I’m sure we’ve all played at least one survival game at this point, right? Minecraft. Valheim. Subnautica. Project Zomboid. ARK: Survival Evolved. Don’t Starve. The list goes on.
So what makes something a “survival game”? Well, surviving, of course! The player will often have limited resources - food, water, stamina, oxygen - that will drain over time. They will have to secure more of these resources to survive by venturing out into the (often hostile) world, while also collecting other resources in order to progress.
Survive and progress are the two key objectives here. What progressing looks like can vary from game to game. Some are sandbox games where you set your own objectives. Some have technology trees to work through. Some have stories. All of them have some kind of balance between surviving and progressing. Too much focus on moment-to-moment survival and you’ll never feel like you’re getting anywhere; too much focus on progression and the survival mechanics feel sidelined.
I’ll start with the latter. Minecraft is a perfect example of this, I think. For the first hour or so in a brand new world, surviving will be something the player has to focus on at (almost) all times. Food will feel scarce, enemies will feel scary and you really have to focus solely on survival. But then, after a while, you’ll reach a point where you’re got plenty of food and don’t have to worry about it any more. You’ll have decent armour and weapons so fighting monsters isn’t risky at all. The survival aspect of the game becomes something you only really engage with when you’re forced to - because your hunger bar is empty, because a monster is attacking you and you want it to go away - but it’s more of a tedium than a system that’s exciting or interesting to engage with. In fact, the more you progress (whatever your version of “progressing” is - building cool things, exploring, etc), the less engaging the survival aspect of the game generally is.
And on the flip side, you have something like Don’t Starve. The game is all about survival, with the goal largely being simply to survive as long as possible, with very little in the way of non-survival progression. To its critics, this is to its detriment; the player rarely feels like they’re making much progress, just prolonging their suffering. This is, of course, the tone the game is going for, but it doesn’t make for engaging gameplay for many people. It doesn’t have something they can get invested in - there’s no reason to survive.
I’ve largely been talking about the negative aspects of survival mechanics so far, but I do feel they can have positive, interesting aspects to them as well. They can add to a game’s immersion, for one. They can certainly make for great, personalised stories, too; not tailored narratives, but the sort of individual, one-off experience in a sandbox game that you remember. For example, you didn’t just build a simple house…
You went on a dangerous journey into the forest to the west to get some wood. You’d just finished chopping the last tree you needed when a wolf pounced on you. Lucky you’d found that old, manky leather armour earlier, eh? You managed to kill it (with your bare hands after your spear broke) but you were losing blood and had to limp back to base with your lumber. You didn’t have any medicine so you fashioned some from some plant fibre you’d collected - not ideal but it stemmed the bleeding for now. And at least you had enough wood to get some walls up around your cabin.
That’s the kind of story made out of mundane events (well, “mundane” when it comes to video games anyway…) that you can only experience in survival games. Because in a game where you’re not as invested in surviving, that sort of situation has far less impact. This leads nicely to my next point: there needs to be a cost to not surviving. The steeper the cost, the more invested in survival the player will be:
- the ultimate “cost” is a hardcore world/character, where the player loses all their progress if they die. I personally find this a little excessive, especially in games that are often already on the grindy side.
- a lesser cost is perhaps losing some XP, or losing all the items your character was carrying at the time. It’s a great motivation to avoid death, but it isn’t too punishing. It’s nothing you can’t bounce back from, at least.
- an interesting mention here is games like Rimworld or State Of Decay 2. You control a community of characters, each one having different stats and attributes. If a character dies, their death is permanent. It sucks, and it’s almost always a major setback for your colony. But it also makes you really value each character’s survival. And a character dying becomes part of your story in the game. It’s woven into both the gameplay - you have to figure out how to adapt going forward without that colony member - and the history of the colony.
If there’s no real cost to not surviving, there’s no real reason to engage with the survival mechanics in the first place. None of it matters. If you can die, but 30 seconds later you’ve reloaded the game and can just carry on from where you were, can you really get that invested in the survival mechanics in the first place?
So what’s the right balance? It’s hard to say - it depends on the game! How deep and complex a game’s survival mechanics are and what its progression looks like definitely affect what will feel right. But I think that, if a game is going to include survival mechanics, there should be an effort to make them interesting and rewarding (if not fun) throughout the entire game. If they can’t be interesting and rewarding, players shouldn’t be made to engage with the mechanics at all, and it should just be a problem that players can solve instead. And there needs to be more to the game than just surviving. There needs to be goals available - narrative, creative or otherwise - that give the player a reason to survive.
The process of surviving itself needs to feel interesting throughout the duration of the game. You need a reason to survive (something to work towards) and you need a reason to not die (some form of cost or punishment).
