Survival games as a genre offer experiences that many games wouldn’t be able to deliver. The basic premise of survival games is based on the idea of a player trapped in a wilderness of some sort as they struggle to survive by collecting resources, crafting tools, gathering food and avoiding threats. The concept alone is concrete enough to carve out its own niche, yet flexible enough to offer a template for a vast variety of video game concepts.
The developers of the survival game “Subnautica,” put it best by saying that “one of the many things that makes the survival game genre grand is that you don’t really need to worry about the FOMO that MMO players go through.”
Essentially, survival games offer a great variety of content to play through without being riddled with high maintenance limited time content as other gaming genres may be. Essentially by design they allow players to play at their own pace, which provides ample opportunity to explore other entries in the survival genre as well.
Many examples include “Subnautica,” as mentioned earlier, mainly being a survival game with the premise of the player being stranded on an alien ocean planet, as well as the extremely well known “Minecraft.” Other examples include “Raft,” “The Forest,” “Ark: Survival Evolved,” “No Man’s Sky,” “Terraria” and so on.
Games such as these provide experiences that tickle our interests in a lifestyle in the wilderness. They provide a unique experience for people to experience environments that can be found on earth, as well as entirely fictional ones. The biggest draw to survival games for me personally is often base building aspects of survival games. Many survival games offer an option to create custom shelters and bases which can often act as a creative constructive outlet.
