The Long, Long Dark
On suicide, survival games, and going on and on and on and on
Necessary disclaimer(s):
This… essay, if you can even call it that, deals with some pretty heavy topics, the most explicit one being very extensive discussions and depictions of suicide. If you struggle with similar kinds of issues, I strongly advise you to seek help wherever you can — whether in the form of a local hotline, or a counselling service, or a friend or family member whom you can trust — as soon as you can, and to try your best to not dwell on these kinds of things for too long, before you potentially find yourself in a position you may live to one day regret. You may feel like living may absolutely fucking suck right now, but until someone can come back and convince me otherwise, the pessimist in me is gonna assume that dying is probably a little bit worse than even that.
And for those who may be potentially concerned about me: I’m doing pretty alright now, possibly even better than I’ve ever been in my entire life, although some days it certainly doesn’t feel like that. I wrote this now primarily because it’s a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a long while, but only now do I finally feel like I’m in a position where I have enough support and stability and most importantly distance to be able to parse things from a healthier perspective.
At the age of seventeen, just a few weeks after I graduated high school, I decided that I would kill myself on my twenty-second birthday. It came to me one particularly unremarkable summer day, very suddenly and with a startling degree of clarity and certainty, like a revelation of sorts: the first vision of my future I felt unwaveringly sure about, maybe for the first time in my life.
Whenever I tell people this — my parents, my friends, my therapist, hell, casual strangers some days — I always get confronted (after, of course, the usual degrees of emotional fanfare) with the inevitable question:
Why?
It’s a difficult question to answer — not least when the person asking also happens to hold some sway over the circumstances of your imminent future. I try to be as honest as I can, although truthfully, I usually just end up defaulting to a handful of ready-made excuses (which the following years certainly provided no shortage of convenient circumstances to reap): lost a scholarship, lost a significant other, first big project failed spectacularly, friends drifted away, no job prospects, no dating prospects, tidal waves of public humiliation , debilitating envy and resentment, the god-damned vending machine breaking and taking the last three fucking dollars on my debit card, whatever and ever, amen.
But you already know all this. You’ve heard this story a thousand times. There’s nothing new here, no revelations and no surprises. And besides, like I said: they were mostly just excuses anyways, coincidences of circumstance which simply accelerated an instinct that’d been building in me years before that.
Because, you see: lying there in the sand on that clear, bright summer afternoon, the dim hum of the ocean in my ears and the heat rising beneath me, there were no convenient excuses. Right then, high school was just beginning to feel like a pleasant thrill of the past, and in a few months I’d be attending a good school on a full scholarship. My girlfriend was lying next to me, reading a book I think, and every once in a while I’d look at her and she’d catch my eye and we’d half-laugh to one another with that kind of innocent romantic idiocy, not even the slightest hint of resentment or distance yet.
Earlier that week, someone had reached out to me for the first time to do an interview about my latest project: a free mod that I’d started in my spare time as a means of distracting myself from college applications, but which had suddenly and unexpectedly bloomed into something much more than that, maybe even the big one, the thing that I thought, no, desperately hoped, would be the break that I needed to finally be someone worth talking to, someone worth hiring.
I’d told all my friends about it the day I found out, as we unwound ourselves over our usual spot in the parking lot of the ACME, which only a few months before had been the A&P, watching the sun dip behind the treeline and the sky gradually wash out to a thin vanilla hue. The Dr Peppers we were drinking were ice-cold, $0.75 a can from the liquor store, and the air had a kind of warm clarity to it: whatever the scent of freshly-mown grass and rising smoke and root-beer in the summertime and all that dumb shit is supposed to make you feel.
It was in that moment that the decision came to me that by the year I turned twenty-two, I would leave this world without a trace.
Why?
There’s a genre of video games out there (or, if we’re being a bit more fastidious with our taxonomies, a sub-genre of the larger and even vaguer umbrella of “action games”) broadly referred to as “survival games”. The premise of these games tend to follow a pretty familiar pattern: you hit Start, you’re dropped into the PoV of some nobody who’s found themselves, for one reason or another, utterly alone and adrift in some forlorn world; and armed with nothing but an omniscient UI and a burning desire to get your twenty dollars’ worth of content, you as hapless drifter are then condemned to spend the next several dozen hours of your life eking out a semblance of an existence for yourself from little more than the sticks and stones and bits of detritus (and on rare occasions , even less) which surround you.
Or, well, that’s the idea of it, anyways.
It’s a mightily compelling setup, especially for a game: you get the blank slate freedom of your convenient amnesia opener, mixed with the life-affirming, sticks-and-stones, rags-to-riches grind of the great American bootstrapping myth. (And, on top of all this, the developer gets a built-in narrative justification for not having to spend a whole bunch of time and money to design, model, animate, program, and voice a bunch of friendly NPCs for you to kill and fall in love with!) In this light, it’s easy to understand the appeal of survival games for both players and developers alike: the ultimate frontier fantasy, born again in a world free of expectations and responsibilities to anyone but oneself, free to carve out a brave new world through sheer grit and cleverness.
