Xbox Game Pass Adds Survival Game With Over 200 Hours of Content

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Back in 2017, the Canada-based studio Hinterland Studio released a survival game called The Long Dark, before survival games became very popular and then saturated. To this end, when The Long Dark was released in 2017, it was more novel than it would be if it were released in 2026. It didn’t create the genre, which had already started to break out thanks to games like Rust or DayZ, but the genre hadn’t quite taken off fully yet. Upon release, the survival game earned a solid 76 on Metacritic, though its user reviews suggest this is selling the game short. On Steam, for example, it has an 88% approval rating across more than 39,000 user reviews. As you can gauge from this large number of user reviews, the game also sold very well. As of 2021, it had already sold over 5 million copies, so there is a decent chance you have already played this survival game. Even if that is the case, in 2026 it’s very different from what it was at launch.

Exploration Survival Game

The Long Dark has both traditional survival modes and a story mode, though the latter is not quite complete. So far, five episodes have been released, with a sixth set to come this year. Meanwhile, a sequel, Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2, is also slated to release this year via early access. No matter which mode you play, you still have the same task: survive an expansive and frozen wilderness recovering from a geomagnetic disaster.

As noted, The Long Dark is a game that can be played for a very long time, like many games in the genre. To this end, it can be mainlined in a little more than 20 hours. However, with side content, this figure is nearly triple the playcount. Meanwhile, completionists will need more like 250 hours with the survival game.

Now that The Long Dark is available via Xbox Game Pass, subscribers are not just being spared its $35 asking price, but subscribers can purchase it outright with an exclusive discount of 20% as long as it remains available via the Microsoft subscription service.

All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think, or join the conversation over on the ComicBook Forum.