No matter which region you choose to trek through in Hinterland’s survival game The Long Dark, the mountains are a constant. Their black shapes threaten the horizon from every angle—shadowy warnings hanging over the landscape. Impenetrable, the mountains not only act as a barrier to exploration, but also limit the player’s perceived power. You may labour and learn in this wilderness, but darkness will always lie at its edges—a great unsolved mystery, and simultaneously, a call.
The gulf between the vulnerable player and the huge landscapes that surround them is central to the game’s experience. Percey Shelley, in his poem Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni, described the glaciers of the Alps as “snakes that watch their prey” from afar, “bursting through… dark mountains like the flame of lightning through the tempest”. Although The Long Dark’s panoramas may just be sinister backdrops, nature finds other ways to reach out, slowly advancing, or sometimes surging violently.
After choosing a starting region you will be plunked down somewhere in The Long Dark’s remote Canadian wilderness. Your journey will often begin with a slow trudge—icy breaths, a bitter wind and the crunch of snow beneath tired feet. You’ll be asked to blunder into the unknown in search of warmth and shelter. There’s no compass to orient yourself and your map only fills in slowly through rough charcoal sketches of the immediate area. It’s quite possible for fog to suddenly descend, or for a blizzard to blow through, causing you to lose all sense of direction.
The wild spaces of The Long Dark are the dominion of forces beyond the human/player—a simulation of what Nan Shepherd, in her observations on the Scottish Highlands, called “the elementals”: ice, wind, water and snow. Shepherd would often worry about the forms her poetry and prose took—so dominated by “stars and mountains and light” were they that she felt them “too cold and inhuman”. The Long Dark has no such concern. Its landscapes tick to a deep time—the rocks, snow and shifting skies betraying a form of geological horror.
Enclosed in tombstone shards of broken ice
Most games are content with modelling nature as a backdrop, but in The Long Dark it has become dynamic, reactive; a central conflict upon which the entire experience orbits. These hostile processes at work create a dizzying effect. The rocks and mountains, “children of elder time”, along with the wind-ravaged valleys, frozen lakes, rivers and falls, all appear in ceaseless motion. The artist John Brett captured this same geologic enormity in his painting “Glacier of Rosenlauib”, where a sedimentary sea of ice and what looks to be a few rocks and pebbles—which are in fact ancient boulders—dwarf the mountain and its miniature pine trees.
Much of The Long Dark is frozen. Two regions open out onto the coast and an immense ocean beyond. In one area a large fishing vessel appears lodged in a thick ice sheet. Several writers and artists have been fascinated by this idea of a sea of ice. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster eventually retreats to the Arctic Circle, where he chooses to wander off and die “at the Northernmost extremity of the globe”. Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recites the tale of a cursed sailor whose journey through the northern wastes sees his ship temporarily overrun by “slimy things” from “nine fathoms deep” and his crew massacred by deathly spirits—a ghost story constantly lingering at the back of my mind as I wandered The Long Dark’s own Arctic regions. Finally, the painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice depicts a similar shipwreck, enclosed in tombstone shards of broken ice as if it was the monster of Frankenstein’s final resting place.
There are two Romantic tendencies in 19th Century art which can shed light on the wilderness of The Long Dark. The first of these is the “picturesque”, which paints landscapes of idealised beauty and tranquility. The game offers plenty of these: great alpenglows capture the underside of billowing clouds and silhouette the mountains at both dawn and dusk, whilst the night is regularly lit by radiant supermoons and shimmering auroras. However, more relevant is the “sublime”. This is a deeper representation of nature—more aberrant, irregular. Sometimes eldritch, unsettling.
Edmund Burke wrote on the overwhelming power of nature, hostile and untamed, his interest was in lands riven by erratic snowstorms and fathomless chasms and avalanches. This sublime hinted at something beyond human understanding, those uncontrollable, immeasurable elements in nature which provoke both terror and reverence. In fact, for Burke terror was the dominant emotion of the sublime. Whilst the picturesque focussed on “small scale, smooth surfaces and gentle luminosity” the sublime revelled in the vastness, darkness, obscurity and emptiness of the natural world. Standing atop a precipice, it can be hard not to feel insignificance.
In the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully
Visually, The Long Dark’s landscapes have the unmistakable quality of watercoloring. This painting method took off alongside the Romantic movement, and was quickly taken up by painters. The game’s vibrant panoramas are a close match to the work of J.M.W. Turner. Turner’s ethereal watercolors and oils both evoke some of the game’s vital contrasts. Much of his work plays off of the elemental opposition of hot and cold light—fire and ice. His inhospitable landscapes emphasised both the boundless quality of nature and the vulnerability of humans.