The thing is though, that’s all it is. A pastoral fantasy, of a state of living that at best usually just ends up being little more than a pretence towards naturalism; and far more often, one which manifests as the kind of cheap libertarian wet-dream entire cultures have been built on, a moral fable about worlds of wolves and sheep, and the age-old virtues of mashing one’s nose to the grindstone and “just gittin’ gud”.
You see, I’ve come to be convinced that there are no real survival games. Or perhaps, more precisely, that there are no games that are really about survival. And before I get put on blast for committing the oh-so-grave Internet folly of semantic pedantry (or perhaps even worse, an informal fallacy!) I will readily admit that I don’t think this discrepancy actually “matters” in any grand educational sense, when considering the intents and purposes of designers in designing engaging video game experiences, usually for the purposes of entertainment. I will even concede that this discrepancy probably doesn’t matter to anyone in any meaningful sense except perhaps myself, for intensely selfish and idiosyncratic reasons.
But the thing is, when we talk about “survival” when it comes to game design, what we’re really talking about most of the time is just a primitive-level awareness of the most basic and rudimentary aspects of our bodies’ (or, well, our simulated bodies’) presences within an implied physical world. If we take even the most cursory glance at the basic nouns of what most people would constitute the trademarks of the survival genre — hunger, thirst, fatigue, shelter implied through a focus on base-building — it becomes rather quickly apparent that we’re truly just dealing with the absolute flat-fuck rock-bottom of the idiomatic pyramid. This is survival in the most nominal, animal sense of the word: a purely mechanical process which utterly reduces the executive function and purpose of a human being down to its most primitive, stem-of-brain form, a machine that needs occasional refueling and rests in an otherwise unceasing march towards some monumental end.
To what ends?
If we take a look at the some of the most popular survival games (this just happened to be the first result of a Google search, no attachment here), we can begin to form the image of a vague cloud of possible conclusions to this death drive: either you live a slave to the earth, digging with your hands through mud and grass and dirt and sand, piling up enough refuse long enough until one day you become the one who disrupts the ecologies and scatters the inhabitants of the fields; or you claw and punch and stab and shoot your way as an interloper in a strange land, dropped there suddenly by some horrible twist of fate, pitted against a savage and unrelenting landscape picked clean by unhinged clans until one day it’s you who’s the one running around in mismatched military gear with an automatic rifle in hand and a backpack filled with thousands of rounds of ammunition and the jerkied remains of other unfortunate interlopers, hunting down fresh arrivals for fun and meat. More often than not, it’s a bit of both, but the cycle is pretty clear: kill, harvest, build, expand, repeat.
Of course, I’ve chosen to deliberately frame the core gameplay loops of these titles in the most uncharitable ways possible, and I readily recognise that the general experience while playing most of these games is probably going to be one of continual delight and entertainment, rather than active disgust or despair. However, I think this discrepancy is vital to note as well: with few exceptions, these titles are designed to be experiences which first and foremost entertain the player, a significant part of which means making necessary concessions against boredom and frustration, which will undoubtedly deter the vast majority of players from continuing to engage with the work.
I think this is ultimately where I define the point of semantic failure earlier, in describing the term “survival game” as a kind of blunt misnomer: not that most of these games are necessarily failing at being games about survival, but that they do not really aspire to such a thing in the first place. Rather, they are games about building elaborate or beautiful structures, or assembling powerful clans, or killing and surviving, that have also decided to add in, perhaps as an attempted concession towards an idea of “realism” (or, as people like to put it now, “immersion”), a slight bit of friction which borrows the language — however primitive — of the broad idea of survival.
So what is survival?
One of the most common criticisms I see applied to survival games is that for a significant majority of titles, players describe the task of having to maintain statistical balances such as hunger or thirst or fatigue as amounting to little more than a trivial annoyance. After a certain point, especially when the game has “picked up”, such tasks seem to only serve as temporary disruptions of more enjoyable game loops, such as gunning down a potential hostile after a pitched firefight in a treeline. Someone on Reddit once referred to “the actual survival mechanics” as the game design equivalent of a particularly troublesome hangnail, which I found to be a startlingly apt and intuitive summary of the overall sentiment I was seeing across a number of discussions.
Isn’t that the point, though?
Survival is the most boring battle. It’s not just the encounter with the wolf, but the digging in shallow dirt with your fingers for worms to stave off your starvation, the cloudy darkness of your piss, the lurching nausea as your body rejects the mushrooms you ate in a stream of rancid diarrhea, all the microtears and blisters and fissures that open up all over your flesh which you hope will harden over into calluses before they become host to bacteria and rot.
