The Long Dark "more than doubles" playable area with latest update

Chilly survival game The Long Dark has "more than doubled" in size as of yesterday's update, which adds a new 'Coastal Highway' region to the game. That's taken from the patch notes, which also reveal big changes to the way fatigue and item degradation work in the game. Items will now degrade less rapidly, but there will fewer of them around to compensate; on the fatigue side of things, you'll now become more tired when you're starving, while calorie deficit has been removed.

For every piece of nice friendly happy news, there's some bad to balance it out. Here's two more. "Added a 100% guaranteed Rifle spawn to Mystery Lake", oh but "The more you carry around, the more quickly you will become tired". One piece of definite good news is that your save game will carry across, so you can take your half-dead character to The Long Dark's new area before it kills them. To access the Coastal Highway, you'll need to follow the railway in Mystery Lake (on the Dam side). Thanks, VG247.

Full details of this massive update here.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.