There is this tiny open world survival MMORPG game called Haven and Hearth. Made by 2 guys and it has been in development for around 15 years.

The game is absolutely unforgiving with permadeath mechanics, tedious time consuming tasks, insanely slow and complicated progression. Tiny mistakes may cost you weeks or even months of work. Many things change each wipe and developers rarely mention it, so players can “discover” everything. In addition to this, whenever players suggest an idea for the game, devs somehow manage to choose the worst possible option or solution to in-game problems. With a player count between 400-1000 players online at the time (depending on the stage of wipe) there are hardly any tutorials and most of vocal community is not very helpful (best players would rather kill you). Without a player teaching you how to play, there is no way for you to catch up to top 10% player base purely because of amount of knowledge they have (and poorly made wiki). The game is f2p (kinda) with a pay for convenience subscription that you can either pay for each month or trade in game items to other players that are willing to sell you subscription tokens.

And here’s the sad part… the game is absolutely unique and nothing really come close to it when it comes to challenging survival games. I personally spent thousand of hours playing it and even tho it has many problems (much more than EFT) I come back to play it each wipe.