It’s not just those five minutes of trauma that completely unravel a life in the making, but the next five decades of dead-end therapies and desperate solutions and oceans of swelling resentment and distrust. It’s the flow and ebb of piece-of-shit customers and piece-of-shit bosses, and counting your macros so your heart doesn’t give out before your career does, and watching the numbers rise and recede in the corner of your screen day in and day out as you sit there in front of a blank monitor with a blank mind and a languishing posture wondering what you’re gonna have for lunch. It’s the oil that gathers in your hair every night when you sleep, the dust that accumulates on every surface of your room, all the trinkets and souvenirs and detritus of your past lives that you gathered into a drawer that now needs to be emptied out because you no longer live there. It’s the tingling feeling of numbness in your legs when you’ve been standing so long the circulation gets cut off, because they told you that you can’t sit because it’s bad for their image, and it’s smiling like you mean it at people whose perception of you ranks you on par with the local furniture, and it’s the feeling that one day you’re gonna snap and there’s gonna be a reckoning , because a brand-new Glock 19 and a fifty-round box of 9mm FMJ rounds costs about the same as about a month of therapy which probably isn’t gonna help you much anyway.
The thing is though — I admit it — no one really wants to play a game like that, and honestly, in good conscience, I don’t think anyone really wants to make a game like that either. Nobody actually wants to know what it feels like to shit in the woods, or what a bunch of chopped-up, salted-and-fried worms tastes like; and anybody who has experienced those things can readily attest to the fairly obvious conclusion that yes, they in fact, without a shadow of a doubt, fucking suck.
And that’s the thing. Having to stop what you’re doing to eat and drink fucking sucks. Feeling too tired to get up at the alarm’s behest fucking sucks. Having to acquire, process, and transport the lumber you need to start building a new table really fucking sucks, especially when the table ends up not even looking that good anyways. There’s a reason (well, several, but…) why most of us don’t go through life sprinting through our neighborhoods and work places at full speed and jumping up and down the sides of mountains so we can shave off a couple of minutes had we just chosen to take the road around; but in video games, this is common behaviour, because walking takes a long time, and generally fucking sucks.
But that’s the point right?
Survival isn’t fun. Survival isn’t engaging. Survival is friction and fragility, the parts of life that get left behind on the cutting floor. Survival is an endless grind towards diminishing returns. And when reproduced in fiction, what other purpose can it serve in its most authentic representations but to act as an ever-present reminder of the constant decay of our bodies and our minds? This is the texture of our lives: what we talk about when we talk about living, and being human, whatever that means.
Every action we take in this world depletes some part of us which must be replenished, every step forward comes at a cost. It’s a kind of ultimate humility in a way, the tax of all taxes: a reminder that even the fastest gun on this side of [nondescript loosely-fictionalised Russian city] still sweats and bleeds and could use a candy bar every once in a while. Memento mori, motherfucker. And remember to have fun while you’re at it.
Picture this:
You press Start. You wake up at rock bottom, bare-handed and bare-assed. You’re probably wounded, so you slap a leaf onto your body and begin to feel better immediately. With the remaining leaves, you stitch yourself a loincloth real quick, because of course, decency matters. You realise you need to eat, so you craft a spear out of a long sharpened stick, and effortlessly cut down a wild boar that happens to run too close to you and ends up getting stuck on the terrain geometry. You harvest the meat cleanly and efficiently in a matter of seconds using little more than a sharpened stone. That’s dinner taken care of. You wander a bit until you find a stream from which you drink until you no longer feel thirst. This seems like a decent place to settle down.
You build yourself a pickaxe or a hatchet out of twigs and a slab of stone, which you use to fell a tree in four mighty swings. You take the remains of the tree, conveniently pre-processed into perfectly-shaped logs of lumber, and construct yourself a small house real quick, where you’ll pass the first couple of nights. Not a bad start, you think to yourself. Not a bad start at all.
Over the next couple of days, you’ll repeat this process, venturing out further and further every time, discovering more hardy materials with which you can craft more elaborate tools and structures. You repeat this every day for weeks, maybe months on end. And then one day, maybe as you’re mindlessly sharpening an obsidian sword, or perhaps you’re overlooking your newly-constructed granary, it suddenly hits you:
There’s nothing else to do in this world.
You’ve seen all there is to see. Stepped foot on every greyed-out block of the map, looted all the major and minor dungeons and every unmarked crack and crevice in between, slayed all the end-game inhabitants and reaped their remains for the rarest gear and materials. Your settlements dwarf the pathetic shack villages of the indigenous population and you can kill anything you come across with the ease of an afterthought. You will never go hungry or thirsty again because your combined production output exceeds the potential yield of the entire natural ecology. This is what you wanted, right? What you worked so hard for all those hours to build for yourself. This is living at the fullest.
Except, well, there’s nothing left to do.
The other big complaint I hear about survival games is that they just get so boring after a certain point. One of the most common grievances, often coming from players with hundreds or even thousands of hours invested into these experiences, is that the game suffers from a “serious” lack of “end-game content”.
