The Long Dark is a great game in part because it makes you always, always have to be thinking about taking care of problems on the bottom end of the hierarchy of needs.
Warmth, water, food, fuel. Even if you're doing some other task you need to be constantly be mindful of providing yourself with the very basics.
Being adjacent to the Walking Simulator genre means the game gives you time to think about these things, not just rush to immediately solve them.
Also there's no gilligan's island coconut radios nonsense. The height of technology is "I found a sewing kit, so I'm gonna cannibalize one pair of wool socks to fix the holes in the other one."