There are also wolves about, excessively keen on ripping your throat out. The game gives you four meters to keep an eye on: hunger, thirst, cold and fatigue.

You’re a bush pilot who has was flying when the pulse went off, and survived the plane crash only to find yourself stranded in the Canadian wilderness: cold, hungry, and completely cut off from whatever’s going on in the outside world. An electromagnetic pulse of some kind has caused all of the world’s electronics to fizzle out forever. The Long Dark is a post-apocalyptic scarcity survival game.

Early access simply provides two sandbox maps, rather than the fuller story mode. The Long Dark, fortunately, is completely bug free. I’m always wary of early access games it seems like a cheap and lazy shortcut for developers, especially when some of them charge what seems like a full price for an incomplete game. I heard about this yonks ago, when somebody linked me to the Kickstarter, but it wasn’t until Christmas that I realised an early access version had been released.

The long dark save files