“End-game content” is a somewhat curious concept generally used to refer to playable content, often “optional”, that is meant to be accessed only after all the other “main” activities in the game have been completed. Practically speaking, this usually takes the form of incredibly difficult content (events such as “Raids”, for example) that requires a significant amount of time, investment, and coordination within the game’s ecosystems to have even a semblance of a fair chance at attempting; and is often posed as, and taken on as a kind of final challenge of sorts to the most dedicated players.
The problem with end-game content though is that the very idea of an “end-game” is in itself an infinitely receding concept, and one whose inevitable conclusion is always decadence and gratuity. It’s predicated upon the assumption that not only must there always be something new to do, but perhaps more pointedly, that there always must be something worth doing.
Look, I get it. We were animals once. It is in our instinct to continue on as long as we can, long after the thrill of living (or maybe just playing) is gone. I understand how habits and rituals work, and I understand what sunk-cost fallacy is, especially when it comes to the wallets of fickle players.
But the fact of the matter is that games are not, and cannot be infinite by design, by — and this is particularly when it comes to the genre of survival games — virtue of the fact that every design is inherently and particularly limited by the lexicon of potential actions it offers to the player through which they can engage with the constructed world. This is the fate of every self-contained system, after all: its conclusion is written into its choice of verbs from the very start.
When all you can do is kill, and loot, and build, then the world begins to seem just a little bit more bleak, just a little bit more devoid of meaning once you’ve killed all you can kill and looted all you can loot and built all you can build. These are not games that are concerned on any level with “survival” as a practical question, but which apply the frictive texture of the “survival experience” frivolously in an attempt to convey a depth or perhaps authenticity that is simply not present within the core of the intended experience.
These are worlds devoid of the need to survive, as they’ve already centred at the core the pleasure of their players as the default: where the only supported structures of meaning revolve around the extraction and accumulation of material resources, and where the top players are the min-maxing hoarders who have become addicted to this ruinous engine and, unable to aspire to more , often end up simply devolving into the cruelest versions of themselves, roaming around and actively meddling in the pathetic efforts of those of lesser means, for the sole and simple pleasure of casual spite.
The end-game is the hardest part to design in my opinion, far more so than any other stage, precisely because its very existence is an active acknowledgement and refusal of natural conclusion. And far more often than not, it’s not a part of the game that’s designed for or played out of a healthy love for the work, but a peculiar breed of fear: a fear of irrelevance, of sunk cost, of the vanity of potential. Most games are afraid of the end-game, and either shy away from it, smartly embracing more linear frameworks in which to situate their action; or they panic and throw funding at it as long as they can, hoping to fill in the existential abscess faster than its gravity can drag the rest of it down (or so people on forums and in comments sections love to think, at least).
There is one game though that I come back to often, that I feel manages to not only avoid this, but actively confront, and maybe even embrace it, this sense of an ending. It’s a game called The Long Dark, by the Canadian developer Hinterland Studio. It describes itself as:
a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies — only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster. (Steam)
This is it, friends. The big one hit, the rapture arrived. The world is over. And yet — somehow, I’m not.
I come to my senses in a narrow ravine. I have no idea where I am or how I got there or even who I am for that matter, although I suppose only the first of these things ultimately matters. All I know is that I’ve arrived as an interloper into this barren wilderness, although even my intent will remain unknown to me for the duration of my numbered days.
The sky is dim and low, a neutral sheet of grey that continues as far as I can see. There is a collapsed train tunnel behind me, and the remains of the tracks stretch out into the snowy haze just beyond. Lacking any other sense of direction, I decide to follow them.
I cross over a small trestle, continuing to follow the tracks until I find myself in the midst of a grove of logging stands. A small trailer stands nearby. I search inside: several bunk beds which look comfortable enough, a single stale energy bar. I’m not particularly hungry, but I eat it anyways, maybe just out of habit. Outside, as I’m leaving, I notice a corpse half-buried just slightly out of the way which I’d somehow missed coming in. Its features are unrecognisable, completely obscured by snow. There’s nothing on the body, and I move on.
Further down the tracks, through another tunnel, I pass over a much larger trestle, overlooking a rather remarkable waterfall and an equally extravagant plunge into a rocky valley down below. I linger for a few moments to indulge in the sight of it before remembering that I am slowly freezing to death and that I don’t have the luxury to stop, least of all for some light tourism.
Eventually I find myself at a small crop of trailers, arranged like a campgrounds along the tracks. Having lost my way once or twice after deviating from the tracks to forage for some firewood and medicinal herbs, the sight of the trailers comes as a steady relief to me: the sky has begun to darken, not just with the setting of the sun, but also with the arrival of an ominously dark layer of clouds, which loom heavy and foreboding and cast the snow in a dim pallour. The wind’s begun to pick up and light flurries of snow fill the air, careening past my vision.
I step into one of the trailers, where I find to my dismay little more than a bed, a can of expired peaches which I can’t open because I have neither a can opener nor a knife, and an assortment of wooden detritus which is largely useless to me in its current form. I consider taking a look at the other cabins, but to my vague horror, I discover when I open the door that the flurries have turned into a full-on blizzard and that, with my torch immediately snuffed out by the wind, I can see nothing within that swirling blindness.
