With its dreamy underwater setting – partly created by its community – and compelling gameplay loop, Subnautica is one of the best exploration survival games on PC. Subnautica is much more hopeful. Host Your Game on Kongregate. An open platform for all web games! Get your games in front of thousands of users while monetizing through ads and virtual goods. Find documentation and support to get you started. Upload Your Game; Our Publishing Program. With our publishing program, we can help get your games to millions of users on multiple. The last Island of Survival is another survival game known as the best survival game for Android among its users. It is an online-based last man standing type action game with deadly challenges and lots of opportunities. The game requires at least 2 GB of free space and works on most modern Android phones and tablets. Enter the best survival games! Designed to test your endurance, your ingenuity and, in many cases, your capacity for scares. Collecting resources, taking on – and hiding from – enemies, all. Valheim is an easy contender for one of the best survival games of the decade. It’s a masterclass in game design, stripping back the intensive graphics, doing away with the expansive planet-hopping scope of recent survival titles, and instead focusing on core gameplay and how to make it fun.
Whether you’re looking to tumble against extreme circumstance or build a cozy hut against the storm, the best survival games are those that truly let you master the elements.
We’ve recently been reminded of just how powerful the best survival games can be. These are the games that immerse you into a new and interesting world, right before stacking you against their harsh conditions, depleted resources, or aggressive wildlife, forcing you to manage your various materials in order to stay alive.
Some of the games on this list are very different to one another in regards to their tone, art style, and mechanics, but at their core, this is a collection of games that let you face off against the most powerful odds – without you even needing to leave your bedroom.
These titles are the enjoyable, if not sometimes flawed, highlights of the genre, ranging from pure survival simulators to roguelikes with strong survival elements. In no particular order, these are the 16 best survival games of all time.
Rust
Possibly one of the most infamous survival games in the genre, Rust has become known for the emergent gameplay held therein. Open voice chat allows players to talk amongst themselves as though they were really standing next to one another, and this makes for some really interesting team dynamics as people cheat, manipulate, or support one another while fending off hunger, thirst, and cold.
Add to this a highly customisable base system, flying vehicles, a randomised map, and dense weapon variety, and you’re left with an incredible experiment into what the genre can be at its craziest.
Ark: Survival Evolved
Ark is a survival game with dinosaurs. Sounds cool enough, right? Often Ark gets compared to Rust because they entered Early Access at around the same time and both feature open-world PvP combat, but they’re really fundamentally different games.
Where Rust often sees you raiding someone else’s base unawares 30 minutes after you spawn, in Ark it takes a lot longer to get to the point where you can actually compete against the players who have put in their hours on the grindstone. And because it rewards that grindier gameplay loop, there’s less incentive for senseless violence, which promotes more peacemaking between players.
Where Rust sees you shooting other players on sight, Ark focuses more on developing your base, taming your dinosaurs, and building your online posse, and when it gets going, it can be an enjoyable ride.
Eco
Eco is an incredibly interesting title – part survival game, part sustainability simulation – that features a diverse and interactive ecosystem that you have to keep alive. It has been lauded as a great educational tool for teaching younger audiences about how to respect the planet, with certain pathways of industry meeting a negative feedback loop.
If you burn coal, you can endanger the planet. If you cut down too many trees, you can endanger the planet. But on top of all this, there’s still the incoming threat of a giant meteor that you have to find a way to destroy, lest all life on earth perish anyway. It’s wholesome and pretty, with a propulsive sense of urgency baked into its mechanics. An all-round insightful experience.
Terraria
This legendary 2D sidescrolling epic needs no introduction – it was 2011’s resource gathering, dig-straight-down sim whose blippy soundtrack still features as a part of the meme discourse 10 years later.
Featuring simple inventory mechanics, an in-depth base building system, vendors, an interesting arsenal of weapons, and hectic boss fights, Terraria is an absolute time sink. Plus, the vanilla game boasts some quality-of-life additions that took Minecraft eight years to implement. We really don’t need to say more, do we?
