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Have you heard of the North Pond Hermit? It's a wonderful story: strange and wistful. For 27 years a man named Chrisopher Knight lived in the wilderness of Maine, sleeping in a camp beautifully hidden amongst boulders and sneaking out, every few weeks, to steal supplies from the surrounding homes. People suspected he was there. It must have been a little bit like being haunted by a lonely ghost. Houses were broken into, candy, books, the odd Game Boy was lifted. Some people would leave supplies out for him, in a bag hooked over the handle of the back door.And then one day in 2013 he was caught, and when he was questioned regarding how long he had been at it, his response was to ask how long ago the Chernobyl disaster had happened. He had taken to the woods just after Chernobyl.
Man, I would love to play a game about the North Pond Hermit: a game that captures the sad majesty of New England woods, with their cruel winters and bursts of autumn colour. A game that allowed you to learn a complex terrain, to make it your own, and yet to always feel that your existence, the life you had chosen for yourself out there, surrounded by people but not living amongst them, was tenuous and worth preserving. I doubt I will ever play something exactly like this, but the North Pond Hermit is often at the back of my mind as I plod through survival games like The Long Dark, and now, blasting through Rise of the Tomb Raider, he is frequently at the forefront of my mind too.
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