Back within the shelter of the trailer, I stand there for a moment in the midst of the inky black, before uncomfortably fumbling my way to the bed. I check the inventory of items I managed to pick up earlier in the day: mostly herbs and twigs, a handful of mushrooms, some stones. I carefully eat a packet of ketchup chips in the dark, and replace my coat with a slightly-less tattered outer shell. For a moment I contemplate the distinct possibility that I will unceremoniously freeze to death overnight while asleep, killed by foul luck, and my own lack of preparation in less than a day. After flipping a coin, I decide to take the risk anyways.
It was on one particularly cold, bright spring evening in 2019 that I decided to finally kill myself for good.
Why that morning, I couldn’t — and still can’t — really tell you. I guess I just didn’t feel incredible. People say that suicide is a process in the coming, but the way it’s always felt to me, more often than not I think it just comes down to a split-second decision at the end of the day. Sure, stuff builds up over months, over years, no doubt about that — but that’s just all innuendo. The actual moment — the only meaningful part — occupies no more than the span of an instant. You could be waiting in line for groceries, or taking the train back home one evening, or even just sitting there doing absolutely nothing at all when suddenly, it hits you, just like that. You discover all of a sudden that you’ve been spread out too thin on the world all this time, that you just can’t go on anymore, no matter what. And that’s the moment it happens. Yes, or no: the most binary and fundamental of decisions. You flip a coin, you push a button, you take a step, you pull a trigger.
Whatever.
Maybe it was the pounding in my head when I woke up. Maybe it was the way the shower head sputtered twice, pipes groaning with pressure, before finally giving in and spewing forth an impotent and lukewarm trickle. Maybe it was the newsfeed that morning. Maybe it was the slightly rancid aftertaste of the milk in my cereal, just a few days overdue. Maybe it was an old friend messaging me that afternoon to tell me that she hoped I was doing well, asking me if I’d found someone yet, telling me about how she was doing, about her friends, about her boyfriend and how she was going on a trip that weekend with all of them, when I hadn’t asked, and didn’t want to know. Maybe I couldn’t help myself. Maybe I was just too out of touch for far too long, and maybe I just couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe I was just bored. Maybe it was all these things, or maybe it was none of them at all.
After some period of uncertain deliberation, I settled upon hanging as my preferred exit strategy.
In truth, it was a bit less than ideal, to put it lightly. Embarrassingly enough, I’d always envisioned a more dramatic, or at the very least impactful death. To cast my body from the heights of windswept cliffs to the heartless seas: how romantic! Even a direct gunshot to the head, however messy, would’ve sufficed — that uniquely American thrill.
Circumstance had it otherwise, though, and since I had neither cliffs nor handguns, or a bottle of pills or a handshake of carbon monoxide to see me off proper, I settled upon hanging, which seemed anyways to be my best option in terms of both efficacy and ease of operation. All things considered, perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad at the end of the day. I admit in retrospect that I probably should’ve done a bit more research into the precise mechanics of it, but it seemed simple enough at the time: mass, compression, distance over time.
Well, physics was never my strong point, after all, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to figure it out.
As luck would have it (or maybe not), the rope I had chosen had been sitting in the garage long enough that the individual threads had, over years of exposure to moisture, dust, mould and insects, become brittle and thin. Why I hadn’t noticed this initially continues to utterly evade me: I must’ve been struck with a bout of stupidity, blindness, or something in between. Or perhaps I chose it that way unknowingly, not really wanting to die all that bad: yet another stupid trick I’d play upon myself.
Either way, when I stepped off the chair, the sudden amount of stress split the rotten fibres and instead of my neck snapping, the rope itself snapped and I fell to the floor unceremoniously like dead weight, only minus the “dead” part.
Cradling a mildly-swollen ankle, and having failed quite pathetically at taking my own life, I sat for a long while and contemplated what I would, what I should do next. Should I try again? I wondered. Any reasonable person would probably say yes. After all, such a monumental decision would’ve certainly been informed by enough willpower to overcome even the mildest discomforts, right?
However, the will to live, as I’ve come to realise over the past few years, has a terrible tendency to resurface in the most inconvenient moments.
Instead, I decided to go for a walk. It was the first time I had left my house all year. I can’t tell you why I felt the need to go out; it must’ve just seemed like the best idea at the time, I guess. I wandered for over an hour, drifting across the sidewalks, and eventually out into the road. At that hour, the streets were entirely vacant: I must’ve looked real suspicious. After a certain point I got a bit tired, but since the ground was wet from rain the prior night and I’d already walked that far (which, granted, didn’t even turn out to be that far at all), I decided to continue walking anyways.
