A Short Walk Through The Long Dark

Growing up, my parents used to drag my sister and I along to go cross country skiing. The whole time, I really did not enjoy it, and it instilled a life-long disdain for the outdoors within me. I think that the problem was that my folks were out of shape, and as such very, very slow. My sister and I would go blasting along, only to have to wait for a good 10-15 minutes as our parents caught up. It was very boring. So much so that I would dream up far fetched survival scenarios if I were ever stuck in the wilderness in order to pass the time.

I think this may have been what got me somewhat interested in survival games years later. How would I forage for food? Where would I sleep? How would I repel the zombies? Well, maybe not the last one, though there have been no lack of games in the genre that have been eager to throw hordes of the undead at players. That's one of the things that really appeals to me while playing The Long Dark. It's just me versus nature. A harsh winter in the mountains. The biting wind. Seldom having quite enough food or fuel to be comfortable. The need to press on in hopes of finding a new shelter because the place you've been staying is fresh out of supplies. All the while, trudging through the snow hoping to find a place you're not even sure exists while jumping at anything that moves for fear a pack of wolves is stalking you. It's compelling stuff made all the better by the corpses I discover kindly staying dead.

Review: How to Survive (PC)

How to Survive is an almost quirky mixtures of horrible thing/zombie titles you might already be familiar with. There are elements of Dead Rising, Dead Island, and the Hunter: Reckoning games; along with hints of isometric post-apocalyptic role-playing and possibly Monkey Island.

It's almost something I'd recommend to see what a small studio can do, especially if you're looking to pick-up games on the cheap -- $15 seems just about right -- but for me it whiffs on capitalizing on it's biggest asset: Kovac.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted Impressions (PC)

Jeff takes a super early look at Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the PC survival game where you're the lone human on a group of islands, trying to find a way off while being hunted by a bunch of gentlemen robots.

Review: Don't Starve (PC)

Discovering a rather forbidding camp

Well, it looks like I've found another game that will deprive me of countless hours of sleep over the coming weeks, and it's called Don't Starve. It's a game where your character magically gets whisked away into the middle of the wilderness by some jerk, and players have to do their best to survive, gathering basic resources to build stuff, and food to eat so that their character doesn't starve, as the game's title hints at. There's a lot to do, and players need to find a logical way of going about it. Don't Starve is one of those games that will have players thinking, "Well, I'll just do this, this, and this, and you know what, while I'm at it I might as well do this too..." Then it just keeps going like this until suddenly it's 4AM, and you have to get up for work in a couple of hours. It's just that much fun, and absorbing.