8/19/2019 The Long Dark Cooking
Frostbitten survival adventure The Long Dark is one of the best in the genre, so says our boy Adam. On top of offering its own uncompromising vision of humanity pushed to the brink (all without a single zombie, alien or robot), it now has a steadily evolving main story arc that’s being released one episode at a time. While today’s free Vigilant Flame update doesn’t contain much in the way of new plot, it does set the scene as well as introducing some major new gameplay mechanics.
The biggest new feature of the Vigilant Flame update is a whole new region to explore. Hushed River Valley is a beautifully scenic piece of wilderness without a single human-made structure to sully it (or seek shelter in), and it branches off of the Mountain Town map. It’s apparently the hardest area to survive in, but contains some nice rewards for dedicated explorers.
The other big new feature is manual cooking and melting of snow-ice, implemented in a pretty natural and intuitive way. Make a fire or heat a stove, put a pot (or an empty tin can) on the heat, and put your meal or drink of choice in the vessel. Wait until cooked, but don’t stop too soon or late or you’ll risk food poisoning or burning it to an inedible crisp.
Probably the most thematically interesting part of the Vigilant Flame update is Buffer Memories. At night, when the aurora glows bright, computers may flicker to life to reveal their last active images before everything went dark. These notes can be collected and kept in your journal. Right now this is mostly for spooky world-building purposes in Survival mode, although Hinterland reckon that they may be an interesting way to lead players to hidden locations and stashes in later updates.
On top of these three big new features, there’s a small mountain of tweaks, and bug-fixes made, including some quality of life improvements made to the radial quick-select menu. You can see the complete patch notes here.
The Long Dark is available via Steam and Humble for £23.79/$30, and is currently half price on GOG too. The Vigilant Flame update is out now. Capitulos de la fea mas bella completos gratis.
Fancy a getaway this weekend? After drowning in E3 stories all week, I know I do. Perhaps I'll escape to The Long Dark's new Hushed River Valley region, where I can drown in its icy lakes instead.
The Long Dark Cooking Stove
Part of the first-person survival sim's new Vigilant Flame survival mode update, Hushed River Valley is described as a 'multi-leveled' region that connects to Mountain Town. It boasts multiple waterfalls, rivers, streams and cliff areas, so says developer Hinterland, but contains no man-made shelters.
As the video below explains, you'll want to in turn source natural cover—'whether that be the hollowed-out trunks of a large tree, a rock formation providing a natural windbreak, or ice caves'—and tucked away supply caches.
As also detailed there, the Vigilant Flame update overhauls TLD's cooking system. Here's Hinterland on that:
We’ve overhauled the cooking system so that it doesn’t occur in a simple menu interface anymore. You place cookable items in the new Recycled Can or Cooking Pot items, or on hot surfaces—namely, stones near burning campfires or on the surface of lit cook stoves—and wait for them to cook.
Each food item requires a different amount of time to cook. If you remove the item too soon, it’ll be undercooked, and eating it could result in food poisoning. If you wait too long, you could overcook the item to the point where it becomes an inedible burned lump, thus wasting the valuable food and fuel resources you spent on it.
The Long Dark Cooking Level 5
This all sounds interesting, because while it means managing multiple timelines, you should, in theory at least, be able to multitask as you wait for things to cook. I'll almost certainly make an arse of this—but I'd love to hear from anyone that's tried it out in the comments below.
Elsewhere, Vigilant Flame introduces 'buffer memories'—new narrative collectibles said to be the 'last documents stored in a computer's memory' before everything went to shit. Activated when the aurora appears at night, expect to uncover more of the game world's background.
Full patch notes for The Long Dark's Vigilant Flame update live here.
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