I’ve mentioned the rookie effort of the newly founded Hinterland Studios before on the blog. The team of industry veterans formerly of Volition, BioWare, Ubisoft Montreal, Relic and Riot Games has come together to work on first-person survival game The Long Dark.
The game has now entered its final week of fundraising on Kickstarter and the team at Hinterland has finally released their first piece of gameplay footage to drum up support for their campaign.
First, let’s look at the gameplay footage that Hinterland released.
The gameplay that Hinterland shows off here is a very early pre-alpha build but I find it to be very interesting looking. The minimalist art design looks absolutely gorgeous. The real-time calorie counter seems frighteningly like my exercise bike but that combined with the audio and visual feedback about your player character’s condition is a nice alternative to the meters that were in Klei Entertainment’s stylized survival game Don’t Starve.
Hinterland promises that the game will track weather, time of day, temperature, food/water, energy use/consumption and gear condition. It looks like that was the case in this demo here. The devs are also promising a mature story, a detailed and explorable open world, memorable characters and moral choices. That shouldn’t surprise you seeing as it’s a game with former BioWare devs on the team.
While there wasn’t much shown in this little gameplay snippet and there’s much more work still to be done between now and release, I’m intrigued enough to back The Long Dark. Okay, I might be a little biased because this is a Canadian company with some top-level talent trying something a bit different in a game set in northern Canada. That last part certainly speaks to me.
As of writing on Tuesday evening. The Long Dark was just over the 60% funding threshold. While that’s not exactly encouraging for those of us who have backed this game, a lot of Kickstarters pick up steam in its final days. Hopefully The Long Dark survives its Kickstarter and reaches the market. See what I did there?
Source: Kickstarter
