A first person shooter in which you won’t get a gun for the first 50 hours and there is only one enemy: Canada.

By the time you do find a gun, you will feel quite foolish to be holding it. For one, you won’t know how to use it, and you’ll have only four or five bullets to learn; your aim will sway and shake from the cold as you look nervously down the sights. For two, what are you going to do, exactly? You can’t shoot a Canadian winter to death.

And by this point, perhaps you won’t want to kill Canada anyway. The snowscape is haunting and beautiful, and every time you stop to get your bearings, each frozen scene looks like a perfectly painted postcard… except for the wolves moving like shadows at the far treeline… except for the thudding of heavy snow from the pines that might instead be the thudding of a bear just over the next hillside… except that every moment spent admiring the scenery is bought with your calories, with heat, water, fatigue… and now there are terrifying gray clouds scudding in from the west…

Do you truly want to take that shot now? With those wolves nearby, with the blizzard coming on?

Or do you break for your cabin, and try to survive another long night, hungry in the dark?

The Long Dark might well be my favorite game of all time. It came along in the post-Minecraft boom of lonesome survive-em-ups, but after a decade of constant development it’s still unsurpassed in the genre. Every time I install, for instance, a survival mod for a game like Skyrim, I find myself thinking “I see you’ve stolen a bunch of stuff from The Long Dark, but I wish you’d stolen more.”

Here the basic mechanics are tuned as taut as violin strings, working in concert and in conflict with each other to always leave you feeling pressured, and make every small gain feel like a hard-fought epic win. The sound of the snowy woods is wonderfully authentic, the art style is painterly and original. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard [i.e. Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer] plays the Canadian voice of your internal monologue, and it’s weirdly perfect. Much like the real Canada, it’s occasionally monotonous but sometimes breathtaking.

I played over two hundred hours on the early Steam builds before switching to the PS4 version, since it looks gorgeous on a big tv and it feels more fun to chase for trophies on a console. I think the game is best on the second-hardest difficulty (“Interloper”) though I dial it down to play on the slowest day-night cycle, because I like to have a bit of time to think and chew the scenery between life-and-death decisions. (That said, it’s worth noting that nearly all of the games trophies can be unlocked on any difficulty level. Faithful Cartographer, here I come.)

You may not enjoy it as much as I have, but I absolutely would recommend this to anyone. It’s been a five-star game since about 2014, and Hinterland’s ongoing updates just keep making it better.