Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I: History and Development

The Long Dark is a game about dying. But in that same vein, it’s a game about living. Living one more hour. One more night. One more day.

Hinterland Games started somewhere between the drive to create an independent studio and an idea for a new kind of game. Veteran creative director Raphael van Lierop left Relic Entertainment after cutting his teeth on Relic’s Warhammer 40,000 and Company of Heroes franchises, and serving as narrative director on Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3. In fact, he left more than his job at Relic. Van Lierop left AAA gaming and his home the city of Vancouver entirely, striking out for the quiet shores of Vancouver Island where his new residence sat on the border of the isle’s rugged wilderness.

It was there, on the literal edge of civilization, that Hinterland was born.

Van Lierop sought creative freedom, and in his rural trappings he imagined a game where players struggled to survive the end of the world. Not an apocalypse of fire or war or zombies. Rather, he envisioned a small event that tipped the once one-sided balance between human kind and nature towards the latter.

Van Lierop assembled an all-star team recruited from other large developers, including Alan Lawrence, former lead of Volition, Marianne Krawczyk, who wrote the God of War series, and David Chan, who served as BioWare’s first audio designer. Later, Hinterland added Ken Ralston, lead designer on Morrowind, to their roster. Together, Hinterland began to set their idea into motion.

But a staff with resume’s as deep as Hinterland’s doesn’t come cheap. Nor do they come from the same geographical location.

Van Lierop would have to figure out how to pay for his vision and keep the team working cohesively. Hinterland garnered buzz when they secured a seed funding from the Canada Media Fund and van Lierop, building off that momentum, launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to round out Hinterland’s funding.

He also established Hinterland as mobile office. Being a veteran of the game industry, van Lierop knew the toll of working in the high-stress, deadline-oriented world of studio development. More importantly, he knew the affects it can have on a developer’s family. “My rule with Hinterland,” van Lierop explained to the Financial Post, “was that I would never ask anyone to move their families.”

With funding secured and the team established, Hinterland brought van Lierop’s vision of desolate, apocalyptic survival to life with a hardcore, permadeath survival sandbox. The team branded it The Long Dark and launched an alpha build on Steam Early Access, bringing it to Xbox One Preview a year later.

Hinterland is currently polishing the game into a finished product, aiming to release episodes of a narrative “story mode” — which features the voices of experienced voice-over actors such as David Hayter and Jennifer Hale — in 2016.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

II: Art and Design

The first thing players notice when they start The Long Dark is how incredible it looks.

Hinterland opted for a stripped down, stylized design. Play begins with a slow fade into the world where players are greeted to gusting wind and a bleak winter landscape that looks as though it was rendered with the gentle fluidity of watercolors.

The lines are clean. Snow covers the mountain landscape and pine trees sway in the breeze. The player gets their bearings. Their breath rises in their field of vision, thin and white before disappearing, and they take their first step toward survival.

It might be easy to discount the clean, even look of The Long Dark. After all, each map is almost entirely blanketed in snow. But the world is — or rather was — very much alive.

Every valley and outcropping lends itself to creating an organic environment. There are rental cabins dotting the shore. A processing facility deteriorating under the snow, waiting for the whaling ships forever frozen at sea. Ice fishing huts. Emergency service cabins. Abandoned cars fanning onto the roadside like fishbones. Wounded animals leaving tiny droplets of blood on the snow. There are even the remains of less fortunate survivors buried in the snow, barely visible if it weren’t for the circling crows.

Hinterland’s world is painted in strong, primary colors. Players will spend most of their time navigating the whitewashed landscape, only to find the world changing with the transitory sun. Dawns and sunsets bloom and fade, and The Long Dark suddenly explodes in color.

As soon as sky changes, the snow follows suit. Players will exit their shelter and find themselves greeted to a land awash in red at dawn. Or they’ll find themselves trudging through a blue world on a clear night. Even the horizon, crowing with impossible mountain peaks, plays its role. Mountain tops are not goals in The Long Dark, but fixed points of reference. They are distant landmarks that becomes a source of gravity from which crafty players will orbit, keeping note of the mountain face to save themselves from getting lost.

It’s evident Hinterland has taken a tremendous amount of care building all five of their sandbox environments. While certain elements of the level design has all the hallmarks of a game — think large, impassible walls that hem a player’s exploration — each landscape feels like the rural Northwest.

Player’s with outdoor experience bring with them the knowledge of how intimidating nature can be. And for players who don’t have that particular life experience, Hinterland does well to reproduce that sensation.

In The Long Dark, you can lose the sun in the trees, making it hard to gauge your direction. Clouds breeze by, always threatening to blow in a blizzard at any second. There are deadfalls, clear cuts, and the all too familiar slog up a logging road. The very fact it only takes a moment of distraction to completely lose your direction is testament to how authentic The Long Dark’s landscape feels.

And this places the player at a pig’s eye view of an unforgiving alpine winter.

From the moment the player first surveys their surroundings, they are immediately faced with a world indifferent — and sometimes outwardly hostile — to their survival. The feeling is similar to that of the Hudson River School, where 19th Century Americans painted natural landscapes of tremendous magnitude. In those paintings, some imagined river valley or a mountain side displays itself across the canvas, all drama and scale, with tiny figures of men in the corner dwarfed by their own cosmic insignificance.