The (new) early access conundrum
Escapism is a funny piece of human psyche. I have a drastically different taste on ‘cozy games’ than the average person may have. Your typical no brain only vibes experience would be something like the dozen or so different Stardew Valley farm ‘em ups, or some other chore simulator that you should be doing in real life instead. Mine is something more akin to The Long Dark, a hardcore survival game taking place in the northern Canadian wilderness where death follows over-compliance and everyday is a constant battle against freezing temperatures, murderous wildlife, and moldy peanut butter.
Now that I said that out loud, I think there might be something wrong with me.
The Long Dark started as a sort of taste test after I had fallen out of every other forever game that was still emerging at the time and now stands as one of my favorite indie titles on how survival games could be more than just resource farming or getting beaten to death with rocks by a racist kid. It’s fascinating to me because The Long Dark left me wanting more out of the genre but most of my other experiences with games similar to it are either online multiplayer content farming which obviously doesn’t fulfill that niche I’m looking for, or are just… not great games objectively speaking. Pretty much anyone can fire up Unity and code together a meter that slowly drains overtime until you click a button to restore it.
But The Long Dark did it in such a thoughtful way in both its themes surrounding its apocalypse setting and making a game that challenges its players through their own follies rather than bad luck. So I always found myself going back to it, setting an arbitrary goal like reaching a certain location or getting a specific Steam achievement, and eventually die from my own arrogance and bid farewell until the next boring off-day.
I can recommend The Long Dark for its Survival Mode alone, but that’s only half of what the game offers. There is also its story mode, 'Wintermute.' And it is so much more interesting of a discussion both by itself in a vacuum and, now that it has finally concluded nine years later, what it means to be an ‘early access’ title.
Most average Canadian winter
This section contains spoilers for The Long Dark.
The premise of The Long Dark is 'the Quiet Apocalypse,' a Carrington-level geomagnetic storm that not only wipes out the world’s electrical grid which sucks as it is because, unlike the actual Carrington event that took place in 1859 where the only prominent technology at the time was the telegram line, the events of the game takes place in the 2000s where electricity has become part of normal everyday life. But is also mysteriously affecting living beings. Wildlife has become unusually aggressive and people begin experiencing severe symptoms of insomnia or outright hallucinations.
You play as Will Mackenzie and Dr. Astrid Greenwood, two exes who agreed to put each other’s differences aside to deliver a package to a remote settlement on Great Bear Island, situated within northern Canada, when the geomagnetic storm takes out their plane and crash lands them in the thick of the apocalypse. As we learn throughout the game, Great Bear is in an interesting geographical location that early signs of the Quiet Apocalypse can be felt through the aurora borealis that frequently appears throughout the region. As settlers began feeling the ensuing insomnia including symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, it becomes quickly apparent that this isn’t your typical long-term power outage. Or your typical end-of-the-world scenario, for that matter.
This isn’t going to be an in-depth review of Wintermute, otherwise I would’ve just made a brief review and moved on to Dark Sector now that my replacement PS3 controller just came in. But it’s worth talking about Episode 5, the final part in the story, specifically because apparently there seems to be a bit of division about this one.
It’s pretty obvious from playing all of Wintermute from the beginning that Episode 5 was shoved out the door without its pants on. The first mission was more reminiscent of earlier episodes where you’re dropped in a large survival area with a clear objective to complete as you explore it, except this time there’s a significant hub area in the form of Perseverance Mills, the settlement Mackenzie and Astrid have been trying to reach for the entire story.
Then every other mission after that one becomes a series of linear set pieces in which calling it a “rollercoaster” would be too on-the-nose considering that you’re literally driving a steam engine train between two locations at some point. And then the final mission of the game is a stealth section, which mind you the game already has a poor batting average with because I thought the one in Episode 2 was annoying with the bear’s erratic AI, but somehow this ended up being worse because the game tells me I can sneak behind a convict to incapacitate him but when I try to do that he detects me anyway (You can only take down specific convicts, you have to wait for a voiceline from Mackenzie before doing it.)
Okay… clearly something happened between now and the five years it took between this episode and the last one. Or maybe the problem was that five years was not enough?
