This guide is geared to preparing you for the MECHANICS of the game and leaving you to develop GAME-SENSE on your own. The only thing that you should spoil in The Long Dark is your meat, because you forgot to cook that wolf carcass before eating it like an idiot, and now you're infested with intestinal parasites. 'How can I find out the mechanics of TLD without constant location spoilers, walkthroughs, and TMI?' 'Where can I learn to play the game without it somehow spoiling the experience of the game for me?' 'Why not just look up directions to a nearby shelter on the internet, instead of dying ingloriously in the snow and letting all my hours of playtime go to waste?' 'If I already used the Wiki to find this rifle that's been so useful to me, why let my character freeze to death now and lose my 17-day playthrough?' Let's say two days later you're stuck in a blizzard with your new rifle.

Worse, if you do 'use a lifeline' and Google where the closest hunting rifle is, you'll now be stuck in a strange limbo. The thing is, that isn't surviving - and this is a survival game, where the entire point is that your character can't smartphone his way out of a bad situation. If you are cold, wet, hungry, and simply tired of searching for a damn rifle, yes, you can take out your phone in real life, find detailed user-made maps of the area, find 3 probable spawns, and then get your rifle before you starve to death. Trial and horrific error is what The Long Dark is all about, and to simply Google your way through the game is to rob yourself of the sense of exploration, discovery, and do-it-yourself accomplishment that this game wants to give you. There are things that you simply don't know that you can do, and things you very quickly find out you can't. Refreshing as this is, it tends to leave new players, well, somewhat in the dark. It's obvious right from the start that this game is a labor of love, and the Hinterlands team have made it very clear that the design decision of 'no player hand-holding' is deliberate, and central to the TLD experience.

Put the user PDF maps away, lose your Google-capable smartphone, and stop asking other survivors for advice on the internet. THE LONG DARK EXPERIENCEIf you want the real The Long Dark experience, you've got to go in blind.

The long dark beginners guide download