Among Trees
Currently in Early Access, Among Trees is a survival game that focuses on the cozier and more gentle elements of survival games. If you’re looking for a game that doesn’t exactly pit you against the elements as much as let you curl up in them, look no further.
At Among Trees’ core is a focus on exploring its beautifully colourful world, with a number of systems to help you do this; base building to escape the elements, plant growing to sustain yourself, and tool crafting to make survival easier. And if you’re looking for some extra kick, you can introduce some dangerous animals into your landscape, or add some tense man vs wild elements, with options to despawn all of the above if you’re looking for that pure, peaceful, escapist fantasy.
It’s exciting to see where this game will head with further updates.
The Forest
If Among Trees is a nice game, The Forest is its bizarro-world counterpart. It’s a dark, frighteningm and eerie survival game that serves as the complete antithesis to the friendlier corners of the genre.
After surviving a terrible plane crash, you come to in a forest chock full of feral cannibals who have kidnapped your son. As you build up resources, you eventually find the nerve to enter the sprawling caverns beneath the forest’s wealth of trees, uncovering more information about what’s really going on.
For fans of the horror genre, The Forest offers an uncanny and terrifying world for you to fend against, with inventory management and base building mechanics that assist you on the quest to save your child.
Darkwood
Since we’re talking about spooky survival games, we’d be remiss if we left out Darkwood. Also featured on our survival horror list, this indie title is set in 1980s Poland, in yet another creepy forest whose deep and extensive backstory provides constant, teeth-gritting inspiration to traverse its brutal day-night cycle.
During the day, the game is treacherous and demanding, but when night hits, you’re essentially already dead unless you have a bunker to fortify and hold up in. Base management, inventory management, weaponry hoarding, and item crafting become integral after the sun sets, and it’s in those moments that Darkwood puts the survival in survival horror.
This War of Mine
Similarly uneasy and grim, This War of Mine is a survival game that truly makes you feel like you’re trying to outlive a war. Developed by 11-bit Studios, This War Of Mine takes the focus of warfare away from the Call Of Duty frontlines, instead choosing to place the limelight on the communities that actually see the most devastation.
You’re tasked with managing a crew of survivors living in a dilapidated house as you manage food, weapons, inventory, and health during the day, and scavenge for supplies in the hellscape of the night. It’s most likely the case that anyone living in 2021 has no illusions about the devastating impact of warfare, but just in case you needed a refresher, This War of Mine will suffice.
Frostpunk
11-bit Studios’ other headline survival title, Frostpunk, is an incredible hybrid game that perfectly blends elements of the 4X, survival, and base-building genres while immersing audiences in its rich and icy steampunk world.
After two volcanic eruptions decimate earth in the 1800s, it’s up to the player to gather and burn as many fossil fuels as possible to keep your civilians warm and develop the efficiency of the last city on earth. And while it does a great job of being a city-sim, Frostpunk’s most interesting elements are what it takes from the 4X strategy genre; with public approval systems in place alongside laws, morality scales, and gameplay options that can allow you to play as a purely evil asshole if you see fit.
Want to have a labour workforce made up exclusively of children that you enslave into compulsory 24-hour shifts while executing dissenters by burning them alive in the furnace? Go right ahead. You monster.
RimWorld
Similarly to Frostpunk, RimWorld is another base construction and roguelike survival game, but with the added twist of its AI storyteller, who you’re constantly pitted up against. Like a Dungeon Master that nobody asked for, RimWorld’s AI storyteller is entirely in charge of the difficulty, progression, and random events that beset your colony, which may allow for an easy meander through its technological progression trees and survival systems, or may force you into a grimdark timeline that sees every one of your colonists dying from an incurable disease.
Alongside this are plenty of custom mods that are accessible directly from the Steam workshop, so if you ever wanted to further humanity with your work as an organ farmer, now’s the time.
Oxygen Not Included
Oxygen Not Included is another base-builder that sees you establishing an underground base in which oxygen… is not included. Each time you start a new world, you find yourself in a procedurally generated landscape where you need to manage your hunger, waste, and oxygen levels to survive.
