Well, the time has finally come. After releasing almost a decade ago, The Long Dark finally wraps things up today with today’s release of Wintermute’s fifth and final episode, The Light at the End of All Things. It’s been a long time coming (the free episode update was originally slated for the end of 2025), but it marks the end of a tough, cold journey. Sorry, what’s that? It’s “not the end, but also an end”? Oh, my mistake!

Earlier this week, over on LinkedIn, Hinterland CEO Raphael van Lierop said that with the release of The Long Dark’s final episode, “a long journey comes to an end.” An earlier developer diary noted that while this was the “end of an era” for the studio, soon they’ll be able to talk about future plans, which includes “ongoing TLD development,” upcoming sequel Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2, and “other unannounced projects.” So, our sibling site Eurogamer popped a message over to van Lierop to determine what’s what with the survival game.

“This isn’t the end of meaningful development for The Long Dark,” van Lierop apparently said. Welp! But it is the “end of this part of development and we see it as a major milestone as well as the completion and delivery of what we promised our fans years ago. So, not the end, but also an end.” The CEO later explained that Hinterland will “have more specifics to share about what comes after Episode Five, after Episode Five launches.”

Now I don’t know what to believe, but ultimately episode five does seek to bring an end to the long-in-development story mode. On that note, it’ll apparently take you around 12-15 hours to beat, and is a lot more linear than previous episodes, specifically so that the story is more conclusively brought to an end (crikey, take a shot for every time I’ve written end).

Potentially also worth a note is that van Lierop asked you to “please keep in mind that each episode reflects the period during which it was created by the team. Our tools and our skill with them has improved over the years. We hope you can play the earlier episodes with their age consideration in mind and be gentle in your assessments.” This’ll largely be targeted more at folks who have been waiting (quite a while, I might add) for the story mode to be completely finished, but you’ve been politely advised nonetheless.

The Long Dark: Wintermute episode five is out today, and it’s free of charge for those with a copy of the game (those without just need to buy it).