There’s a hidden depth to the sublime. The unknown can be uplifting as well as terrifying. Almost a hundred years from the onset of the Romantic movement, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the “life-affirming” energies of un-warped existence; a nature of primordial pain with a chaotic will of its own. The words wilderness and will even share an etymology. Wild land is ungovernable; self-willed. Arthur Schopenhauer, who influenced the thought of Nietzsche, described existence as simply the “will to live”, encapsulating some of The Long Dark’s deathly drive with a metaphor of a rowing boat: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a rowboat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting”.
We know that nature kills, and The Long Dark is keen to remind you of this. Journeys can be halted by raw exposure to extreme conditions. Snow and storm and darkness can quickly converge to lower the temperature. The poet Wilfred Owen documented exposure in the trenches of World War 1, describing the effects of icy winds, “mad gusts” and “shivering ranks of gray” which descended on the soldiers. Similarly, The Long Dark presents a kind of cold that makes the brain-ache. Merciless blizzards pour into valleys to end playthroughs, ambushing those who’ve lost their way. Sometimes death comes suddenly, other times it is a slow process, a whittling down where “pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”. Before long you’re frost-bitten and in a critical condition. The long dark comes to immortalise you in cold crystal, like the frozen corpses you find scattered in the wild, or those bodies preserved atop Everest.
Its developers don’t wish to simply erase human presence
In the realm of video games The Long Dark is uniquely effective in its representation of the sublime, but there is also a damning contradiction at work. Alongside its bitter landscapes burns the human will to survive. Romanticism was a reaction to the over-encompassing logics of The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but these impulses are in abundance in the game. Players must systemise to survive—boil cans of baked beans and wolf down tins of sardines to maximise their calorie count. They must sleep eight hours a day in a warm bed or fire-lit cave and melt snow to keep hydrated, all in order to have the strength to carry what they need: expedition quality ski-jackets and insulated socks, hatchets and hacksaws; every instrument that could give you the edge. These precise, calculative decisions come under what the sociologist Max Weber and later critical theorists called “rationalisation”. For Weber, modern life had become an “iron cage” that disconnected us from the mystery and magic of natural life. In effect, we had become disenchanted from the wild world around us.
Henry David Thoreau goes some way to explaining the dialectic at play here, writing that whilst “we need the tonic of wildness” at the same time there is this human drive to “explore and learn all things”. This tension is central to The Long Dark—the game can be finicky, pedantic even, but then the sublime never lets up and bursts from the seams to ruin any survival plan. Whilst there’s pleasure to be found in overcoming the wrath of nature through rationalism, The Long Dark is at its most powerful when its regions are yet to be surveyed.
“bringing back wild qualities where they have been lost.”
It’s important to remember that the “wilderness” is a cultural idea that we attribute to landscapes, rather than some inherent quality. Nature is never pure and always political and historical. Consider the fact that the Romanticists often held the pastoral above the urban, despite the fact agriculture can be just as environmentally damaging. Fraser Macdonald, who is involved in contemporary debates around Scottish wilderness, has called for a “richer sense of landscape” that takes into account “hybrid labour between humans and non-humans”. The Long Dark is far from just pristine wilderness. The game’s interiors are just as important as its outdoor areas. Scattered through the landscape are various human structures, everything from creaking bothys and portacabins where the wind whistles through window cracks, to larger compounds with industrial contexts. One of the more remote regions, Desolation Point, contains a cavernous processing plant—evidence of a once thriving industry. Exploring the ruined plant with its rusted machinery can feel like the flare-lit sequences of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Besides the industrial instruments lie the colossal bones of whales, used up and then discarded in the frost. These eerie places of lost industry show that The Long Dark may revere the wild, but its developers don’t wish to simply erase human presence.
Estranged from the poetic energies of the land, one possible solution is a radical “rewilding”. Beyond just conservation, we should attempt to re-enchant the world around us. On transforming the Canadian landscape J.B. Mackinnon believes in “bringing back wild qualities where they have been lost.” Importantly, rewilding is also “cultural—weaving nature back into our daily lives” in as many ways possible. The Long Dark could well be part of this project. As contradictory as the idea of delving deeper inside (a game) in order to connect with the outdoors may seem, games like this can unquestioningly help stimulate our perception and imagination of the wilderness. The Long Dark offers up a deeply encouraging relationship with nature, even if it is a disembodied and immaterial one. Just as Robert Macfarlane has sought to use language and “placewords” to drive and enhance our understanding and vision of the wild, games might use virtual worlds to capture some of this magic, helping to rebuild and sharpen a sense, awareness and desire to return to the wild.
The newest issue of Heterotopias, 004 is out now, and in it’s focus on landscape includes pieces on The Witcher 3, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in The Woods and more. Get it for 10% off this week only.
