Wintermute, the narrative part of survival game The Long Dark, released its fifth and final episode last week, nearly 10 years after the beginning of the story first premiered. This week, I received a Kickstarter update for the game, which I backed in 2013, telling me that studio Hinterland “now consider our promise to deliver the game complete.” I was surprised both to receive an update for a Kickstarter I’d honestly forgotten about, and to imagine a world where The Long Dark could ever be considered finished.
Wintermute’s story episodes might have been far between, but Hinterland has been consistently adding new things to the survival sandbox, including a small narrative as part of paid DLC. The studio hasn’t said what, if anything, from the latest story episode will make its way to survival, but I and many other players assume it will be something, because it feels like there’s always something coming to the game: a new area, a new mechanic, some tweak that puts wolves where you wish there weren’t wolves or makes the snow look nicer. Hinterland is working on a multiplayer sequel, but even then it’s hard to imagine the book being fully closed on a game that’s been a staple of my game-playing life for the last 13 years, even as I think it’d be more than fair for the developers to be ready to move on to new things.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of Wintermute: I was first drawn to The Long Dark for its promises of cold weather and granular survival mechanics rather than any story set in that world. I’ve called the story a good place for newcomers to learn some of the game’s maps and mechanics, which can be difficult to wrap your head around against the requirements of survival. But Wintermute also does a good job explaining some of survival’s place-names and giving you context for the geomagnetic storm that sets up its premise. And it’s largely risen to the challenge of merging survival gameplay with its narrative, telling a story that still has the unique, slow feel that I love about The Long Dark.
The core premise of the five episodes is that doctor Astrid Greenwood asks her ex-husband Will Mackenzie to fly her to a remote location called Perseverance Mills to deliver some medicine secreted in a hard case, when their plane comes down during an aurora and they’re separated. Will has to find Astrid, while Astrid continues on her mysterious mission, all while the both of them face the harsh environment of the northern Canadian wilderness and threats from various other survivors. The first two episodes, released in 2017, were heavy on Will being sent on fetch-and-gather quests for NPCs that sometimes felt at odds with the game’s survival needs and pace, and players chafed against it so much that in 2018, Hinterland overhauled the two episodes and released a “redux” version to address some of their complaints. This was followed by a third episode in 2019 starring Astrid, which felt to me like it really got the balance of story and survival right, and a fourth in 2021 where you play as Will again.
I’ll be honest that I haven’t played episode 4, opting instead to watch a playthrough right before the release of episode 5. This was partly due to time constraints, and partly because episode 4’s antagonists are escaped convicts from the game’s Blackrock prison. As someone who’s worked with incarcerated people and as a chaplain in a Boston jail, I’ve never felt totally comfortable with narratives like this, even if the game sets up that people in Blackrock have committed particularly heinous crimes. Convict ringleader Mathis is played immensely well by Elias Toufexis, and the convicts drive a lot of episode 5’s urgency.
(Spoilers for Wintermute episode 5 follow, though I try to keep it vague.)
Luckily for me, while the convicts play a big role in episode 5’s story, much of the actual gameplay doesn’t have a ton to do with them, or features them without focusing on them too much. You begin the story as Astrid finally arriving at Perseverance Mills, and you’re swiftly sent out into a big new wilderness that’s tense to explore. The next part of this section features another new, creepy environment, and it all feels like the blend of exploration and story that Wintermute is uniquely challenged with but often gets right.
When you’re Will again, you navigate a mine with some puzzles that call back to episode 4, and even if I had to start this chapter again due to bad save choices, and then a few more times in the mine due to technical issues that are now patched, it’s an interesting section, further developing Will’s relationship with another scientist and giving you a companion to explore the game’s world with. It’s all pretty linear, and that linearity defines much of the rest of the episode, where Will and then Astrid are essentially funneled down corridors full of uniquely nasty enemies. I found these sections tough in a good way, with their own particular pressures and challenges that forced me to rely on my own decision-making even if most everything was set out for me. But they also tamper with some of The Long Dark’s essential mechanics and rhythms in a way that has rankled some players, who see them as counter to the core, open spirit of the game.
Hinterland was clear that episode 5 would be focused on wrapping up the story; it knows what it wants to tell you, and has designed the episode to make sure you experience that rather than letting you get there in the personal, freeform way players define for themselves in survival. It feels different from what I expect The Long Dark to be, but this has always been one of the tricky things about handing a narrative to players who might have tens to thousands of hours of doing whatever they want in a survival sandbox. There’s a vocal number of players on the subreddit who feel angry and betrayed by some of the things episode 5 does, and this conflict touches on one of the interesting things the game has long grappled with: how to navigate the line between what players want and the game and story Hinterland wants to create, whether that’s how the story episodes work or what’s present in survival. How does a game that promises so much freedom, whose sandbox is predicated on players forging their own objectives and being (more or less) the only person in the world, adequately prepare players for the opposite experience, one where the developers are doing their own thing and it’s the player who’s along for the ride?
