Fancy a getaway this weekend? After drowning in E3 stories all week, I know I do. Perhaps I'll escape to The Long Dark's new Hushed River Valley region, where I can drown in its icy lakes instead.

Part of the first-person survival sim's new Vigilant Flame survival mode update, Hushed River Valley is described as a "multi-leveled" region that connects to Mountain Town. It boasts multiple waterfalls, rivers, streams and cliff areas, so says developer Hinterland, but contains no man-made shelters.

As the video below explains, you'll want to in turn source natural cover—"whether that be the hollowed-out trunks of a large tree, a rock formation providing a natural windbreak, or ice caves"—and tucked away supply caches.

As also detailed there, the Vigilant Flame update overhauls TLD's cooking system. Here's Hinterland on that:



We’ve overhauled the cooking system so that it doesn’t occur in a simple menu interface anymore. You place cookable items in the new Recycled Can or Cooking Pot items, or on hot surfaces—namely, stones near burning campfires or on the surface of lit cook stoves—and wait for them to cook.

Each food item requires a different amount of time to cook. If you remove the item too soon, it’ll be undercooked, and eating it could result in food poisoning. If you wait too long, you could overcook the item to the point where it becomes an inedible burned lump, thus wasting the valuable food and fuel resources you spent on it.

This all sounds interesting, because while it means managing multiple timelines, you should, in theory at least, be able to multitask as you wait for things to cook. I'll almost certainly make an arse of this—but I'd love to hear from anyone that's tried it out in the comments below.

Elsewhere, Vigilant Flame introduces "buffer memories"—new narrative collectibles said to be the "last documents stored in a computer's memory" before everything went to shit. Activated when the aurora appears at night, expect to uncover more of the game world's background.

Full patch notes for The Long Dark's Vigilant Flame update live here.