So do any games actually manage all this? I’m not sure… Subnautica probably comes the closest for me, personally. It does a great job of constantly pushing you to progress, but the more you progress, the more scary things get and the harsher the conditions you need to survive become. The survival mechanics are not just relevant but central throughout the entire game, but you rarely feel like they take too much focus away from the rest of the game.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I think that the right balance doesn’t depend on the game but the player. Survival games are about surviving. Some people like other surrounding aspects of survival games, but if you genuinely enjoy the core loop of survival games, the game ends when you secured your survival in the game.
It’s the exact same issue with tabletop RPGs and complexity… You can write an essay on why combat isn’t engaging and how it only slows down the “good parts”, and before you know it, there will be someone scratching their head trying to wrap their head around someone finding combat boring. Same thing with narrative systems vs luck systems vs crunchy systems. Some people treat RPGs as improv/acting sessions, while others expect the G from “RPG” to be a meaty G. One thing is certain: You can’t please everyone and the concept of “balance” varies wildly from person to person.
Using the Minecraft example, you indeed reach a point in which you stop engaging with the survival aspects, but is that a bad thing? Does surviving in Minecraft needs to be more complex or “interesting”? I think it’s part of the flavor of the game just as it is right now. Surviving is an obstacle that drives you to play the game, and overcoming that obstacle is a landmark event of the experience. Some people like it, and others would much rather play creative mode.
Personally, I love survival games and when I’m itching for one, I’m actually itching to get that “from rags to riches” experience. Skyrim has a huge scene for survival mode to please people looking for a “tedious”, realistic survival experience. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with the ANOMALY turns the game into a hardcore survival experience. Case and point, one of the most downloaded addons for ANOMALY is a mod that adds lengthy animations when the player eats food, drinks water, opens their backpack, smokes a cigarette, etc. I love those, but there are times I just want the simplicity of Minecraft’s survival experience.
The thing is that you don’t (generally) want players to overcome the same obstacles 50 hours in the game that they’ve been overcoming 2 hours into the game. Feeding your character is fun for a while but it’s just a boring chore when you do it for the 100th time, and the gameplay has to evolve in a way that it adds something new, interesting to the loop.
I think valheim actually does it well overall, it is an improvement to the usual survival formula in almost every way.
- Hunger is important but not a ticking bomb that you have to constantly keep track of.
- Travel and distances matter very much but you get many tools to make it easier, but never completely obsolete!, in the form of carts, boats and portals.
- Building a base is important for comfort levels, safety and crafting but you’re never forced to go too deep into that - its up to players and their interest if they want to make it a huge mead house with walls all around you, or just a square box.
- Difficulty doesn’t increase on its own, you decide when to face bosses or embark in new areas
- New areas present new challenges rather than just scaling enemies, and as you master the area you also find ways to mitigate those challenges so they aren’t too annoying (usually potions or capes)
So yeah it’s a difficult balance to achieve, but I think most games get it wrong because they add stuff like this without understanding how it actually affects gameplay, they are just following a checklist of “oh yeah of course we need to have mechanic A in game in this genre”. A common example is hunger in Subnautica IMHO - it is necessary for the immersion but eventually it’s just a chore that doesn’t add much to the game, it should have had more, something to keep it fun and important later on.
Valheim makes feeding yourself interesting by also making it so that different types of foods give different benefits.
You can eat a variety of things to round yourself out for different situations. Some things are better for combat while others are better for increasing your stamina to make it easier to run around building/gathering.
One Hour One Life got an interesting solution to this problem. Your character is only alive for up to 1-hour. This allows for a stronger focus on the survival aspect as dying isn’t such a big deal. Death is even expected.
Players start as a baby born to an existing player or spawn as an Eve who will then have a chance of giving birth to new children. Progress is mostly about passing it on to new generations. As an Eve survival is extremely difficult and even just creating a campfire and some basic clothing can be difficult for new players. But even if that’s all you managed, you passed that on to your babies who won’t have to go through making this and can focus on other projects. It’s common practice to find a young player and pass on all your belongings to them when you are getting too old and you know your time is coming.
This life cycle of being born to different mothers in different villages that are in different stages also means you can experience different levels of progress. You can be born into a village that is still in the foraging stages and building a farm is a priority. Another village has the basics of survival taken care of and you can start to go up the technology level such as building a smithy. You can upgrade from basic fur clothing to a proper textile industry with dyes. There are so many life-improvement and luxury projects you can start that even in a super-advanced village there is usually something to do that is still progression. The last resort is always to build a car and explore the world (something I have never managed).
