Once you get into it, you’ll be all alone. Or you can even play a custom game to tweak almost everything or put in a custom code someone shared online. The difficulty you’ll have will depend which Experience you choose out of four which will mess with spawns, resources, how hostile the world will be, the possible time/area you’ll start at, how fast item conditions decay, and how long it takes for your condition to regenerate. This will basically set you somewhere in the world (you can choose which region if you want) with some supplies. The main selling point to The Long Dark is its survival mode. For this, I’ll first go through survival as it will be during sandbox before going into story mode. So what else than to start off spooky October by the fear of being all alone in the wilderness during winter with barely any hope of surviving and returning to see what the game now has to offer.
I eventually stopped, of course, though that was before character models were put in and before the story mode. To be honest, I played The Long Dark over four years ago and was actually one of my first five purchases.