The Long Dark Celebrates a Year of Early Access – September 29, 2015

The Long Dark, an exploration-survival game  from Hinterland Studio, pits players against nature in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. The game’s free-form, non-narrative Sandbox Mode has already sold over 550,000 copies on Steam Early Access and Xbox One Game Preview.

Story Mode will feature two playable characters — bush pilot Will Mackenzie and doctor Astrid Greenwood — as both struggle to survive the aftermath of the “First Flare” event that has brought modern civilization to its knees. It will be released episodically.

The mechanics of Story Mode will be specifically tuned for narrative gameplay. The permadeath of Sandbox will be replaced by a progress-based save system. Approximately 25%-35% of Story Mode will consist of completely new areas.

Raphael van Lierop, Hinterland founder and creative director and writer/director on The Long Dark®: After keeping our community in the dark about our plans for Story Mode, we’re thrilled to finally be able to reveal some details of what we’ve been working on alongside the over 75 updates we’ve made to Sandbox Mode over the last year. Our success on Early Access proved there’s an audience for a more thoughtful survival experience, and the resources we’ve been able to invest in the game will help us pursue our ambitions around storytelling as we continue to expand this world. We see a bright future for The Long Dark®, and are committed to a long-term relationship with our players.

Hinterland will also have an ongoing commitment to Sandbox Mode. Raphael van Lierop continues: Our original plan with Sandbox was to use it solely as a gameplay test-bed for Story Mode, and shut it down at launch. We’ve discovered that Sandbox offers a completely different experience, highly beloved by our players, and it deserves to continue to exist in its own right. So we plan to continue updating Sandbox with more features and content, expanding the foundation of our core exploration-survival experience, in parallel with our work on Story Mode.   

The first part of Story Mode’s Season One, launching in Spring 2016 for PC/Windows and Xbox One, will include Sandbox Mode. Remaining episodes in the season’s story arc will be released throughout the remainder of the year.