The player assumes the role of crash-landed bush pilot Will Mackenzie who must survive the frigid Canadian wilderness after a geomagnetic storm.

Early reviews of the alpha release were generally positive, and the game went on to sell around 750,000 copies by April 2016.

The Long Dark is a survival game which takes place in the frigid Canadian wilderness, and is played from a first-person perspective.

[14] Story mode (also known as "Wintermute") is an episodic adventure game, with survival elements, and does not have a permadeath feature.

In Wintermute, the player switches between roles of a crash-landed pilot or his physician passenger as both struggle to survive after a geomagnetic storm and cannot freely travel across the game world, each being restricted to certain geographic regions.

Inspired by these new surroundings, he formed Hinterland and began to work on The Long Dark, a game about surviving the Canadian wilderness.

[1][23] Hinterland wanted to explore a post apocalyptic world from the fringes, away from the urban apocalypse, which "we've all seen a million times" and away from "B-movie cliches like zombies".

"[25][26] When van Lierop announced the Hinterland team in September 2013, members included Alan Lawrance, formerly a lead at Volition, Marianne Krawczyk, writer of the God of War series, and David Chan, BioWare's first audio designer.

Hinterland announced the game's voice cast during the Kickstarter campaign, allowing The Long Dark to capitalise on the actors' individual fan bases; the cast announced were Mark Meer, Elias Toufexis, Jennifer Hale and David Hayter.

The developers said that their game was improperly placed on the service without any sort of licensing agreement; Nvidia agreed to remove it as a result.

[45] Andy Kelly, writing for the same publication a month later, praised the atmosphere, highlighting the art style, sound design and lighting.

Kelly felt that the game's "focus on atmosphere and environmental survival" made it "[stand] out in an increasingly crowded genre".

[46] Also at PC Gamer Martin Musgrave wrote that The Long Dark made for one of the greatest survival games to date.

[43] John Walker, writing at Rock, Paper, Shotgun in August 2014, enjoyed the game and found it "impressively full of things to do", but felt that the accelerated passage of time detracted from the realism.

[47] In an early access review for GameSpot in October 2014, Nick Capozzoli too criticised unrealistic systems, noting that one should not need "a dozen energy bars and a pound of venison to sustain yourself day-to-day" and that "a crowbar [shouldn't] lose half its integrity after being used to pry open a couple lockers".

Instead of stretching his resources as a survivalist would, he felt "like an insatiable force that roves through the environment, picking it clean."

[52] In a 2015 interview with Creative Director Raphael van Lierop about The Long Dark's launch on Xbox One, Gameranx's Holly Green addressed the unique nature of the game's survival mechanics, writing it was "one of the first pure survival games on console, separating the genre from its horror roots and taking its themes of minimalist resource management to their most logical conclusion".

In April 2016, Hinterland announced that over 750,000 copies had been sold across all platforms and expressed gratitude over the 99.78% approval rating from the Steam user-base.