If you’ve been following The Long Dark for a while now you’re probably aware that there has been a bit of friction between the game’s community and its developers, Hinterland. The game initially started in 2014 on Steam Early Access as an alpha build back before there was even a story mode, before eventually officially releasing on most major systems in 2017. While most of the attention on the game was the open-ended Survival Mode, a lot of eyes were also on Wintermute as it was a much more structured narrative than other games in the same genre where most of the story is sidelined into being a series of collectible notes.
After the completion of Episode 4, Hinterland announced a DLC pack called 'Tales from the Far Territory,' which is meant to supplement Survival Mode with new content with the revenue made going towards further development into The Long Dark itself, Episode 5 of Wintermute, and eventually its sequel Blackfrost which was announced a few years later. A lot of people were put off by the idea of paid DLC for the game given that it “wasn’t technically finished,” whatever that even means is left ambiguous given it wasn’t in early access anymore. Worse still, it was to be released as a season pass, as Tales from the Far Territory would be divided into six parts over the course of years of continued development in conjunction with freebie updates to the base game.
To put it nicely, because as we all know on the internet you can be as much of a jackass as you want with zero repercussions, people had voiced their impatience on the existence of premium content in the game which I think got to Hinterland and the game’s director Raphael van Lierop if the absolute breakneck pace of Episode 5’s gameplay and narrative is any evidence to that. Which is mighty unfortunate because something eerily similar has happened to another hardcore survival game that I have an unhealthy obsession with.
Most average Kentucky summer
Surprise, I am now talking about Project Zomboid, the isometric zombie survival sandbox game by The Indie Stone. Happy belated April Fools!
Project Zomboid has been around for many years longer, even having to be rewritten at one point following a laptop carrying most of the game’s code being stolen. I also very much enjoy it, for similar reasons as The Long Dark. While this game does have a multiplayer, I still think this game is best experienced by yourself if you’re looking for deeply immersive apocalyptic survival. Why go to the grocery store in real life when you can do it in Project Zomboid? The only difference being you can bash in someone’s skull with a fire ax and you won’t immediately get arrested for it. Because everyone is too busy being dead.
The game has a pretty basic premise in comparison, though. It is July 1993 and a zombie outbreak has occurred in rural Kentucky. Maybe it was the government, maybe it was the burgers. Point is, the world’s over and you are one of the lucky ones who are immune to the airborne variant of the virus, but not through fluid transmission via blood or saliva. You’re also stuck in what is basically the ground zero of the entire epidemic with so many zombies you’d be surprised how a game that looks like this can drop a multi-core CPU to its knees.
We need to jump ahead to Build 41, in which Project Zomboid saw a popularity spike as the game was being frequently covered by YouTubers and a Steam Workshop scene began blossoming. There was a lot of talk around the coveted Build 42, which is intended to have everything from overhauled crafting mechanics, to animals to farm & hunt, a new lighting system, and skyscrapers to fall to your death from. The hype was unimaginable. Then eventually a public beta came out. And then the entire community became armchair game developers overnight.
I don’t have a lot of specific nitpicks about Build 42 because it is still an in-development unstable branch of the game and this kind of stuff is subject to changes & revisions. But my biggest problem with it is feature creep. I think a reworked crafting system, animals, new lighting, and a plethora of other minor things is already enough of a major update if you ask me but adding goofy ragdolls to the zombies and hastily re-implementing the multiplayer instead of fixing egregious bugs that are still present in the current patch of the build to this day has me scratching my head a bit. But again, that shit has happened because people got nothing better to do than complain I guess! So time to rip this band aid off now.
It is what it is
It’s probably because I’m pushing 30 and everyone else who also plays video games are teenage weekend warriors, but after playing enough games with ongoing development like The Long Dark, Project Zomboid, any MMO ever, or any live service title that has lasted more than six months, I’ve learned to appreciate (or dislike) something for what it is rather than what it could’ve/would’ve/should’ve been.
I think what happened with The Long Dark’s Episode 5 reception is just how long the game has been built up to get to where it is now today. I’m fairly confident it was rushed but that doesn’t mean there the artistic vision of it was pushed aside in order to get this thing into the hands of the entitled royalty that is The Gamers™. Raphael has explicitly stated in a post-launch status that there are no intentions to alter the game’s story just because some people were put off by the ending or certain character motivations. And I have nothing but profound respect for standing your ground on something you made, especially after it seemed like people were just egging you on to hurry up already as if there is some arbitrarily set deadline like it’s an office job. Hinterland is an independent studio! They don’t have to put up with the same bullshit that got the entirety of the AAA games industry in the anti-union hellhole it is in today!
