by Mossy Toes » Fri Sep 26, 2014 3:19 am
The Long Dark. Lives up to its promise. I mean, to "gamify" it the developers made things like prybars and hatchets degrade far faster than they normally would, and made wolves faaar more common and aggressive than they normally would be, but...
As far as complaints go, those are very not-major, though. You have to watch out for your exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and temperature, and you're constantly burning through calories as you scour abandoned buildings and frozen corpses for any gear, food and clothes that could help you survive. If you sprint everywhere, sure, you get places twice as fast--but you tire yourself out three or more times as fast, so have to sleep, so end up way more dehydrated, so have to burn through your precious stash of firewood to melt and boil more water--and if you don't boil it, you run the risk of dysentery. Or if you eat nearly-spoiled food or raw meat, you can get food poisoning. Or you can get an infection from wolf bites after an attack... provided you don't die of blood loss, shock, and/or the wolf ferociously gnawing at your face while you try to punch it away. Or you can sprain your ankle while stumbling around in the dark. Or, of course, as implied earlier, you can freeze to death, starve, dehydrate, or collapse out in the elements from exhaustion.
You may find a rifle, but... good luck finding any ammo. You'll need it. If you get a hatchet, make sure it doesn't break on you--that thing is more precious than gold, for foraging. Far more precious, actually--what good would gold do you in a dead and frozen world, where your basic survival supplies are dwindling fast?
It's a game that, if you want to survive it, forces you to slow down and walk 95% of the time, because running will just waste your resources. And with that slowing down of pace, you are forced to appreciate the truly beautiful--albeit cruelly desolate--landscape that Hinterland Games has thrown together. Shocking in its sheer relentlessness and inevitability. Even though so far there's just one map in the sandbox mode, and no story mode... I consider myself having already gotten my money's worth out of the game. And apparently, they mean to release it properly by the end of the year, and the price is going to go up then!
What sphinx of plascrete and adamantium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Imperator!