And all of these steps matter, better clothing gives better insulation and reduces your character’s hunger rate. Roasting meat over a campfire is less nutritious than a meat pie cooked in an actual oven. Taming horses to have a horse you can ride upgrades mobility so much. Something that often becomes necessary to gather materials.
For some that 1-hour cycle is a bit too fast and there are variants of the games that change the duration. I like the balance of having time to do something but still dying of Two Hours One Life more.
I really love project zomboid but I feel this a lot. There’s no reason to face danger once you get your safehouse set. I think an understated feature of the game is exploration—unless you memorized the whole map already—and you kinda stop getting that at the endgame. You might drive around a bit looking for a nice car but that’s it.
I wish there was a mod that tweaked the map a bit to add some more authored environmetal storytelling to key locations to incentivize more exploration. Right now you walk into buildings and everything is set very tidy like people still work or live there but there’s zombies just vibing inserted there. Sometimes you’re presented with random scenarios like a car with a flat tire and tools next to it, but I’m talking about something more deep. Like, imagine seeing a particular police station completely torn apart with a dead cop inside a closed cell with a few empty cans and bottles, a note, and an empty shotgun. Or going to the museum but someone put all the exhibitions in a locked room, and maybe the zombies broke down the door anyway. Maybe one of the houses already had its staircase broken and we could explore how those people lived there for a few weeks and tell a story about it. You could show how authorities might have tried setting barricades near public buildings that got ran over anyways. I think the research facility is a huge missed opportunity for this as well.
I agree completely. Project Zomboid is fantastic - it does a lot of the actual survival stuff really well - but, like you said, once your safehouse is mostly self-sufficient, it largely becomes optional to engage with anything dangerous at all. It doesn’t really have any real goals - developer-set or player-set - to keep you going once you’ve got your survival situation “solved”.
And yes! Environmental storytelling would really elevate the game. Even the buildings that aren’t clean, tidy places don’t really have any personality to them. It feels like a very sterile world that only exists for the player to experience. Of course, a lot of games would benefit from (more) environmental storytelling, but I think PZ is probably one of the games that would benefit most because of the nature of survival sandbox-style games. Creating your own “story” is a large part of the appeal, I think, and having an immersive world to match PZ’s immersive survival mechanics would really enable that!
I always feel like project zomboid is an excellent simulator but not really a good game for those reasons. You struggle with controls, UI and overall difficulty in the beginning - which mostly boils down to understanding how you’re meant to play the game rather than how it would make sense to play a game - and then the game kinda… stops? It’s just endless days of waiting for something to happen or to make a dumb mistake and due from a routine task. I really hope NPCs change this up and give some meaning in the later phases of the game but it’s gonna be really difficult to pull it off.
Easy or difficult, tedious sums up many games for me. I didn’t like hunger, combat, inventory clutter, or linear progression/impractical rewards in MC (also would’ve liked contraptions to be better, like easy sticky-piston chaining). I sucked at Don’t Starve, and I once had a moment where a bolt of lighting destroyed my base as I was trying to place a lightning rod (but couldn’t, and I had a screenshot of this at one point).
In Shattered Pixel Dungeon (like other Roguelikes), I feel a lot of my progress depends on what gear I get and how my guesses turn out (I dislike how equipment identification/curses specifically work) and hunger+inventory are annoying here too.
I quit playing Mewnbase when I ran out of inventory space and discovered that stuff on the ground would disappear, and I had no idea I would need to plan things that specifically especially not knowing what was needed.
Not survival in a traditional sense, but I hated loot in Gungeon. Because of inventory for active items/consumables, many of which I did not actually want (and inventory slots made selling it often not an option because of the rat).
Plenty of other games I’ve tried either seem like they come down to luck or have a very small margin for mistakes/inefficiency. In some cases I think there’s a disconnect with how the devs intend certain features and how they appear to me (or potentially how viable they are in general). And at this point, if it’s not free I’m not looking at it.
Then again, I likely get more enjoyment from watching someone play a game (especially story-based) so often that’s what I’ve done (LPs).
I didn’t like hunger, combat, inventory clutter, or linear progression/impractical rewards in MC
I’m definitely with you on this. I think all of these things can be great in other games (yes, even inventory clutter and management!) but they definitely feel more like chores when playing Minecraft. Some mods can help you fix some of these things but, ultimately, they’re generally obstacles to my enjoyment in Minecraft (which comes from building, exploring, making ridiculous redstone contraptions, etc.)