I enjoyed Episode 5, unlike most people apparently. Maybe it’s because I had the foresight to replay Wintermute in its entirety as I think most of the harsher complaints made to it can be boiled down to someone returning from a several year hiatus between episodes. I seriously don’t recommend just jumping to the final episode of anything ever for several painfully obvious reasons. Even if you’re a seasoned player, you should spend the time to start over from Episode 1 and reabsorb the story to get a better understanding of both Wintermute itself and exactly why Episode 5 in particular is what it is.
Even if Episode 5 was a complete dud, I doubt it could ever be so bad it gives second-hand embarrassment from ever playing The Long Dark again. I still love it, and it has only gotten better over the years. Hinterland has a strong blueprint here to use for Blackfrost, and I can only hope it is used to great effect.
The “perfect game” in your head is stuck inside there for a reason
This brings us back to Project Zomboid, a far more community-driven game than The Long Dark, which has been for the better!… and for the worse.
The discourse surrounding Build 42 has been some of the worst cases of video game over-anticipation that isn’t your Cyberpunks or your Battlefields. The surprise unstable release had people screaming from their rooftops that gaming is officially back on the menu, and then these same folk proceed to tear apart their entire drywall after it is discovered that, believe it or not, it is actually kind of unstable! I think this level of hype fallout followed by vocal frustration over some of the new game mechanics (like the muscle strain system, boy did people have some constructive opinions about that one) played a significant role in the growing feature creep problem as the Indie Stone tried soothing an angry mob through jingling keys in front of them. To be fair though some of these people are just stupid and seem to not be able to hear themselves speak, so I can’t blame them for thinking that would work.
As video games continue to grow exponentially in almost every area imaginable, players seem to grow ever more impatient which is just a recipe for disaster as indie games continue with the early access approach in order to push more copies out into an oversaturated and competitive market. People see an exciting new thing coming out like Project Zomboid’s Build 42, create some sort of dream scenario of it as these things understandably take time to put together into a playable state, and then shoot blood out of their eye-sockets when it ends up not being exactly how they envisioned it. Here’s the thing: game developers are good at putting software together to make interactive stimuli. They cannot pop your brain open like the hood of a car and figure out exactly what flavor of that stimuli is going to make it tickle. That’s what a therapist is for. Or I guess a brain surgeon if we’re being literal.
Critique (endearing) vs. Critique (derogatory)
And then there’s me, another run-of-the-mill gamer who though the stealth section was bad or the new ragdoll physics was unnecessary. Who am I to judge over the opinions of everyone else when, at the end of the day, everything is subjective?
First, you might want to close your tab before I jump out of the computer screen and Get You.
Second, as annoying as it is from the perspective of someone who genuinely wants to see better things from their hobby, creators actually don’t have an obligation to listen to anyone's feedback. Of course, this can end up being a huge mistake on their part because something that is wrong with their work could be a repeating issue in subsequent work. Yahtzee Croshaw didn’t coin the jingle ”Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee!” just because it’s catchy. But if you’ve worked retail for more than twenty-four hours you would know that, no actually, the customer is not always right. There’s an odd philosophy in critical analysis; it’s really only as effective as the recipient of it makes it out to be.
If early access is going to be the new normal in the indie scene moving forward as video games need more time than an entire demographic generation to come out (which is a problem in of itself but I’m already rambling), we might want to start exercising even a smidgen of patience before we figure out whether something is a fine addition to our library or a waste of time & money. There’s a shocking amount of people I see that just have no intuition on whether they may or may not like a video game before buying it. Is it just corporate marketing conditioning people to make these blind purchases? If games have to be $100 I don’t know how much farther that one will go!
More importantly, just don’t let a development hiccup or a community’s behavior leave a blemish on the games you love. You’re not getting back all those hours you’ve spent on it anyway.
Lozzy is a gaming enthusiast who crashed his plane in the northern Canadian wilderness. Follow me on Bluesky.