Thank you for your support!
No matter which region you choose to trek through in Hinterland’s survival game The Long Dark, the mountains are a constant. Their black shapes threaten the horizon from every angle—shadowy warnings hanging over the landscape. Impenetrable, the mountains not only act as a barrier to exploration, but also limit the player’s perceived power. You may labour and learn in this wilderness, but darkness will always lie at its edges—a great unsolved mystery, and simultaneously, a call.
The gulf between the vulnerable player and the huge landscapes that surround them is central to the game’s experience. Percey Shelley, in his poem Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni, described the glaciers of the Alps as “snakes that watch their prey” from afar, “bursting through… dark mountains like the flame of lightning through the tempest”. Although The Long Dark’s panoramas may just be sinister backdrops, nature finds other ways to reach out, slowly advancing, or sometimes surging violently.
After choosing a starting region you will be plunked down somewhere in The Long Dark’s remote Canadian wilderness. Your journey will often begin with a slow trudge—icy breaths, a bitter wind and the crunch of snow beneath tired feet. You’ll be asked to blunder into the unknown in search of warmth and shelter. There’s no compass to orient yourself and your map only fills in slowly through rough charcoal sketches of the immediate area. It’s quite possible for fog to suddenly descend, or for a blizzard to blow through, causing you to lose all sense of direction.
The wild spaces of The Long Dark are the dominion of forces beyond the human/player—a simulation of what Nan Shepherd, in her observations on the Scottish Highlands, called “the elementals”: ice, wind, water and snow. Shepherd would often worry about the forms her poetry and prose took—so dominated by “stars and mountains and light” were they that she felt them “too cold and inhuman”. The Long Dark has no such concern. Its landscapes tick to a deep time—the rocks, snow and shifting skies betraying a form of geological horror.
Most games are content with modelling nature as a backdrop, but in The Long Dark it has become dynamic, reactive; a central conflict upon which the entire experience orbits. These hostile processes at work create a dizzying effect. The rocks and mountains, “children of elder time”, along with the wind-ravaged valleys, frozen lakes, rivers and falls, all appear in ceaseless motion. The artist John Brett captured this same geologic enormity in his painting “Glacier of Rosenlauib”, where a sedimentary sea of ice and what looks to be a few rocks and pebbles—which are in fact ancient boulders—dwarf the mountain and its miniature pine trees.
Much of The Long Dark is frozen. Two regions open out onto the coast and an immense ocean beyond. In one area a large fishing vessel appears lodged in a thick ice sheet. Several writers and artists have been fascinated by this idea of a sea of ice. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster eventually retreats to the Arctic Circle, where he chooses to wander off and die “at the Northernmost extremity of the globe”. Coleridge’s epic poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recites the tale of a cursed sailor whose journey through the northern wastes sees his ship temporarily overrun by “slimy things” from “nine fathoms deep” and his crew massacred by deathly spirits—a ghost story constantly lingering at the back of my mind as I wandered The Long Dark’s own Arctic regions. Finally, the painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Sea of Ice depicts a similar shipwreck, enclosed in tombstone shards of broken ice as if it was the monster of Frankenstein’s final resting place.
There are two Romantic tendencies in 19th Century art which can shed light on the wilderness of The Long Dark. The first of these is the “picturesque”, which paints landscapes of idealised beauty and tranquility. The game offers plenty of these: great alpenglows capture the underside of billowing clouds and silhouette the mountains at both dawn and dusk, whilst the night is regularly lit by radiant supermoons and shimmering auroras. However, more relevant is the “sublime”. This is a deeper representation of nature—more aberrant, irregular. Sometimes eldritch, unsettling.
Edmund Burke wrote on the overwhelming power of nature, hostile and untamed, his interest was in lands riven by erratic snowstorms and fathomless chasms and avalanches. This sublime hinted at something beyond human understanding, those uncontrollable, immeasurable elements in nature which provoke both terror and reverence. In fact, for Burke terror was the dominant emotion of the sublime. Whilst the picturesque focussed on “small scale, smooth surfaces and gentle luminosity” the sublime revelled in the vastness, darkness, obscurity and emptiness of the natural world. Standing atop a precipice, it can be hard not to feel insignificance.
Visually, The Long Dark’s landscapes have the unmistakable quality of watercoloring. This painting method took off alongside the Romantic movement, and was quickly taken up by painters. The game’s vibrant panoramas are a close match to the work of J.M.W. Turner. Turner’s ethereal watercolors and oils both evoke some of the game’s vital contrasts. Much of his work plays off of the elemental opposition of hot and cold light—fire and ice. His inhospitable landscapes emphasised both the boundless quality of nature and the vulnerability of humans.