Some time later I found myself at the train station near my house. I contemplated boarding a train somewhere, but realised I had left my monthly pass at home, and had no more money on my debit card to afford a ticket anywhere else. I then briefly contemplated lying down on the tracks and letting a train run me over; but after waiting for some time (I ended up not lying down after all, as the rails were cold and wet, so instead I just stood there quite stupidly, hoping no one would notice my presence and summon the police), a train did not come and my impatience was beginning to mount and anyways, I realised at some point that getting hit by a train leaves the body in a rather unflattering state; so I got up and just returned home.
For the second time that night, once again ensconced in the dim glow of my bedroom, I thought about what I would be leaving behind. Not much, I figured: a shitty room with no meaningful possessions, a shitty life with no meaningful prospects. As above, so below. Earlier that day, I had read an obituary in The Guardian from a woman whose husband, an anaesthetist, had killed himself some months prior. “It feels like carelessness to me,” she wrote. “Like he slipped through my fingers while I looked the other way.” It was a painfully effusive piece. My heart felt hollow after reading it. It ached for some time with a dull and alien sense of longing. What for, I’m not particularly sure. It made me feel a bit uneasy, like the nausea of motion sickness. After a while, though, it went away.
The hardest difficulty available in The Long Dark is called Interloper. It’s an interesting name for a positively brutal experience, one which takes the natural scarcity and indifference of the game’s setting and escalates it significantly across virtually every aspect of the design: useful item spawns are much rarer, items decay faster, wildlife is scarcer but more hostile, the days and nights alike are both colder and more deadly.
An interloper is a kind of stranger, one who’s not welcome in a usually foreign, or even alien landscape. This, for me, is the core of The Long Dark’s thesis: the experience of suddenly finding oneself, woefully unprepared and ill-equipped, in an unrelentingly hostile environment where any chance of survival is contingent upon sheer luck, and any preparation or planning can be utterly undone by a second of misfortune.
The other difficulties similarly reflect through their names, with remarkable accuracy, their understanding of the player’s place within this world: Pilgrim, Voyageur, Stalker. Like the interloper, each is a figure a few degrees removed from the environment, who has come to it with some kind of purpose in mind: to contemplate, to explore, to inhabit. But the interloper is the only one whose namesake also contains a response from the environment itself to their presence: that they have chosen to enter with the mark of an intruder, and will be treated as such.
Regardless of whichever difficulty the player ends up choosing though, there is only one possible ending to the game, contained within its very title and presented to the player on a stark black card upon their death: to fade into the long dark.
There are a number of games out there that profess to be, on whatever level, about death, and particularly, death that comes as the conclusion of one’s own decisions. I usually try my best not to doubt their best intentions, but oftentimes I find most of them to be too sentimental or cloying, and the ones that aren’t are rarely ever about death itself, but rather, overcoming it through perseverance and sometimes just sheer grit.
Looking back, what The Long Dark offered to me was the first (and if I’m being honest, probably the only) experience that did not try to lay some moral claim over my decisions, that did not try to project upon my struggle any drama or swooning revelation. It was the first work in which I felt my experience was truly recognised, and mirrored: that my decision to no longer live would not be a meaningful act to anyone but myself, and that it would be one with no trigger or framing, just one final action on just another day of what in another timeline would continue on as my life.
I think a big part of this lies in just how thoroughly disinterested the game is in constructing a narrative or canon out of any single player’s lived experiences within the game. It is a world utterly devoid of other observers or signposts of meaning; a landscape that has, through sheer desolation, become truly alien in its indifference towards its interlopers’ actions.
No matter how well they planned their expeditions; no matter how many sunsets and sunrises to which they bore witness, or great expanses they contemplated; or how many wolves they managed to shoot down, and pounds of meat they were carrying upon their death; or whether they saw and mapped every square meter of every region, or didn’t manage to make it past the very first few; everyone ends the game the same way.
Unlike with most other games, the idea of “competing” here on any aspect feels redundant, maybe even crass. It doesn’t matter if you lived a thousand days, or less than one. Each approach and experience embodies its own philosophy of living and dying that is no more or less valid than the other; and the only thing that differs is the valence of one’s emotions in the moments before death.
After a few days or so of contemplation, I settled on the Raven Falls Trestle as my final spot. It seemed fitting, as it was the first major structure I’d come across that first night; but beyond that, I had no serious attachments to it. Honestly, it was just the closest vista to where I’d chosen to make my base, and after about ten seconds of contemplation, I realised I didn’t want to invest the effort to plan out yet another series of expeditions just to find a good spot where I could kill myself.
I’d survived 44 days up until that point. That afternoon, just before sunset, I set out with nothing on my back except my clothes. I wanted to arrive at sunset, and go out with that as my last memory here. The weather was mostly clear, just a little bit overcast. It didn’t look like there was any chance of a storm picking up any time soon.
I arrived almost exactly on time according to my calculations. The sun was beginning to crest over the ridge. Unfortunately, I hadn’t factored in the possibility that it could look anything but magnificent. The sun indeed set as I sat there, languidly dipping beneath the mountains: a thin watery shade of vanilla, with a smattering of orange splotches scattered throughout.
