GeoGuessr For The Long Dark, Yes

A player has made GeoGuessr for The Long Dark, a survival game that gets part of its challenge from becoming lost in a snowy wilderness where everything looks the same. As a long-time player who’s spent an inordinate amount of time muttering “goddammit I’ve seen this rock before” while wandering areas I should know by now, I am here for it.

TLD Guessr is the work of player henhau, who released the game a few weeks ago. Like its real-world geography inspiration, you’re shown five different screenshots from The Long Dark and have to locate them on a map, and you get points for speed and how close you are to the correct location. There are global and daily leaderboards–at time of writing, the current global leader sits at an average time of one minute 59 seconds. The videos on the game’s homepage come from player Tenmilliontinyducks, known for counting down to Long Dark releases by posting videos from the game, and users can submit their own screenshots as well.

Here’s one of the game’s better players trying it out for the first time:

If you’re not a Long Dark player, the whole thing might seem baffling. While GeoGuessr also drops you in areas that can feel at first like they are barely places at all, you’re able to move around the game and pick up clues. You can’t do that with TLD Guessr, which means you just have to stare at the image before you and wrack your brain. And I wouldn’t fault you for thinking every screenshot here basically looks the same–a lot of snow, some rocks, maybe a tree or building.

But I think that’s what makes the fangame so very appropriate to its inspiration. The Long Dark is very easy to get lost in, especially if a storm kicks up or night falls; so much of my time in it has been spent in places that seem vaguely familiar, navigating on a half-remembered, half-invented sense of where I might be and where I might find safety. The sameyness of the landscape is part of the game’s challenge, and part of the allure of attempting to master it–how do you come to know an area that’s nothing but trees and rocks, or a wide open expanse of snow?

Through surviving in the game, these non-places become places: areas with stories and associations personal to you and your time in the game. While I am terrible at TLD Guessr (the number of screenshots I have assumed are the Coastal Highway area that are aggressively not are too numerous to count), each round brings up an immediate emotional reaction in me, an intense sense of place-ness that’s one of the things that makes the game so unique to me. Even if I don’t know where the screenshot is, I know the feelings that make it somewhere to whoever took it. It's something I love about the game, and I love that a player has made that feeling a game in its own right.

If you're not a Long Dark player, TLD Guessr led me to discover other video game-based versions of GeoGuessr out there. Given how bad I am at the one for a game I rank among my favorites, I doubt I’ll be any good at any of them either.