The Long Dark is a PC first person survival game by Hinterland Games. This text only refers to The Long Dark’s Survival Mode.

When I booted up The Long Dark a couple of months ago, I was expecting an unpolished but perhaps novel survival sim. It certainly was unpolished, but it also turned out to be one of the best gaming experiences of my life (so far! SO FAR! Shit, that was close). What I want to explore here is how The Long Dark is able to give players great narrative experiences, despite emergent gameplay being the main source of them. The Long Dark uses various tools to accomplish this, including environmental storytelling, presence, and atmosphere. Finally, it has what I call a Core Mystery, which I’ll discuss in more detail later.

My Story

So I booted up the sandbox and…

I’m clueless, breath escaping my deteriorating body in quick little puffs. Within an hour I was dead in the dark.

But on my fourth attempt, after learning the basics of the game, I found a shack. Inside was a rifle, and two cans of dog food – I was a king.

I survived for days, weeks! I explored my surroundings, learned where I could hunt, fish, and gather firewood. On a crisp clear morning, I ventured a little farther than usual, confident with my rifle; if I got lost, I knew that following the peak of a faraway mountain would take me home. As I trudged through a forest, footsteps crunching, wind silently threading the boles, I heard a quick patter. I turned, halting the black wolf in its tracks. It snarled, lunged, and I fired my rifle into the snow.

I struggled frantically against the snapping wolf but the surprise had thrown me off. I beat at it’s head with my bare hands as it mauled me. I struggled, but knew I would die. To my surprise, my fist thudded into the wolf’s nose, causing it to yelp and scamper off.

I was in a bad state. Multiple lacerations, a sprained ankle. I managed to stem the bleeding with bandages, but had no anticeptic to avoid infection.

My vision was swimming from the blood loss, so I huddled into a little depression in a rocky overhang, built a fire, and settled into my sleeping bag. I wasn’t far from home, and could trek back after a quick rest.

I awoke to darkness and howling wind. My fire was out. I was freezing. I had to get home. In startled disbelief, I realised I couldn’t.

In the blizzard, the world was transformed. Snow raised by the bellowing wind formed a wall around me, obscuring my mountaintop beacon. I had no firewood, nor could I find any, so, leg throbbing from the infected wolf-bite, I limped into the storm.

After this everything is hazy. Freezing, starving, thirsty, leg alternating between searing and numb. It was only a matter of time before I’d collapse, but I couldn’t stop.

Emerging suddenly out of the darkness, I saw a Canadian Flag, and thought I’d gone mad.

But beside it was a hut. I stumbled inside, found some antibiotics, inhaled them with the most delicious dusty dog food a human has ever enjoyed, then collapsed into the bed. I’d survived.

In the morning I was greeted by clear skies and sunlight. I saw my mountain peak in the distance, and barked a nervous laugh when I saw an identical mountaintop in the opposite direction. Either one could lead me home.

That’s it, that’s my story. After sleeping, my game was saved, and I quit, only to return much later, by which time my save had unfortunately been lost in the torrent of updates the game has received since then.

Now, I want to be the first to admit that this isn’t a great story, but as I’ll explain, I left some parts out. I’ll reveal them later, don’t worry. It’ll all be made clear in the end.

Emergent Narratives and Meaning

My experience in The Long Dark made me consider my favourite games, and how many of them share certain elements, namely emergent and environmental narratives, immersion, atmosphere, and core mysteries.

When game mechanics are given a framework to interact in on a wide playing field, emergent narrative can be born. This is an incredibly broad term, and it’s found in countless games (incidentally, it can only exist in games). It’s not what makes The Long Dark’s story, but it’s one of the ingredients. Something as simple as waiting out a blizzard in a cave would qualify. The blizzard means danger, and a cave is protection from the elements – the two weren’t directly connected until circumstance brought them together.

My point here is mainly that The Long Dark has emergent narrative, and that its premise (open world survival) is suited toward it. But emergent narrative doesn’t require a huge sandbox and survival gameplay. Take XCOM: Enemy Unknown, where you can give your squad members custom names and attributes. This alone created a form of emergent narrative in players’ heads.

