It's a classless hardcore survival simulation set in Iron Age Finland, and your chances of survival are heavily dependent on player skill rather than luck - the point you're most likely to curse the RNG is while picking stats at character creation, not during actual gameplay. You can customize the game start to get the difficulty level you want: a fisherman using multiple nets (a ridiculously reliable and nutritious food source that takes zero effort) starting on the relatively peaceful west coast will have a
much easier game than a trapper (food supply subject to player knowledge of proper trap placement/migration routes/distance to nearest settlement/the whims of fate) in the raider-heavy eastern reaches. It leans strongly towards realism, with the only exception being the various ritual chants you can learn which grant a small enough bonus you can just ascribe the success to a morale boost/placebo effect.
It's also a wide-open sandbox; there's no goal other to survive, and you're free to do whatever you want:
- Will you get your food via farming, foraging, hunting, milking/slaughtering domesticated animals, trading, trapping, fishing (which comes in three distinct flavors - clubbing/spearing slow fish in the shallows, using a fishing rod, or casting nets that you can come back to later), or even raiding/cannibalism?
- In your free time, will you whittle wood into valuable trade goods, go hunting big game, build a cellar and smokehouse and stock up on preserved food, build traps everywhere 'just in case', or build a raft and find an isolated island to make your base on and use said raft to float hundreds of logs back to base to build a massive cabin with?
- When winter approaches, will you hunt down a bear and make amazingly warm and protective fur clothes from it, build a portable but indefensible fur-covered kota, undertake the frustrating and laborious process of building a sturdy log cabin, or stock up on trade goods and leech off of a nearby village while 'borrowing' their sauna for warm shelter?
- For defense, will you surround yourself with trained dogs, hire a companion to assist you, lay traps around your base, or simply train your combat skills and single-handedly slaughter anyone who attacks?
It does have one of the nastiest failure spirals I've ever seen in a game, though, where the amount you need to eat to remain satiated goes up the closer to starvation you are - a character with maxed nutrition can survive an entire winter with the dried meat from one or two large game animals, whereas a starving character needs to eat several pounds of food per
day until they recover. In other words, if you don't find a food source within the first few days of a new game, you're pretty much screwed.