I’ve been surprised by some of the ire I’ve seen on the game’s subreddit, even as I don’t disagree with some of the criticism. This kind of discourse is nothing new in games, but it feels to me like it takes a particular tenor around The Long Dark. The game had a long early access period, and the episodes 1 and 2 redux and the constant updates to the survival sandbox have all, not totally incorrectly, given some players a sense of ownership over the game. But how far does a player community’s feedback extend? How does, and how much should, a developer please a playerbase that has, impressively, helped keep an indie studio with one relatively niche game in business for 13 years while still staying true to its own vision?
I think The Long Dark itself plays with this tension in the sandbox, casting you as a lone survivor as many similar games do but then bucking the trend of letting you come to dominate the natural world. The most common advice to new players is to get comfortable with dying a lot. You can’t build shelter outside of temporary snow huts from cloth and sticks; your gear degrades and your food goes bad and wounded animals run off with your arrows; it’s possible for a blizzard or wild animal attack to end your run no matter how well-equipped you are. There are plenty of high-level players who can survive forever, but it’s through their own skill and knowledge rather than through any increasing power the game gives you. The Long Dark is about doing what you can with the situation in front of you; it’s not a power fantasy, despite its setup. You can survive in its world, but that world will never belong to you.
So on the one hand you’d think players who felt the story didn’t do what they wanted it to would be primed to engage with it on its on own terms, but on the other hand I can see how years of making their own game-within-the-game and of developers responding to their feedback would give them a personal-feeling stake in how things play out. It’s another sign of the challenge Hinterland set itself by creating these two vastly different pieces of the game, and of releasing them at such a different pace.
This conflict between survival and story also feels present in the note episode 5 ends on. It takes a bit of a logic-defying leap to get there that’s been the focus of some players’ disappointment, though I saw this as not so out of step with how plenty of media deals with challenges that are more practical than they are narrative. The final note the story hits is about how its characters will come together or not to face the future, focusing more on their relationships than the game’s frozen setting, and leaving Wintermute on a question for the player about their own behavior in times of crisis.
“How will we survive? As individuals, as a species? Will we? Should we?” the game’s final voiceover asks. “When push came to shove and we were tested, was this really the best we could do?”
It’s a different embodiment of the question asked of players in survival, where their “best” is a question about living in the natural world rather than the human one. But while The Long Dark is on its face a man-versus-nature tale, the survival sandbox doesn’t cast nature as an enemy in the way the story characters do the convicts. You find your place in nature in survival; in Wintermute’s ending, characters find their places in the new society that’s forming.
This question of human togetherness is an interesting one for a game whose practical bulk is about being alone. I’ve written before that one of the reasons I bounce off Wintermute is that it just feels weird to have people in the places I’m so used to being alone in. But even as the only human character, people are always present in the survival game: in their actual bodies frozen in the snow, in the things they left behind, in the names of places that pop up on your screen when you discover them. Even before people lived in the Pleasant Valley town of Thomson’s Crossing in Wintermute episode 3, they felt present to me in survival as I set up a solo existence in a place designed for multiple people. Abandoned canneries and mines hint at lost work; deer blinds and hunting cabins hint at recreation that I now use for my own survival. The solitude of the sandbox counter-intuitively makes people feel closer, and, for me, Wintermute’s ending brought into focus this feeling that I often have in survival but rarely look directly at.
In my real life, I’ve had this same feeling on my solo bike trips: the way traveling alone on a road made for cars makes me more aware of the man-made contours of civilization, the way social interactions take on new meaning when I encounter strangers without the mediation of society. The size and speed of the world changes when I’m navigating it under my own power, and I become aware of how much I depend on others but also how much I can do on my own, how the rhythms of train schedules or the price of gas are just human things layered atop the actual rocks and grass of the Earth. But I’ve also been rescued by friends and strangers when my own abilities failed me, or encountered people on their own adventures or living in the margins that gave me bigger insight into the human world. Both are different experiences of how people live and how we live together, a reminder of the unlikeliness and fragility of all of us being here at the same time.
Both Wintermute and survival capture different notes of this. The Long Dark is a game I go to when I’m feeling overwhelmed by people or life and just want to feel alone somewhere. But it’s also a game I go to when I’m lonely, where its rhythms and solitude help me reconnect with the fundamentals all people share living in the world. In its ending, Wintermute brings together both these feelings, exploring how the line between being alone and being together can be thinner than we sometimes think.
Wintermute’s ending feels like an obvious setup for upcoming sequel Blackfrost, which the studio says will feature both solo and co-op play. But it also doesn’t feel like the end of The Long Dark– studio founder Raphael van Lierop told Eurogamer that episode 5’s release is “not the end, but also an end.” It feels strange to me to be able to look at the game as some kind of whole, even if just last night I was watching videos about in-game areas I’ve yet to see despite my hundreds of hours in its world. It’s a game I don’t imagine ever being done with, even if its story is finally complete.