There’s a hidden depth to the sublime. The unknown can be uplifting as well as terrifying. Almost a hundred years from the onset of the Romantic movement, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the “life-affirming” energies of un-warped existence; a nature of primordial pain with a chaotic will of its own. The words wilderness and will even share an etymology. Wild land is ungovernable; self-willed. Arthur Schopenhauer, who influenced the thought of Nietzsche, described existence as simply the “will to live”, encapsulating some of The Long Dark’s deathly drive with a metaphor of a rowing boat: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a rowboat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting”.
We know that nature kills, and The Long Dark is keen to remind you of this. Journeys can be halted by raw exposure to extreme conditions. Snow and storm and darkness can quickly converge to lower the temperature. The poet Wilfred Owen documented exposure in the trenches of World War 1, describing the effects of icy winds, “mad gusts” and “shivering ranks of gray” which descended on the soldiers. Similarly, The Long Dark presents a kind of cold that makes the brain-ache. Merciless blizzards pour into valleys to end playthroughs, ambushing those who’ve lost their way. Sometimes death comes suddenly, other times it is a slow process, a whittling down where “pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces”. Before long you’re frost-bitten and in a critical condition. The long dark comes to immortalise you in cold crystal, like the frozen corpses you find scattered in the wild, or those bodies preserved atop Everest.
In the realm of video games The Long Dark is uniquely effective in its representation of the sublime, but there is also a damning contradiction at work. Alongside its bitter landscapes burns the human will to survive. Romanticism was a reaction to the over-encompassing logics of The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but these impulses are in abundance in the game. Players must systemise to survive—boil cans of baked beans and wolf down tins of sardines to maximise their calorie count. They must sleep eight hours a day in a warm bed or fire-lit cave and melt snow to keep hydrated, all in order to have the strength to carry what they need: expedition quality ski-jackets and insulated socks, hatchets and hacksaws; every instrument that could give you the edge. These precise, calculative decisions come under what the sociologist Max Weber and later critical theorists called “rationalisation”. For Weber, modern life had become an “iron cage” that disconnected us from the mystery and magic of natural life. In effect, we had become disenchanted from the wild world around us.
Henry David Thoreau goes some way to explaining the dialectic at play here, writing that whilst “we need the tonic of wildness” at the same time there is this human drive to “explore and learn all things”. This tension is central to The Long Dark—the game can be finicky, pedantic even, but then the sublime never lets up and bursts from the seams to ruin any survival plan. Whilst there’s pleasure to be found in overcoming the wrath of nature through rationalism, The Long Dark is at its most powerful when its regions are yet to be surveyed.
It’s important to remember that the “wilderness” is a cultural idea that we attribute to landscapes, rather than some inherent quality. Nature is never pure and always political and historical. Consider the fact that the Romanticists often held the pastoral above the urban, despite the fact agriculture can be just as environmentally damaging. Fraser Macdonald, who is involved in contemporary debates around Scottish wilderness, has called for a “richer sense of landscape” that takes into account “hybrid labour between humans and non-humans”. The Long Dark is far from just pristine wilderness. The game’s interiors are just as important as its outdoor areas. Scattered through the landscape are various human structures, everything from creaking bothys and portacabins where the wind whistles through window cracks, to larger compounds with industrial contexts. One of the more remote regions, Desolation Point, contains a cavernous processing plant—evidence of a once thriving industry. Exploring the ruined plant with its rusted machinery can feel like the flare-lit sequences of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Besides the industrial instruments lie the colossal bones of whales, used up and then discarded in the frost. These eerie places of lost industry show that The Long Dark may revere the wild, but its developers don’t wish to simply erase human presence.
Estranged from the poetic energies of the land, one possible solution is a radical “rewilding”. Beyond just conservation, we should attempt to re-enchant the world around us. On transforming the Canadian landscape J.B. Mackinnon believes in “bringing back wild qualities where they have been lost.” Importantly, rewilding is also “cultural—weaving nature back into our daily lives” in as many ways possible. The Long Dark could well be part of this project. As contradictory as the idea of delving deeper inside (a game) in order to connect with the outdoors may seem, games like this can unquestioningly help stimulate our perception and imagination of the wilderness. The Long Dark offers up a deeply encouraging relationship with nature, even if it is a disembodied and immaterial one. Just as Robert Macfarlane has sought to use language and “placewords” to drive and enhance our understanding and vision of the wild, games might use virtual worlds to capture some of this magic, helping to rebuild and sharpen a sense, awareness and desire to return to the wild.
The newest issue of Heterotopias, 004 is out now, and in it’s focus on landscape includes pieces on The Witcher 3, Kentucky Route Zero, Night in The Woods and more. Get it for 10% off this week only.
Thank you for your support!
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