I froze to death in The Long Dark. New to its unforgiving sandbox world, I couldn’t organize my inventory efficiently enough to stay warm, and I froze right there in the snow. It was a pitiful, embarrassing death.

So naturally, I wanted to try again.

The Long Dark is a game you will never win - its end state will always be a date with the reaper. But it quickly got under my skin, like many demanding games with clear systems do. The Long Dark’s challenges are simple: eat, sleep, stay warm, and build things that help you do these things. When you fail, you know the fault lies with you, and there lies the hook: this time, I'll last longer.

“What we’ve seen with our players is a lot of failure and death in the beginning, but because of the learning model we have what we find is when they succeed in succeeding that first day, there’s a sense of triumph”, says The Long Dark’s Creative Director Ralphael Van Lierop.

“One of my favourite things is that more often than not the thing that kills players is themselves. Like maybe you were too greedy and you filled your pack and were over-encumbered and you couldn’t run, and you were eaten by wolves. Your choices have ramifications in a lot of different ways.”

Developer Hinterland has gone to great lengths to make the world itself a beautiful place to explore. Moving around its sparse, snow covered northern wilderness, peppered with small huts and overturned cars, proved quite meditative. As I entered an abandoned house, complete with heartbreaking children’s toys scattered about a dark bedroom, I found myself conjuring up the family who once lived there.

“The main metric for success is how long the player has lived”, says Van Lierop. “But more rewarding than that are the stories that comes out of the world. We find people writing sometimes really poetic descriptions of their experiences. Like one guy said how he was dying so he climbed to the top of the mountain to see the sunrise before he died. It’s really those quiet moments.”

It helps that there are no objectives in The Long Dark's sandbox mode, Van Lierop explains, so you create the survivor you want to be. Do you want to play it safe and make a warm house your home base? Or do you want to see how long you can brave the elements - and roaming wolves - for?

"I think the sandbox mode appeals to a certain type of player. Our story mode has the same mechanics – those players - the benefit of a little bit more direction through character etc. But this mode is a pure survival experience. And the people who it is attracting are the people who are maybe sick of more generic gaming experiences with empty rewards. And we’ve noticed players challenging themselves, setting their own rules, like 'I wonder if I could survive three nights outdoors?' 'Or I wonder if I could spend 5 days in a row without going inside?' It wouldn’t be hard for us to put an objective system in but we’re seeing players enjoy being self directive."

It is, I note, a tough game to demo at E3, in among the booming trailers and shoutcasters and endless games with guns.

"It's great being here, but it's also not so great", Van Lierop says with a laugh.

"I'm hopeful people will like it because it's different".

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU's office. Follow her on Twitter.