(also would’ve liked contraptions to be better, like easy sticky-piston chaining)
I’d love a blueprint feature like Factorio has! Again, some Minecraft mods do have similar things, but they’re definitely not all that fluid to use.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
I can’t actually say I’ve played it. I do tend to be a fan of roguelikes/roguelites in general, though. It’s certainly possible to struggle on bad runs because you got unlucky with items, but a lot of those styles of games let you manipulate the odds in your favour in some way once you know what you’re doing. And overcoming poor-quality loot can make for interesting, challenging runs that feel rewarding to win. But the other side of that coin, of course, is that they tend to feel punishing to players who don’t understand the workings of the game yet (and who simply don’t have the mechanical skill to perform well).
To be clear w/contraptions, I am mostly talking about how viable things are in survival and how powerful they are allowed to be. Like the original mod pistons chained when unpowered, MC’s implementation required re-powering+de-powering them in order (more complex the longer it was). Similarly, slime block limits meant you couldn’t make giant doors because it was too many blocks to move (esp. as it counted slime blocks themselves). Gold for powered rails means I rarely-if-ever was able to use it (especially not branch-mining for it specifically).
I did try mods and liked the options some of them gave. Including inventory management (mods and version compatibility ruined it for me, though). The added items still added overhead, and even in vanilla I would’ve liked to simplify some things (like 1 type of wood).
Minetest could be an option for me, but I haven’t seen anything close to what I’m looking for to be worth it for me to make my own mods/game setup.
a lot of those styles of games let you manipulate the odds in your favour in some way once you know what you’re doing. And overcoming poor-quality loot can make for interesting
they tend to feel punishing to players who don’t understand the workings
SPD has unidentified items that are ineffective if you lack the stat to use them, and if cursed will bind themselves to you (on top of a negative effect). So using an unknown item (even if you’ve had it for a while) can cause you to lose, but also not equipping that item can also cause you to lose (if not in a fight, by attrition). Also some rewards can still be cursed, and I can think of many other options for identification/dealing-with-curses that would make the player less dependent on the one-scroll-that-they-don’t-have.
and for context I have won the game at least 5 times (and lost many more times).
I can’t actually say I’ve played it
Be aware (or maybe beware) it is free (also open source).
I’m right there with you on Pixel Dungeon. The identify scrolls are so rare, you just have to grit your teeth and take a chance, especially at the beginning. I probably had 50 runs in a row that ended up being ruined by a surprise cursed item on the first or second floor, even if I survived to the 5th-6th floor. It was to the point where I was like “How the fuck does anyone win this game??”
I did end up beating it once, said “THERE. FUCK YOU.” and uninstalled.
I really like one of the survival mods for Skyrim. I think it’s Snowfall? Something like that; it added cold and blizzard mechanics. Now I have a reason to find a bridge over a river instead of just swimming across all the time! It also made me actually use the food I would otherwise hoard, and created a use for those otherwise cosmetic clothing items (many of them are warmer than armor, which doesn’t matter in Whiterun, but can matter quite a bit in Dawnstar). Bad guys becoming arrow sponges with one-shot mechanics just frustrates me, as a difficulty modifier, but getting a warning that a blizzard is coming while I’m in the middle of cleaning out a bandit camp adds exactly the right about of tension, and adds a level of decision-making that really appeals to me. It upped the difficulty level for me just enough to make the game twice as interesting, without making it feel oppressive.
Well, except for that one Stormcloak quest to the frozen island in the middle of an ice sea to get to that one constellation stone. That sucked. But, like, fuck the Stormcloaks.
But the point is, for me, I want the survival aspect to be a constant, predictable mechanic that I can prepare for, but that isn’t a means to its own end. The narrative direction of Skyrim doesn’t change, I just have to go about accomplishing those goals a little smarter.
Great write-up! I selected the title to see where this article was from, but it’s just you posting your well-written opinions to the fediverse!
I’m torn on the subject, personally. I understand the reasons why resource-limited survival games are the way they are, but they’re generally not for me. The difficulty often feels artificial, and basic actions like crafting take too long and you never have enough components to depend on it.
Which is weird, because I usually don’t mind grinding in games (as long as it’s my choice). And again, I realize why those survival games have those mechanics, they just don’t resonate as much with me…
I feel like just the act of surviving isn’t specific enough to call it a survival game. I actually had this discussion with a friend of mine not too long ago and some interesting points were brought up. Is Sims a survival game? You do have to eat and take care of your Sims in order to not die yet I personally wouldn’t classify it as a survival game. What sets Sims and Rimworld apart? Well I would say the biggest difference is the struggle and feeling like it actually takes effort to survive. This is why I find it hard to call even Minecraft a survival game, it doesn’t focus on the aspect of survival enough, it’s simply a mere distraction.
