You’ve fallen through the ice at -20°C, turning a normal supply run into a fight for your life. Your clothes are soaked-through and beginning to freeze, you have no choice but to throw them off and scramble to safety, praying you have enough useful consciousness to make it there. Building a fire can be difficult at the best of times, and your shaking hands and soaked supplies aren’t making it any easier. It’s all going to come down to the resourcefulness you can show in these agonizing minutes that will make the difference between life and death.

Stories like that are exciting, right? That’s what this game should be about, those moments of survival where you’re perched on a knife’s edge and have to be smart to survive. But oddly enough, The Long Dark has such a weird balance with its survival gameplay that players are never really put in situations where these moments could occur.

The best way to break down the problem is to analyze the game’s five meters: heat, energy, hunger, thirst, and status. To keep your heat up, you can just stay inside, rest near a fire, or wear clothes to slow the drain when you’re outside. Your energy level drains proportionately to your physical activity and replenishes upon sleeping, and hunger and thirst work in a similar way. Status is essentially the catch-all score card, being diminished if you’re overworked, hungry, dehydrated, sick, or injured. That sounds sensible, but consider what this incentivises players to do: minimize physical activity and stay inside. This solves the heat, energy, injury, and sickness problems, and it also kinda solves the hydration problem. Water can be easily melted from snow, and since your environment is so snowy, you aren’t even required to go outside to collect it. If you’re in a house with a stove, you can boil enough water to last roughly two weeks in an hour, trivializing this requirement entirely. So, the only reason to ever leave your house is to gather food, in a process which still doesn’t prompt the sort of player-driven stories the game needs. Simply following a road and cleaning out settlements gives an abundance of food, and you can even survive about four days with no food before your status drains to zero. So, the optimal way to survive is to do nothing for three and a half days, eat a big meal, then do it again. When you’re out of food, move to the next settlement, pick up endlessly respawning sticks along the way for building fires, and do it again. In each settlement, there will be more than just food too, so the ammo, clothes, and other supplies you find make it easier and safer every time.

The immediate argument to be made against that is “of course you want to stay inside, this game is meant to be realistic”, but realism isn’t interesting on its own. What is The Long Dark’s realism in service of? It’s interesting for a few hours as you learn the ropes, but after that there’s nothing left to maintain the engagement. Players can make the game more punishing with the impressively comprehensive custom difficulty sliders, but if they don’t change the fundamental dominant strategy of sitting on your arse, then that’s all the game will ever boil down to. To test that point, I decided to pretend the goal of the game was to traverse the longest route from one end of the map to the other, and this was a journey I found incredibly enjoyable. I set personal rules like not allowing myself to overburden my pack or store items in safehouses, and it ended up being a tense and interesting experience that I genuinely enjoyed. It’s this sort of challenge that would let players build personal stories, not the blank sheet of paper that is its main survival mode or the bland fetch quests of its story episodes. I may have had a great time making my own fun out of it, but I can’t recommend a game where I had to invent my own objectives, set my own rules, tweak difficulty sliders manually, and hold myself to those limitations in the face of their artificiality. Crafting games just shouldn’t require you to craft the game itself.