The Long Dark Ps4

The Long Dark offers a far more grounded and meditative take on the survival genre. Death can come easily and quickly in the frozen wastelands of The Long Dark and getting started can be very intimidating. I’ve been absolutely loving the gameplay experience and wanted to share some easy tips to help you get started and survive your first day.Check Your EquipmentThe first thing you’ll want to do is look through your starting equipment. The clothing you have on and gear you begin with is somewhat randomized. You should have some food, fire starting materials and maybe even a storm lantern if you’re lucky.Temporary ShelterI recommend first trying the Mystery Lake map – there are many shelters and it still offers a challenge to new players while not being brutal. In the 10 games I’ve started on the map, I’ve always started in sight of some kind of shelter. This will make learning the game a lot easier since you won’t be bleeding off heat while you play around in the menus.

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If you do not see any shelter, typical survival common sense usually applies to The Long Dark. Follow rivers, power lines and roads to lead you to some form of habitation. Once you're inside a shelter, take stock of the food and water you have. These will be your earliest killers.

You should have enough junk food from your starting inventory and whatever is in the shelter for it not to be a crisis. Worry about your water first.Unless you find a toilet to drink out of, fire is the key to water. Water in The Long Dark is always available by melting snow, you can do this from any fire. You can start a campfire from the radial menu as long as you have matches and something to burn and you are outside.

If you are inside, then you’ll need to find a furnace or another pre-established fire pit. It’s perfectly okay to go outside for your firemaking since you will be gaining heat next to the fire anyway, you just run the risk of wolf problems, so be ready to run back inside.Remember that once you melted the snow, it will still put you at risk of disease and dysentery. You’ll have to boil the water or put water purification tablets to make it potable.With food, remember that calories in your body are functionally weightless, so if encumbrance is a problem, eat until you’re full. Likewise, look at the calorie to weight ratio of the food you have.

Eat food that has a worse ratio and carry the food that provides a good amount of calories for its weight.Key ItemsSo now you have a place to lay your head, some beef jerky to eat and a source of water, it is time to start thinking about the medium term. Unlike Minecraft, your character is unable to make most items you find in the game. It is more of a game of scavenging than of crafting. There are a few key items you want to be on the lookout for that will greatly aid your survival in the first few days.AxeGiven fire’s power to keep you hydrated (as well as warm and eating cooked food), it is important to maintain fire starting materials. An axe will not only allow you to break up branches into firewood, but allow to you tear apart furniture for even more wood.Hunting KnifeLike the Axe, the hunting knife will allow you to destroy some furniture for materials, it also lets you skin and harvest meat from animals much more quickly. This could be the difference between life and death since you’ll be doing that bloody work in the cold. Early on you may be more likely to find a dead deer than to kill one, since the meat is frozen you’ll need the hunting knife to get any of it.MatchesMatches are one of the key factors in your long term survival.

There are very few other items that can start fires so your matches are precious. Leave no stone unturned when looting a shelter since twenty matches could make the difference between life and death in the long term.

In my current game, I’ve managed to secure most of everything I need, but the shortage of matches will likely be the thing to force me to venture out again into the unknown.Sewing KitThis might not make the difference between life and death on the first day, but it will certainly matter greatly soon. As you find more clothing, you will eventually have more than you can wear. The best way to make use of it is to tear it up and use it to repair your best set of clothes. To do this, you need a sewing kit. You can often boost the warmth of damaged clothes by a degree or two, which will start to make all the difference for how long you can be working and exploring outside without heat.With a hunting knife, you can also tear up any curtains or pillows you find for even more cloth.

It is much more useful to have one great set of clothes than a bunch of ratty stuff weighing you down.Rifle and BulletsThis is not a necessity but it is very helpful. If you can find a rifle, you can bring down deers that have thousands of calories. A rifle is also your best defense against wolf and bear attacks.

Even if you haven’t found a rifle, be on the lookout for bullets. They can be hiding everywhere inside and often there may be a stray bullet or two on the floor.

The worst thing you can do is eventually find that rifle and have no bullets to use in it. Bullets seem to be extremely rare and I’ve never had over ten at one time.Once you have the rifle, be very conscious of when you use it, if it is your primary tool to get food be preparing a backup for when those bullets run out.Manage SleepMy last bit of advice is to manage your sleep cycle. Exhaustion is a resource like, warmth, hunger, or thirst – though it goes down far more slowly. I found early on too much sleep was more of a burden than too little. The game won’t let you go to sleep if you are too well rested. This is somewhat unrealistic for me personally since I can always sleep, anytime anywhere.Either way, during my first few games I’d be grabbing an hour here or there as I needed the heat, but when it came to my first night, I found myself unable to sleep. Since I didn’t want to waste wood or lantern fuel, I was basically stuck sitting in the dark all night.

It is best to manage your exhaustion in both directions, know that when night comes you actually want your exhaustion to be pretty high as this will ensure you aren’t up all night wasting energy on doing nothing.The Long Dark can be a very challenging game, but it can also be extremely peaceful and meditative. Use these tips to get help get you started as you build your way to a long term survival technique. The Long Dark will be out on August 1st on Steam and PS4, but you can also play the early access version now on PC and Mac.

If you were stuffing your face with food this past holiday season, do spare a thought for what my character, Will Mackenzie, was doing at the same time in; stranded in the North Canadian wildness, freezing his ass off and surrounded by wolves while he tried to find his friend in the aftermath of an horrific plane crash. Sounds like fun right?Well, it really is, and the sheer amount of work that developer Hinterland has poured into The Long Dark since its original release in 2017 (you can read our ) means that the game deserves a second critical bite of the apple and in doing so, we’ve discovered one of the best survival adventures money can buy. The Long Dark: Wintermute Redux is now much improved and realizes its potential with aplombGiven that we’ve already raved at length about The Long Dark previously, this review will instead be concerned with shining a light on the considerable improvements that developer Hinterland have made in the 16 or so months since we saw the game last. Right off the bat, it’s clear that Hinterland’s quest to reinvigorate The Long Dark extends to nearly all aspects of its design. With a vast and dizzying range of improvements, The Long Dark Redux truly feels like an essential survival adventure.One of the biggest beneficiaries of such improvements is the narrative encapsulated within the Wintermute story mode. War for the overworld minions. Now with greatly improved scripting boasting additional plot elements, new side-stories to discover, better voice-acting and re-recorded dialogue, it all adds up to the end result that Wintermute now flows much better a story-based experience.Beyond Wintermute itself, a range of positive changes have also been made to The Long Dark’s almost inexhaustible Survival mode too.

This includes brand new challenges, new buffs and a whole bunch of tweaks that meaningfully adjust everything from unwanted bear spawn glitches to the manner in which some skills are used by the player. In particular, interacting with stoves and fireplaces is much better now – with a clear demarcation between the various stages of providing fuel, heating liquids and so on now being much more obvious than before.

And then stacked on top of all this are a veritable raft of visual improvements and optimizations, all serving to polish the PS4 experience further with better lighting, improved frame rates and the inclusion of other graphical effects that were previously only found int he PC version of the game. Likewise, the audio side of things has seen a substantial uptick in quality too, with audio design that is grandly atmospheric – the sound of the wind howling through the valley, pushing its way past and through the tree branches like someone rushing through a train station, proving to be one such subtle highlight of these improvements. As part of this refreshed Redux release, the UI has been iterated upon massively – making it far easier to navigate and simpler to use.Despite Hinterland implementing such widespread refinement throughout The Long Dark, it’s actually easy to forget how much the Canadian developer actually managed to get right in the first place.