It's survival as Henry David Thoreau imagined it, rather than Bear Grylls. You scavenge for food to eat, but you quickly transition from stuffing raw mushrooms in your mouth to building a wee greenhouse next to your growing cabin. You're dropped in a beautiful forest, in which you can barely move for bumping into cute bunnies and woodpeckers, and then set about exploring. Relaxation might not be what you associate with games in which you'll die by standing around too much, but Among Trees manages it.

If you needed any more convincing, check out our V Rising review for more in-depth thoughts. And if you opt for a PVP server, you can engage in raids on enemy fortresses.īut if you'd rather experience the game on your lonesome or with a handful of mates in PVE, you can! The levelling journey is well-paced too, making the transition from vampire chump to vampire champ a consistently rewarding ride. Being top-down, you've got this MOBA-style combat, combined with servers that support up to 40 players. However, it's very much got its own bloody flavour. Neat, right? It follows a similar structure to Valheim, in that you've got to gather resources, power up, and take on a multitude of bosses. If you thought that was a real combo of genres, then get this: you play as a vampire. V Rising is an early access survival game with a hint of MMORPG and made by the Battlerite devs. Seriously, it's a brilliant time sink that has all the staples of a good survival game and then some. The charming PS1 aesthetic, the way you can't just stick a fire in an enclosed space and expect the smoke to magically dissipate, the bees and their happiness. You're dropped into a beautiful forest biome filled with boar and little goblin dudes, before you'll need to venture out into dark woods and plains teeming with massive ogres and horrid, overgrown mosquitoes.įor a game that's still in early access, it's not only rich in things to conquer, but the little details too. Purgatory is actually quite nice – early on, at least. To do so, you'll need to gather up resources, build yourself some nice gear, and beat a handful of big baddies scattered across the land. Valheim is a Nordic delight where you and up to ten bearded buds attempt to break out of procedurally generated purgatory.

So go ahead - choose your poison.Īlternatively, if you're exhausted from prising a wolf's mouth from your neck, you might want to watch the splendid video version of this list instead. Whether that hostility takes the form of extreme weather, horrid beasts, or the accumulation of noxious waste gases in an asteroid colony, is entirely dependent on your personal tastes. But we've chosen a set which, at their very hearts, feel like they're about keeping yourself - or others - alive in the face of a hostile universe. That's obviously a pretty key concept to a lot of PC games. There are games on this list which have barely anything in common with each other, beyond the fact that the player must y'know, survive. It's worth noting that we're being pretty broad with our definition of 'survival', here, as we wanted to offer something slightly different from a big list of first person wilderness games where a) you get hungry and b) stuff clips through walls all the time. It's not exhaustive, but it'll certainly give you enough fishing, crafting and wolf-avoiding to keep you busy for a good while.

How, then, can you pick out the gems from this big pile of detritus? Easy we've made a list of the best survival games. More still were overlooked for high levels of jank in their early days, but have since grown into beautiful things thanks to regular updates. A good few of them were brilliant many, many more were not. For a while back in the late 2010s, you couldn't seem to move online for the sheer number of early access survival games lying around the place.

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