But what has been argued by many as a weakness of emergent narrative is that the stories aren’t really stories. With emergent storytelling you get a lot of small stories, strung together, without real purpose. It hits a little too close to home, doesn’t it? To reality, I mean. We want a grand scheme, an overarching meaning, since we usually can’t have that in our actual lives. A story is more than a string of events, goes the argument, and I tend to agree. I don’t know if a story needs a single true meaning, but I do think it needs direction, as in movement from one point to another, with bits inbetween. Nevertheless, I believe The Long Dark manages to stay out of the same category as games like Rust or Minecraft, in terms of story, not because it has emergent narrative (Rust and Minecraft both have that), but how other aspects of the game complement it.

Taken in a vacuum, emergent narrative lacks direction, presence, and depth. It’s only when The Long Dark is viewed in the full context that we begin to find a meaningful narrative.

Immersion and Atmosphere

Immersion and Atmosphere are at the core of The Long Dark. It roots us in the universe in a way that Rust and Minecraft doesn’t. The game indicates your present condition, location, and purpose through what you see and hear in the game world. Say you’re standing at the edge of a treeline before a frozen lake. The trees above you rock back and forth. You can almost taste the bite of the wind as it streaks across the ice, carrying with it the howl of a wolf. Your stomach growls and you shudder. These indications provide all the information you need: you’re hungry, cold, visibility is low, it’s windy, and there are wolves nearby. Time to make decisions.

Consistency in the game world (if you eat food, you are less hungry, every time), an unbroken presentation (loading screens exist but are short and far between), and interactivity with in game objects (you can break down furniture into firewood) all contribute to feeling present in the The Long Dark. But simply giving audiovisual cues about your surroundings is not enough to make you feel present. It needs more. In Super Mario Odyssey, Mario might shiver in the snow, but this doesn’t affect your decision making or interaction with the world. In The Long Dark, it does. Everything you see and hear has direct impact on gameplay. Anything can be important, keeping you alert. For example, it caught me by surprise how moonlight could save your life; it makes you observe and appreciate the world you’re in.

As for atmosphere, it’s what gives the emergent narrative in The Long Dark its distinct flavour of emotions. After getting dropped into the game, the order of emotions can go something like this:

Curious (ooh, a stick!)

Desperate (I don’t have enough sticks!)

Abandoned and Lonely (Why is my only friend this frozen corpse?)

Defiant (I will wear your goddamn skin, wolf!)

Serene (I am one with nature.)

What this has started to resemble, at least to me, is an arc.

Admittedly, The Long Dark’s arc can keep rising and falling indefinitely, since there’s no “end”. But you don’t play any game indefinitely, you do stop at some point (you do, right? Please tell me you do). And the point at which we stop is usually on the high, after we have overcome a certain obstacle. If it’s the last time you played, then that was the story you had. If you keep playing, then you have multiple complete arcs. But the reason I don’t think it deviates a lot from this particular shape is how one learns and progresses through the game, and the atmosphere which keeps your thoughts coming back to themes of abandonment, deterioration, and eventually, sober acceptance.

Immersion and atmosphere are the first steps in providing the emergent narrative of The Long Dark with both presence and a point of origin from which direction can follow.

Environmental Storytelling

Remember when I said I’d left parts out of my story? Well, what I omitted was part of The Long Dark’s environmental storytelling: In my shack, where I found the rifle, I also found a man frozen to death, curled up on the floor beside a desk on which he’d left a note speaking about his friend, and how as children they had spied on tourists having parties nearby in the summer – a different world it seemed. I found more frozen bodies, and more notes, often about the past, where it was always a little warmer. I wondered what had happened to the world, and whether I would ever find answers, or only memories of the dead.

I would argue that this adds direction to the emergent storytelling in The Long Dark.

This image tells a story. Everything is abandoned, left behind. What caused this, and what are the dangers of staying? Why did people abandon their cars in the middle of a bridge? Boom, I’m there – in the moment.

This might be my favourite method of being told a story in games. Two of my favourite games, Portal, and Bioshock, use it to amazing effect. In Portal, the narrator/mentor character prods you along cheerfully, until you spot hidden and ominous writing by your deceased predecessor. The walls of your neat box begin to disintegrate, as you realise the world is not what you thought. In Bioshock, the city of Rapture is one giant statement, constantly reinforcing the corruption which has ruined a once opulent society.

