The story mode has a checkpoint system, one which saw me eaten by wolves 20 times over the course of an hour, but once you're in the game's survival mode, a death will put you back to the start. It's a fragile existence, and unlike most survival games, once you're dead here, that's all she wrote. You'll use these odds and ends to try to create a life for yourself out in the Canadian wilderness. Searching frozen car trunks, kicking apart damp crates for wood, raiding lakeside cabins for ever-warmer gloves.

On the flip side, I once held the W key a second too long while trying to cosy up to a fire and gave myself a burn on my hand that cost me a day of scavenging to find the herbs to treat it. Some survival games are more akin to a build-'em-up, letting you construct towering structures and high-tech gadgets rather than getting on with the business of survival.

Each followed a desperate battle for survival, because The Long Dark isn't a slouch when it comes to killing you off early in the game. I'd be eaten by the same wolf, or at least one that looked just like him, several times over the next hour or so. It's hard to get a sense of exactly what Foley work has to go into creating the sounds behind 'man getting eaten by wolvesвЂќ, but I can say that when it happened, death was gruesome. This third time, I was mauled to death by a wolf, feebly mashing the left mouse button to try to save myself. It was a meditative experience, nature vs man in a pitched battle. The first time, I starved to death in a charming valley. In the game's three years of Early Access, I've played it only twice before this review, enjoying the game's frozen apocalypse, showing a world ending not with a bang but with a whimper. 'It's too windy to light a match here,' the game tells me, gleefully. It's less mysterious now, teeth bared like an animal ready to attack. Starving, freezing, and in need of a good night's sleep, I push back towards the road. Before I know it, I'm far from the highway and completely lost. My torch burns out, and I start back-pedalling rapidly. My torch was waning when I heard the panting behind me and I turned around to see a pair of eyes, glittering in the darkness. Walk softly and carry a brightly lit torch, and perhaps you'll survive.

The Long Dark's instructions were clear on Wolves. The game had been good to me so far, teaching me the basics of survival on a tiny plateau after a plane crash. I had my first encounter with nature's assassin as I traipsed through a frozen highway in The Long Dark's story mode, Wintermute.

The long dark wolf struggle