Unexpected Wish Fulfilment - ZOC
*Contains mild location spoilers for the Zone of Contamination*
Some personal backstory: I grew up in a primarily mining town. Country Australia rather than incredibly remote Canada, but still a mining town. The whole region is littered with coal mines, both underground and open-cut.
My dad is a miner, and growing up sometimes the pits where he worked would do family or open days. Put on a helmet, walk around the place, maybe sit in a huge dump truck. I found the mechanical parts of these tours the most interesting, partly because I was like 8 years old, and to a 8 year old a bunch of conveyors and chutes and all that kinda stuff looks *absolutely fun as hell to climb on.*
For obvious reasons, you are not allowed to climb on the (functional, running) mining equipment at the family open day.
In any case, this was a long time ago and this desire was something I hadn’t thought about again until incredibly recently. Specifically, when I walked into the Concentrator building in the Zone of Contamination. I looked up at those three-to-four stories of dead conveyor belts, hoppers and chutes, and it all came rushing back.
You guys. You would not believe the giddy satisfaction I got when I started nosing around and realised that I can just clamber up and down and mess around inside all this equipment! Running from building to building along conveyor belts! Squeezing through hoppers! Sliding down chutes into the underground mines below! I had the stupidest grin the whole first swing through the entire complex.
The Long Dark has already given me a lot of wish-fulfilment in the form of pretending I can walk around in sub 5°C temps for more than ten minutes without dying of an asthma attack (I’m Australian, I ain’t built for cold) but this was an unexpected little gem that I enjoyed so much I thought it might be nice to share. Thanks Hinterland!
tl;dr: clambering around on mining equipment in game fulfilled a forgotten desire from my childhood and it was good.
Anyone else had any unexpected moments of satisfaction or wish fulfilment playing this game?