My disappointment in the moment was palpable. I thought about postponing the whole thing until tomorrow, or the next day, or even the day after that. But I was there already, and I’d already made my choice, and if I didn’t do it then, I’d be too much of a coward to do it again.
I tried to think about something. My head was blank though, preoccupied with the task at hand, the bitter cold gripping me. I spent a good ten minutes, or maybe it was ten years, just standing there, shivering, trying to conjure up one last thought about something. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was given how distracted I felt by this kind of dumb shit any other given day.
At last, though, one came to me.
I am seventeen, and I have been dreaming. Mostly of stupid things, probably, but you know how it is: in high school, surrounded by pretty girls and petty struggles, time and consequence seem to have little bearing. People ask you what you want to do in the future, but no one really cares, or probably knows for that matter what “the future” even means at that point. At that age, it’s just another one of those fictions people tell you about to try to scare you into obedience. Spring has come, the days are both numbered and endless, and nothing matters: no jobs, no goals, no motivation, no future. Most of us will probably just go on to do whatever it is our parents, what the career counselors tell us to do: go to college, get some bullshit degree, get some bullshit job, pursue some bullshit passion if we can afford it. But in that moment, we’re not really thinking about any of that.
I’m seventeen, it’s the end of senior year, and the light of the setting sun filters through the blinds in the Latin room, getting in my eyes occasionally, but I don’t mind too much. I think I’m laughing, my friends are laughing, some stupid joke I can’t remember anymore, and for whatever reason, maybe it’s because I just got caught up too much in the moment, I say out loud suddenly, to no one in particular, “You know, I think things will be fine, regardless of where we end up going. I think we’ll all be okay.” We must’ve been talking about college. I had no idea what the hell I was saying, but it sounded right to me. I felt pretty good about things.
A few months later, we graduated. We left for college. Time passed.
At first, it was barely noticeable. That winter — motivated in part by a newly-renewed sense of worthlessness following a disastrous first year at university, mixed in with the unusually frigid and dismal weather — I stopped going out. It’s too cold, I’d tell myself; all this snow and slush. It seemed like a convenient excuse at the time. Besides: my friends — my new ones — still came by to visit me every once in a while, I still kept in close contact with my old ones, I was still in a fairly stable and comfortable relationship, I still had something to work on that made me feel like I was worth something: things were okay. It was just a seasonal thing.
But then spring came around.
Things did not get better. In fact, things not only did not get better: they got much worse. My grades plummeted. My relationship imploded. My project failed. Other than attending classes (only in the most nominal sense, admittedly; somehow, I’d managed to hold on to the barest semblance of my responsibilities as a student), I stopped going out altogether. Every other week or so, I’d leave my room at three in the morning, picking up the next week’s worth of food from a harshly-lit 24/7 about a fifteen-minute walk away. The trash accumulated. I didn’t want to see my friends. The sight of them forced me to confront, with acute directness, the depth of my own failure — and who wants to do that? I didn’t want to see anybody at all. I was scared. I felt profoundly, impossibly alienated. I didn’t want to feel that way — so in order to avoid it, I shut myself away.
Just outside my window, life rushed past me at dizzying speeds. This is what they call parallax, I guess: the singular and ageless antidote to solipsism. Every morning I woke to signs of global collapse: insurmountable debt, random acts of violence, mass exploitation and terror and despair. The atmosphere of the earth was crumbling and conspiracies seemed to metastasise by the day. My friends got new friends. My ex-girlfriend got a new boyfriend. They got internships, they got jobs, they earned money, they travelled and saw the world. We got older.
In the amber of my bedroom, time seemed to pass at an impossibly glacial rate. Eased by a steady drip of violent video games, high school anime melodrama and internet pornography, the days and nights bled together until they became indistinct, and then indistinguishable. The world was simultaneously ending, and utterly stagnant. We were all coming apart at the seams, at a speed so tectonically slow that we couldn’t even notice it. This can’t go on much longer, I told myself; this will go on forever.
Shortly before graduating, as a sign of commemoration for our enduring friendship, one of my closest friends took me to a local department store where he purchased us a matching set of wristwatches. The gesture was inspired by a recent film for which we shared a great appreciation, in which a father, before setting off upon an interstellar voyage to the end of the universe, gives his daughter his watch as a means of comparing their relative time upon his return. Sitting on the top deck of the parking lot of a nearby IKEA, we synchronised the watches to the second: the idea was that when we met again in the future, having returned from our separate ways, we would still be connected by that persistent tick, the mechanism of our relationship embodied in literal clockwork. We agreed to always keep them on, so that our memories could remain just a glance away.
Something went wrong, though. Call it mechanical imprecision, call it human error: for whatever reason, the hands of our watches slowly began to desynchronise, and what started out as an imperceptible difference eventually became a matter of seconds, which by the next year had become a difference in minutes, and eventually almost an entire hour. Each time we met, I seemed to fall further and further behind him.
