Highlights
- Survival games are challenging and increasingly popular, often set on remote islands with limited resources to gather and survive.
- Games like Lost in Blue: Shipwrecked, Stranded Deep, and ARK: Survival Evolved provide unique survival experiences for players.
- For a more relaxed survival style, The Survivalists and The Forest offer opportunities to build bases and live a nice life in the midst of harrowing situations.
The survival game has continued to grow over the past decade, with a huge number of games being released under the genre. Part of this rise is attributed to the growing popularity of open-world games, which gives the sort of freedom that players all dream of attaining inside their favorite gaming worlds.
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Survival games are often extremely challenging. Players have to consider a variety of factors and make sure they follow a set of rules to keep their character healthy. There are many ways to impose restrictions on a large map in a survival game. One that has become fairly popular is setting the game on a remote island where players are trapped and must gather resources and build shelter to ensure their survival.
7 Lost In Blue: Shipwrecked
Metacritic Score: 54
- Platforms: Nintendo Wii
- Released: August 7, 2008
- Developers: Hudson Soft
A fun Wii-exclusive game that continued the Survival Kids franchise, Lost In Blue: Shipwrecked features a teenager named Aidan who, along with his monkey named Hobo, arrives on an abandoned island after the cruise ship he is on crashes. With a girl named Lucy and her dog named Max, they set out to explore the island together.
The survival genre wasn’t as popular when Lost In Blue: Shipwrecked was released in 2008, but this game was a fun and simplistic example of the style that would later become more popular. The tropical island setting gave the game a feel-good vibe from the get-go, and it proved to be a fantastic early example of the genre for the Nintendo Wii.
6 Stranded Deep
Metacritic Score: 65
If players want a particularly deadly survival experience set deep in the stunning and warm Pacific Ocean, they can take on the challenges of surviving after a plane crash in Stranded Deep. This game allows players to check out not just fascinating islands, but also the depths of the ocean, such as terrifying underwater trenches without a bottom.
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Players are tasked with building shelters, rafts, and other items to keep themselves alive, which is an especially large challenge in this game, since resources are so sparse. With plenty of tropical life to see in plant and animal form, and even some mythical sea creatures to be discovered occasionally and fought with great caution. Stranded Deep doesn’t take place entirely on the islands that are featured, but they and the entire map give off the sense of tropical remoteness that many survival games have become known for.
5 ARK: Survival Evolved
Metacritic Score: 70
There are different maps throughout ARK: Survival Evolved, but players start in a place known only as The Island, a remote setting where various people from throughout time and space have been sent. With enough resources to survive, and plenty of deadly creatures of many types to be seen, including a variety of dinosaurs, players will have a hard time adjusting to the difficult, grinding nature of this survival game.
The Island contains clues from past survivors, and players will later see that The Island is not an island at all, but the setting remains and works as one, even though it is secretly on a space station. This only serves to make it even more remote as an island.
4 Dead In Vinland
Metacritic Score: 74
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS
- Released: April 12, 2018
- Developers: Ishtar Games
A slightly different type of survival game, Dead in Vinland takes place on a strange island where a family of Vikings wash up and are forced to survive while dealing with the local warlord who demands tribute from them, prompting the game to devolve into turn-based combat at times.
Dead in Vinland has both survival and management game elements, forcing players to make the best use of all the skills that the various members of the Viking family have, and taking precious care of their available resources. For players who like extreme challenge, the game even includes a permadeath mode called "True Viking," which forces players to be extremely careful when entering into turn-based combat with family members.
3 The Survivalists
Metacritic Score: 76
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, Microsoft Windows
- Released: October 9, 2020
- Developers: Team17, Mouldy Toof Studios
There are so many truly challenging survival games being released nowadays that sometimes it can be refreshing to find one that is much simpler and designed more for the satisfaction that comes from building up bases and creating a nice life out of a harrowing situation.
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The Survivalists allows players to do just this, giving them free rein after washing up on a deserted tropical island. With help from the local monkey population, players can easily survive and set themselves up with a wonderful little life, without ever really needing to stress about survival mechanics besides hunger. For fans of a more relaxing survival style, The Survivalists is perfect.
2 The Long Dark
Metacritic Score: 77
One of the more punishing and realistic survival games released in the last decade, The Long Dark, is set on a very different sort of remote island. In the frigid wastes of the Canadian wilderness, players take control of a pilot who crash lands and must survive on the fictional Great Bear Island, trying not just to find enough food and water, but finding ways to deal with the constant threat of freezing to death.
Players are forced to deal with all sorts of threats that normally wouldn’t be present in survival games, such as wind chill and the real effects of fatigue on the body. For anyone hoping to find a pleasant world filled with intriguing lore, disappointment is inevitable, as The Long Dark forces its players to focus on just trying to survive this brutal map for as long as possible.
1 The Forest
Metacritic Score: 83
One of the most beloved survival games of the past decade, The Forest features another plane crash on a deserted island, with a surprising number of survivors. Unfortunately, in single-player mode at least, all the others are taken and killed by the cannibals living on the island. However, there is a great multiplayer mode as well. With a curious research facility atop a mountain, and plenty of terrifying mutants shambling around, there is plenty to fear in this remote location.
Players are given very little instruction and are forced to solve their own issues of heat, sleep, food, and water, as well as crafting weapons to survive the cannibal attacks that they will suffer more and more as the game continues. The Forest is a quintessential version of the traditional remote island survival game, a true classic of the survival genre which has spawned a sequel which is now in early access.
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