No one here gets out alive.
Ever since Minecraft, survival games have been a popular genre for gamers of all ages. These games test your skills in completely different areas than what you’re probably used to when it comes to your gaming experience. No two games in the genre are alike, and that’s part of what draws people toward them.
Here are some of the best survival games you can find.
7 best survival games on Steam
Don’t Starve & Don’t Starve Together
In Don’t Starve and Don’t Starve Together, you travel through a dark and desolate landscape. You must try to survive illness, starvation, panic, and a bunch of supernatural creatures trying to kill you. The games are a challenging but rewarding set of roguelike survival games. You can play as a variety of characters with unique abilities that can help or hinder you in your quest to survive in the wilderness.
7 Days to Die
Where zombies meet Minecraft. 7 Days to Die is a unique survival builder game. You have to combat zombies as you build a defensive stronghold. Every so often, the zombies become enraged and you’ll have to face hordes of them at a time. Fans of Minecraft and other builder games will love this intense survival version of the genre.
Rust
Picture a survival builder game like 7 Days to Die, but with less Minecraft-feel and zombies. Rust follows a more traditional survival gameplay. You have to stay fed, healthy, and safe from the natural threats of the wilderness. You’ll also have to protect yourself from other players, as the PVP of this game can be an intense part of your attempts to survive. Creating alliances can be an interesting and important thing to help you survive.
Oxygen Not Included
Instead of just keeping yourself alive, Oxygen Not Included asks you to keep an entire space colony alive and thriving. Each character in the colony can develop attributes and jobs to help with the survival of your colony.
Each of them has different needs, however, so you’ll have to multitask quite a bit to keep them all alive and healthy. While the game is still in early access, the developers are well-known for developing highly successful games at this stage. These are the same guys that made Don’t Starve, after all.
Scum
In Scum, a group of prisoners has been brought to a large island where they have to fight to survive. Instead of being purely based on physical survival skills like most games, Scum lets you try a large variety of strategies using their various attributes.
These attributes include mental ones, so you’ll have to balance your physical needs with the mental strain that the prison is taking on you. This game is still in early access, but it’s already worth checking out.
Pathologic
There are surprisingly few survival games that are actually based in horror. Most of them are about post-apocalyptic settings and learning to survive in the wilderness. “Pathologic” takes an entirely different approach, by being a cross between horror, survival and roleplaying.
You play as one of three characters trying to uncover the truth about a plague that is killing a village. You only have 12 days to find a cure, as well as trying to survive the other possible harms that the game throws at you.
ARK: Survival Evolved
A Pokémon-like survival game where you train dinosaurs to help you survive: need we say more? These massive pets can be used for anything from helping you create your own village, to providing a mount that will carry you across dangerous terrain. Outside of dinosaur taming, this game is very similar to other large 3D survival games like Rust and 7 Days to Die. Your main goal is to stay healthy, fed, and hydrated while you traverse the wilderness.
Beyond survival
If you’re looking for survival games for your phone as an alternative to Steam, you’ll definitely want to check out our Softonic Solutions page where our community shared some great phone survival games to try. Add your own if we’ve missed any!
