The Long Dark

The Long Dark is a survival game which takes place in the frigid Canadian wilderness, and is played from a first-person perspective. The player must manage their body temperature, calorie levels, hunger, weight, and fatigue. The Long Dark has three game modes available to the player: story, survival, and challenge.

The game's map is divided up into 12 main regions: Mystery Lake, Coastal Highway, Pleasant Valley, Forlorn Muskeg, Desolation Point, Timberwolf Mountain, Mountain Town, Broken Railroad, Hushed River Valley, Bleak Inlet, Ash Canyon, and Blackrock Mountain. Alongside these are transition regions, which are significantly smaller and whose purpose is to connect these regions together through a small region. They are: Crumbling Highway, Keeper's Pass North, Keeper's Pass South, Ravine, and Winding River. The Tales from the Far Territory DLC added four regions: Transfer Pass, Forsaken Airfield, Zone of Contamination, and Sundered Pass, and a smaller connecting region being the Far Range Branch Line.

Following completion of his work as director on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Raphael van Lierop left Relic Entertainment to work on projects which he felt were "more personal" and "more representative of [his] values". Van Lierop also left Vancouver, moving his family from the city to the Comox Valley in the northern part of Vancouver Island. Inspired by these new surroundings, he formed Hinterland and began to work on The Long Dark, a game about surviving the Canadian wilderness. Hinterland wanted to explore a post-apocalyptic world from the fringes, away from the urban apocalypse, which "we've all seen a million times" and away from "B-movie cliches like zombies".

Van Lierop was also keen to impart a Canadian identity upon the game, having been frustrated with homogenised AAA video games which sacrificed character for mass market appeal. He summed up his approach with, "I'm Canadian. This game is Canadian. Deal with it."

Following a period of alpha access exclusive to backers of the crowdfunding campaign, a version of the game featuring only its sandbox-style survival mode was released on Steam Early Access in September 2014 for Windows. It later arrived on Linux in November 2015. Early impressions from critics were generally favorable, but noted the incomplete nature of the game.

Leif Johnson, writing for PC Gamer in June 2014, felt that the game's small, unchanging map rewarded route memorisation, and the game was most engaging when allowing the player to discover things for themselves. Andy Kelly, writing for the same publication a month later, praised the atmosphere, highlighting the art style, sound design, and lighting. Kelly felt that the game's "focus on atmosphere and environmental survival" made it "[stand] out in an increasingly crowded genre."