The last we spoke, he was no longer wearing it. He’d claimed someone had stolen it from his room earlier that year. It didn’t matter whether he was telling the truth or not; I believed him, but more than that, I believed in the irreversible loss of its meaning. Not too long after that, I stopped wearing the watch as well. None of this is a metaphor for something more profound. The band had begun to wear down and chafe my skin, and although I hadn’t noticed it before, the weight of the watch itself at some point began felt a bit uncomfortable, a bit too noticeable upon my wrist. Every once in a while, I’ll still put it on, usually in anticipation of situations where its presence will be able to lend credence to the illusion of urgency. Most of the time, though, it just sits in my dresser. Sometimes, late at night, I can hear it ticking, and the sound fills me with the dread of nostalgia. At this point, that’s all it’s really good for: noting, with casual indifference, the passage of time.
Just the other day, he reached out to me again. I don’t know what compelled him to suddenly remember me, to reach out across the distance and send me a message. “How have you been?” I couldn’t tell if he actually cared, but it didn’t matter too much. We exchanged some pleasantries, cursorily updated each other on our states of living with information we probably could’ve gleaned more succinctly from our resumes. He was finishing up school. He had a job lined up as a software engineer at a prestigious technology company where he’d interned the previous summer, making more money in a year (not including bonuses) than my life will ever likely be worth. He felt somewhat unsatisfied and expressed mild anxiety about not knowing what he’d be doing for the rest of his life; he felt he was living insincerely, and didn’t feel like his personal passions were being fulfilled. I told him not to worry so much, since at least he was in a position where financial stability was not an imminent question; and that things were probably going to be okay. We didn’t talk about the past.
Then I jumped.
Except, of course, I didn’t.
I took a step, I really did, maybe even two — and then I saw the waves frothing beneath me, folding and unfurling, utterly indifferent to my presence looming up above.
I thought about a lot of things in that moment. I was scared. I hate the ocean. The smell of seawater makes me sick. If hell is real, I didn’t want to risk the chance of being stuck down there in the pitch black cold for the rest of eternity. They say that supposedly your life flashes right before your eyes at the moment of death; but there was no flash, no illumination, not even the slightest hint of revelation or even realisation for me.
Honestly, all I could think about was how much I wanted a fucking Dr Pepper.
I took a few moments to collect myself. Oddly, I didn’t feel that much different than moments before: I had no desire to cry or scream or anything melodramatic like that, and all I really felt was a sense of vague queasiness, the kind you get when your body’s pumping full of adrenaline and telling you to get the fuck out of there by any means necessary. My hands were shaking a bit, although I attributed it at the time to the cold. I’d taken my shoes and socks off just before. I put those back on too.
Then I went to the 7/11, got myself a Dr Pepper, and went to class.
Honestly, there’s no clean conclusion to this story. I have nothing to offer you that you don’t already know or haven’t already heard a million times already: no catharsis, no moral lessons, not even the vaguest ability of consolation. I’m sure some people will feel the temptation after reading this to say some stupid shit like, “oh, you’re so brave!” or “you’re a real survivor!”. And while I certainly don’t doubt, and perhaps I may even appreciate on some level, the sincerity of their intentions, I also don’t want to hear it either, and I think that that kind of shit is just a bunch of dumb platitudes that people made up to deal with the cognitive discomfort of having to cope with the realisation that someone they may know has just attempted to erase themselves from this life.
But all of that is neither here nor there.
The thing is, when we talk about what it means to survive, to be a survivor, there’s a tendency to frame the state of surviving (I guess what they call “survivorship”) as some kind of dramatic event or trait, like this odd, almost heroic thing that you are or maybe even become as the result of your experiences.
I dunno, maybe that’s true for some people; and if so, well, I’m glad — or at least, I’ll say that I’m glad — that they were able to derive something positive from it.
But even if you don’t feel that way for whatever reason, or maybe you feel frustrated because things feel bad, maybe they’ve felt real bad for a long while but you’ve got nothing to show for it yet, no great event or trauma in your life to quote as a citation for your patience: I’m here to tell you that you too have survived, and that in itself can be meaningful in its own right.
I’m not really sure how to end this honestly, but look. I don’t believe in hell, and most days I struggle to believe in heaven as well. One thing I know for sure is that there are no 7/11s down in hell, and there are definitely no ice-cold Dr Peppers to be found there either.
And in the same way, I’ve now come to realise now that there is no great race in this life, no matter what some people will tell you. No great competition either. There is no great victory, no triumph over life or death, except perhaps whatever small, moment-to-moment ones that we manage to burrow out for ourselves amidst the smoke and grime and mud of our world.
That’s all there is, man.
In time, this will all be over. We will have no choice: it will be utterly beyond our control and our will. The curtains will fall and crumble, the stage will rot and collapse, the servers will shut down and degrade, the hard drives will corrupt and melt, and there’ll be nothing left of any of it except electrical phantoms and vapours.
But for now, we are young. Our work is not yet done. And despite everything, you’re still here — and so am I.
Hang in there, friend.
