombstone shards of broken ice Shepherd would often worry about the forms her poetry and prose took-so dominated by “stars and mountains and light” were they that she felt them “too cold and inhuman”. The wild spaces of The Long Dark are the dominion of forces beyond the human/player-a simulation of what Nan Shepherd, in her observations on the Scottish Highlands, called “the elementals”: ice, wind, water and snow. It’s quite possible for fog to suddenly descend, or for a blizzard to blow through, causing you to lose all sense of direction. There’s no compass to orient yourself and your map only fills in slowly through rough charcoal sketches of the immediate area. You’ll be asked to blunder into the unknown in search of warmth and shelter. Your journey will often begin with a slow trudge-icy breaths, a bitter wind and the crunch of snow beneath tired feet. Although The Long Dark’s panoramas may just be sinister backdrops, nature finds other ways to reach out, slowly advancing, or sometimes surging violently.Īfter choosing a starting region you will be plunked down somewhere in The Long Dark’s remote Canadian wilderness. Percey Shelley, in his poem Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni, described the glaciers of the Alps as “snakes that watch their prey” from afar, “bursting through… dark mountains like the flame of lightning through the tempest”. The gulf between the vulnerable player and the huge landscapes that surround them is central to the game’s experience. You may labour and learn in this wilderness, but darkness will always lie at its edges-a great unsolved mystery, and simultaneously, a call.
Impenetrable, the mountains not only act as a barrier to exploration, but also limit the player’s perceived power. Their black shapes threaten the horizon from every angle-shadowy warnings hanging over the landscape. No matter which region you choose to trek through in Hinterland’s survival game The Long Dark, the mountains are a constant.
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