# brutal survival sickness in the long dark to consider the long dark by hinterland studio inc. // video here once again the ugly spectacle of 'garmey' video experience threatens to rear its realist survivalist sandbox hatchet against the player who would otherwise seem perfectly intent to explore the deniably beautiful natural(tm) scenery and only very occasionally be forced to scavenge for dried venison strips like a miserablist lumberjack with a permadeath-wish the unrelentingly punishing pace of teh garme constantly gnawing at the frozen bones of the player could - like the post digital landscape teh garme evokes - be slowed down to a pace similar to trudging through deep unfamiliar snow in the dead of winter - moments before a wolf attacks out of nowhere indeed a punctuated dis-equilibrium of extreme quietude with a feedback mechanism giving emergent rise to sudden moments of sheer life-or-death decision making would seem preferable long dark's kind of every-second-is-a-fight type thinking feels terminally boring; teh garme mechanics conceptually seem to consist of 'press e to wait agonizing seconds for loot in some icy static nowhere' and 'continually press tab to check calories burnt per hour'. this feels too much like work that is teh garme relies to far too standard time-tested methods for informing the player about ir state. while the art direction does an excellent job of letting you know it's real cold out here such obvious use of in-garme menus is a design failure of potentially garme-threatening proportions // images here such dull overlayed menus unfortunately speak volumes - that is they say next to nothing about the world presented as a potential evocation of human meanings. for example indicator bars for "extreme loneliness" or "deep isolation" would seem absurd. sure you could stick them in but this is not that kind of garme this seems the kind of garme for hyper-nerdy grinding micro management of falsely limited virtual resources. and why on dead earth is there a clock at the top of the menu - surely the player is capable of looking out the window? the long dark should take a good look at its themes - whatever they are - and fit teh garme to them rather than the other way around indeed why have two separate modes at all? one hopes that writer marianne krawczyk can adapt teh garme to ir story mode without too much cheesy dissonance // republic of bob