It’s a very par-for-the-course, min-max base builder, with each of your different colonists having different stats that make them better at certain tasks, but makes for a great sense of achievement as your management prowess pushes you forward towards a larger population and more efficient base.
Sunless Sea
A bit of a left-of-field entry to this list, and not a pure survival game in the most specific sense, but a brutal roguelike management game that incorporates elements of the genre into its inventory management and progression, and takes no shame in pitting you against all of its worldly (and unworldly) elements.
Following a tiff with hell, London has been sucked beneath the Earth into a cavernous ocean, full of islands whose populations and rich backstories are in need of commerce and trade. You take the role of a ship captain who connects these islands together, fights against the vicious hell-spawn of the seas, and manages your food and fuel resources to deliver items throughout all of the unterzee and above.
The crux of this game lies in its story world however, with Sunless Sea’s aesthetic and story proving to be somehow deeper than the oceans you traverse. And if you’re looking for a Lovecraftian take on survival and aren’t afraid of reading, get into it.
Valheim
Valheim is an easy contender for one of the best survival games of the decade. It’s a masterclass in game design, stripping back the intensive graphics, doing away with the expansive planet-hopping scope of recent survival titles, and instead focusing on core gameplay and how to make it fun.
With a wide array of world traversal options, expansive biomes, enjoyable base building systems, and some hectic boss battles, Valheim is a fantastic title only made better by its online playability. Get a bunch of mates together and have an old-school LAN party with this one; build up your viking stronghold, summon in some nordic gods, and thank me later.
Minecraft
It’s Minecraft. It’s quite possibly the best example of what game design can be; a laundry list of fun and interesting systems that intersect with each other in perfect simplicity. You chop a tree, you get wood, you upgrade your shit, you build a base, you farm, you tame animals, you explore the world and you fight bosses – but all in a way that seems emergent and never feels like its something you have to do.
But it’s also an intimidating title that may seem simple on the surface, but holds an infinite capacity for interactivity as limited as your imagination. At its craziest, Minecraft can see you build everything from 1:1 replicas of all of Seattle, to redstone calculators that can solve calculus problems, but at its core, there is still a thoroughly enjoyable survival sim.
We all remember the first base we built to escape the rain, the first time we died to a creeper, or the ecstasy of finding our first diamond, and it’d be hard not to give credit to the game that’s fuelled millions of kids’ childhoods.
The Long Dark
The Long Dark is one of the more capital ‘S’ survival games on this list, but is easily one of the richest in terms of its aesthetic and setting. It sees you managing heat, food, water, and tiredness, with systems in place for crafting and repairing clothes, building fires, and hunting/combatting the various animals that populate your surroundings.
Rather than including intensive base-building mechanics, The Long Dark takes a turn for the more realistic, as you try and escape the snow in the various abandoned settlements of the Canadian wilderness. While some of the survival elements are frustratingly immersive (effect stacking sometimes makes the game a nightmare to play), that’s also The Long Dark’s biggest boon.
If you’re looking for a game on this list that really aims to make you feel at odds with your surroundings, and in turn gives you that rich sense of pride for surviving at all, The Long Dark has it all. Not to mention, it has a great story mode attached.
Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero
If you take the positive elements of every game on this list, toss them in a blender, and sous vide the result, you get Subnautica. Somehow, Unknown Worlds found a way to perfectly tread the tonal line between a curious, playful reef-swimming simulator and a batshit terrifying abyss-walking thriller, and does so with a mastery of interactive systems, crafting mechanics, and an intriguing story to boot.
It does such a good job of setting the tone of the alien world of 4546B, – you never really feel like you’re being pitted directly against it as much as you’re trying to work alongside it in. Even though there’s nothing more emotionally turbulent than having your seamoth destroyed by a Reaper Leviathan, it never feels like the game is singling you out for doing anything wrong, but rather that you just flew too close to the sun that time, and that your reward should be a quick panic attack.
Best Survival Games Free
There’s a couple of issues the game has with inventory management or could’ve approached crafting with a less frustrating UI, but both of the Subnautica games stand as incredible ways to create a survival experience for the audience.