The Long Dark is subtler. The past is disappearing under the snow, along with the frozen corpses you stumble upon. The occasional notes you find, unlike Bioshock’s audio diaries, don’t break the consistency of the world.

Environmental storytelling makes any tailored narrative blend in with the world, and this is what hides the story in The Long Dark.

The Core Mystery

This is the final and essential ingredient. The Core Mystery provides the depth. Even if you already have an interesting setting, it can provide you with your story’s guiding star. What exactly do I mean by a Core Mystery? Let’s look at some examples.

No Man’s Sky takes this concept quite literally. Potter along through the universe, explore, mine, trade, mine, mine, and mine some more, but always know that at the center of the galaxy, there’s a secret. And it’s a secret which affects the entire galaxy.

Subnautica has a slightly more structured narrative and progression compared to The Long Dark, but the Core Mystery in this case is the mysterious presence which seems to be involved in your current predicament. Does the dark ocean floor hide answers?

So what is The Long Dark’s Core Mystery? We already touched on it in relation to environmental storytelling. The land has been fled by humanity, and many have been abandoned to freeze in the process. What happened? Why? Another, much subtler mystery, is whether you will encounter another living human. I’ve specifically avoided finding out the answer to that, although I’m quite sure the answer is no.

The Core Mystery is the final act of the arc. It’s the beating heart at the center of the game, the faceless monster that lurks in the depths. You may already be familiar with the mystery box concept, which film director J.J. Abrams is a big proponent of.

My argument is not to keep the answers constantly out of reach. We want to avoid lazy writing and “empty mystery boxes” which so plague what could have been great stories.

In Portal, there was a mystery, and the payoff was there. It delivered. There are many examples of stories that didn’t (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, No Man’s Sky, etc.) There are also stories that don’t attempt an answer at all (The Walking Dead might fit here). In those cases, instead of being disappointed by the mystery box’s contents, you never open it, or you do, and find it empty. This is where I think The Long Dark is straining against its boundaries, since I suspect (I haven’t played all it’s maps or looked up all it’s secrets) that its mystery box is empty; there is no answer. As we can see from other stories though, this doesn’t preclude it from having an interesting narrative. Perhaps the important thing isn’t that it lacks an answer, but that it asks a question, or it feels like it does.

Answering the Mystery

What I would love to see more in open world survival games, is not just a core mystery, but one with a particular tailored reveal in it’s highest difficulty area. Imagine it like a sink (a metaphor particularly apt for Subnautica). You get to explore the whole sink (you’re really tiny, okay? Just go with it), starting in the shallows near the edges. At the bottom of the sink, there’s a drain. After much hardship and exploring, you might stumble upon it and wonder what it is and where it leads, or you may have been seeking it out due to hints and environmental storytelling. If you decide to brave it and enter, you’ll be led to the heart of the mystery. The journey there will be our own (more so than branching stories etc), meandering and errant, but the payoff will be tailored, or static, and that can provide our journey there with more profound meaning, since without it, only gameplay guides our actions.

To illustrate my point about giving the journey a profound meaning, I’m going to use what many refer to as a shining example of story in games, namely Spec Ops: The Line. Most of the game, you’re not sure what the grand scheme is, you’re just a guy shooting bad guys, like in most shooters. It’s… functional. But the ending twists everything around on you, and paints your actions in an entirely new light, giving everything meaning. Although it could be argued that this particular game took control away from the player, my point here is limited to showing the possibility of giving what seems to be a pointless string of events profundity through the reveal of a mystery, and the attainment of a goal.

There’s a final part that I left out of my story at the start. When I was dying in the blizzard, I was certain it was over, but instead of exiting the game and restarting, I kept going. I thought, What if someone’s still alive out there? I can’t let them find me like this, just another sad memory, another lump of frozen meat. They deserve better, and after all I’ve been through, so do I. What caused all this?



I was invested in the Core Mystery.

Bringing it all together

Emergent narrative exists in huge portion of games, and in many ways it’s inferior to tailored ones. But if you add immersion, atmosphere, environmental storytelling, and an underlying narrative – just right – you can create atmospheric open worlds with direction, and a purpose bigger than ourselves. And that, to me, is what makes great stories.