Given that I quite like survival games, these days, I have had my eye on The Long Dark for a while. Sure, it isn't as open-ended as some of these games (you can't really progress beyond a basic survival sort of mode), but it has a neat environment and is full of various Canadian influences so I was interested.

This weekend, it was at a 90% discount on Steam so I picked it up for about $5.

Played it for a few hours last night and I do like it. It is difficult and a little overwhelming to start, but that is par for the course when this genre is done well.

Just learning the mechanics, I am hiding out in a cabin near a frozen lake with the Canadian flag flying outside.

Definitely well-done and with an interesting general feel which I haven't seen done quite this way before (the biggest threat to survival is the bitter cold of the environment). I will need to mess around with it a bit more and also try the story mode to see where that goes. For now, I am just playing the survival mode on easy difficulty.

Other than that, I think I have figured out a way to constrain some of what I had in mind for the next OP release, so I should get started on some of the movement changes I had in mind (want to fix passive falling jank and add running/sneaking). I also added another plan for the release after next, where I want to seriously overhaul movement and mutation scheduling since the current system is gratuitously complicated and I am not sure I am getting any value from that (it is quite expressive but I am not sure if that enables anything and can cause bogus rounding errors, etc, due to time slicing so narrowly).

Otherwise, it is good to see it finally warming up out there. I have been able to run errands in my Vibrams over the past few days, although I still need a coat. So far, so good.

Now, to become less insane,
...Nights