Cross stitch pattern of a promotional poster for The Long Dark. Download the PDF here: The Long Dark Pattern

Grid Size:65W x 80H
Design Area:4.64″ x 5.71″ (65 x 80 stitches)
Colors: 7

Did you know my Patron, Tilly Parker, is a bonfire specialist who is known far and wide for crafting elaborate wooden structures purpose made to be lit on fire in a spectacular fashion. Every year they make a huge flaming Rube Goldberg machine to count down to midnight and at the end it triggers a bunch of fireworks!

I’ve been playing a lot of The Long Dark with my brothers lately. It’s fun to go in blind and die a few times, but there is no shame in using maps if you’re getting frustrated. I know that there’s an in game way of mapping where you’ve been and that’s a great way to get immersed in the game but I swear those maps on the wiki are priceless.

My little broski and I printed off the textures for the cans in the game and put them on some canned food irl to give as a Christmas gift to my older brother. It turned out amazing! If you want to try this, make sure you save and measure the labels for each can so that you can match the size of the print out. Also mark each can with a sharpie on the metal so that you know what’s inside even if you accidentally lose the label. What you don’t want is to end up with a bunch of unlabeled cans and then you crack into some Pinnacle Peaches only to find tomato soup.

It was a fun craft and you can do it for all sorts of games with food items like Moomoo Milk from Pokemon or Nuka Cola from Fallout or Cheese Squigglies from Putt Putt. Even printing out the box art to Yoshi’s Cookie to decorate a box of cookies would make them so much more special even if the gift itself is pretty cheap.

I figure that if my brother is going to be stocking up on some Covid emergency foods then they might as well look like they came out of a survival game!

As for The Long Dark itself, it’s a fantastic game. I am a big fan of custom game difficulty and you get all sorts of options, from altering animal aggression to changing how easy it is to find items. If you really want to just walk around and explore, you can crank the difficulty down even lower than the easy mode and you can even dial those blizzards up to eleven if you really like dying in the snow.

I think the main selling point is the story mode where you get concrete goals and meet up with characters that fill in the lore of the area. It’s a great tutorial, and I found myself getting really invested in piecing together what happened. There’s this part where you have to carry dying people one by one to safety while watching their stats slowly fade away and it just got to me.

There are other game play modes too that give you simpler objectives that allow for more freedom like finding an item in a difficult area then carrying it all the way across the map.

I can definitely recommend The Long Dark. It’s on sale right now for 8 bucks and that’s as low as I’ve seen it so if you liked Firewatch or Subnautica, I’d say give it a try.