The Long Dark: Wintermute has finally released in full after a decade of development, and looking back on the story now that it's complete, it really feels like the writers prioritized the wrong things. Spoilers under the cut.
In the final episode of the story, there's a twenty minute long cutscene consisting entirely of an NPC lore-dumping at you. This single scene is payoff for one of the long-running mysteries of the game and the reward for the previous several hours of gameplay where said NPC constantly reminds you that she won't answer your questions yet and the research she's doing here is so fringe and extremist that no one believes her.
And then we get to the cutscene, where she explains that she was tracking solar cycles to predict the next geomagnetic storm, and that the current geomagnetic storm happening around us is the "big one."
Except...we already knew that. "Survive the harsh winter after a geomagnetic storm destroyed all electronics" is the pitch for the game.
Nor is it such a fringe subject as to be career-ruining...unlike the follow up that auroras cause brain damage and violent/erratic behavior, which is 1) just accepted as fact, 2) is another part of the basic premise of the game, and 3) her belief in it is not the reason why the scientist is considered an extremist. (And while a good portion of that cutscene is spent effectively reading the Wikipedia page for the Carrington Event out loud, the ultimate explanation for the brain damage is "magic dementia that's cured by alzheimer's vaccines," no further info ever given.)
Yes, the primary point of the scene is to emphasize that the geomagnetic storm is worldwide and likely will last beyond our characters' lifetimes, but to just slip that into a twenty minute long recap of everything else...
The game's writing just feels so disconnected and loose. Episodes lack connection and casualty -- each new event feels less like the culmination of the story up to that point and more like someone saying "and then X happens and it's cool!" This is only further reinforced by episode 5 constantly teleporting us around and removing our gear.
Story beats are either forced into becoming cryptic/mysteries when they make no sense to be purely for suspense/intrigue or they're dropped and forgotten seemingly at random. The pacing is wild and instead of the story and its themes being reinforced across the five episodes of the game, we end up with twenty minutes of someone explaining the lore that was never touched upon until now.
We didn't need a twenty minute long lore dump! If every last bit that information has to be conveyed to us, well, we just spent the last two episodes traveling with the PhD student of the NPC that gives the lore dump! We could have used any of that time to hint towards the greater story, instead of constantly reminding the player that it's too complicated and secretive to explain yet.
The Long Dark is at its strongest when the story is left ambiguous and subtle, with a greater focus on themes than flashy villains. The game is quiet and somber. The survival mode excels both in environmental storytelling -- corpses frozen holding hands, a knife stabbed into a doorway, etc. -- and in slowly delivering a story, like the series of notes left behind (admittedly a Kickerstarter backer submission) detailing a young couple falling in love as their small group of survivors slowly dies off after the power went out. Heck, the survival mode has a full, voice-acted storyline in the form of Tales from the Far Territory, and it's reception has been better than Wintermute as a whole!
I've been playing this game a long time. Back before Wintermute, the game was just a survival sandbox mode meant to test mechanics. And this mode eventually spun off into a pseudo-separate, successful survival game!
And so it's wild to me that survival mode was originally built for Wintermute, because by the point of episodes 4/5 of Wintermute, you can tell that it doesn't want to be a lonely, open-world survival game at all. Wintermute gives you all the resources you need to survive, removes major survival mechanics (cooking, crafting, mapping), and turns into a thriller/shooter.
(Also, the CEO/game director has returned to the forums/Reddit to argue with people about how his game is actually perfect, which is...awkward.)
Just...ten years of development on Wintermute, and it would have been a better story if they just stitched together the survival mode challenges (Hopeless Rescue, Archivist, As the Dead Sleep) and the tales (Signal Void, Buried Echoes, Last Horizon).
Anyway. The final episode was very cinematic with some amazing moments, and I cried at Mackenzie's final radio transmission. I've been waiting a decade to see the end and we're finally there. But with a competent writing team, it could have been so much more, and it's painful to see such potential go unrealized.
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