Vintage Story is a minecraft looking game, it felt a stretch and odd when i picked it, and in many ways feels like minecraft but extra faggot. Except its actually great.

Its hard to describe its experience without comparing it to minecraft because i'm a 27yo, and minecraft was the first thing to have that kind of full experience for me. I had played Wurm Online before minecraft ever came to be in my eyes, however there was this sense of horror, loss and confusion, the slow progress and the meaningful progress that it brought.

This game brought to me those same feelings i had over a decade ago, it is like you wish minecraft could be for you again. I don't really have the words which take to describe it.
It is deeper, it is freeing, and it feels like a acomplishment, every little step you take through the very, very long path there.

If you want to pick up this game i suggest you go in blindly, nab a torrent somewhere, bring in your friends and resist the urge to actually look for help, guides nor a wiki. There is a ingame handbook which will tell and show you everything you need. On the top left there's a tooltip about how to open it.

It sold some 100-150k copies as of right now, at least as far as i could find, so its definitely a small game and still in development. If you do enjoy it after torrenting, buy it, you'll get what i mean.
I've had some 2 thousand hours on this one yet, and i'm still playing. I run a 24/7 server with my small group of friends, and 5 people feel like a knit small community thats large enough to not feel empty and small enough to still get absolutely shat on by the game.

For your first game i suggest either wilderness survival with the map turned on and a very small respawn radius of some 500 blocks, AND MICROCHISELING ON, i swear to you, that shit is fire, it looks stupid but you'll end upg etting drawn into it for hours upon hours.