Or is it just me. I have just started play, gone from the beach up to a Wolf and there is a cave to the left, tried jumping up on the ledges and get stuck in the scenery each time. On other things, the camera seems to get all stuck up sometimes, jumping is incredibly badly animated etc. Does it get better than this, or should I just give up on it now?

Getting stuck in the scenery happens. To me it doesn't happen that much, but when it does, arrgh. I'm usually already quicksaving a lot, so I don't end up backtracking much.

If you're trying to grab a ledge, stand up against the wall facing the ledge, don't move, and hit space. You should automatically grab onto it and hoist yourself up. It's a different animation. If that's not the problem, not sure what to tell you. You don't really need to do the generic jump that often.

I had the same issue when climbing ledges or jumping and fixed it by forcing VSync.
It is missing in the game settings so you should enable it on your GPU Control Panel.

Thanks, that forcing VSync on in Nvidia control panel really worked. I can now jump and mantle!

Uninstalls game after getting stuck in cave walls once too often...

...finds thread with a solution.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a good game though, might be worth installing again. Risen 2 also good, 3 got a bit long for me.

http://risen.wikia.com/wiki/Sara

Check the swamp farmer.

As far as fixing the ledge problem, I found a thread in steam forums that suggested something. I tried it - it works: go into the "ini" folder, find "timing" (or something similar). Change each of the four fields to 60.00000 (just change the left of decimal number). It seems to have speeded up movement and fighting too.