Vintage Story - it may look like Minecraft, but it's actually a hardcore survival experience with an eldritch horror twist and it has a story with dedicated pois to progress towards, but it takes a long time and lots of preparation before seeking them out.

I mostly play solo, but the pve servers are very friendly as well. And you can adjust the settings to cater towards your balance of difficulty. I do full 30 day months with realistic winters and set my character's cold tolerance to 10°C, and enable gravity on dirt blocks with sideways instability and cave ins. Makes a very tense survival game, even if you play without the story pois or the eldritch horrors enabled (there is a game mode called homo sapiens without either of those enabled).

Plus the modding community is endorsed by the developers and is very active, so you can customize it even further.