Very recommended, but with **HUGE** caveats!

The game is very atmospheric, with constant cold and snow, blizzards, need for food and firewood, creepy monsters. You can travel on a sled! On top of that, great music, and the few short "dream cutscenes" are suitably mystic and creepy. Some fantastic art direction there (and also in the general environment).

Gameplay is mostly fun -- a lot of resource collecting, there is a bit of base building and companion management, a bit of crafting, lots of (decent-enough-for-me) combat. Combat isn't too varied, but it is tense -- it took me a while to figure out how to defeat monsters, but once I upgraded my weapons and learned the timings, it was quite ok, a lot easier then most metroidvanias I played. And conquering an enemy "base" was always a nice rush.

So, all in all, if they polished the game a little more, this could be **STELLAR**. Problem is: there were quite a few bugs, most of them "workaroundable" (camera going nuts sometimes), but some a bit nastier (fell through the ground once; character stopped responding completely once; buttons go crazy when you fight next to your sled).

Now, these bugs are very common in games these days, and they did not happen so often, so it should be ok, right? Well, no, because the game features semi-permadeath (you get to keep a few boons, but you do restart from the beginning, and it feels very repetitive), and you cannot reload from a previous save. The sensation of losing a life to a bug or a bad interface is... unforgivable.

But anyway, at the end I had lots of fun during the 40hs or so I played this (scum saved a lot against the bugs), and I was quite impressed by the game despite its many flaws (jumping sections? really?). Strongly recommended, but only for the patient ones.

Score: 81/100.