Survival as a genre is generally known for being demanding. You start from nothing, and against the constraints the game introduces, you have to learn how to walk and eventually thrive. Games like Minecraft make this an approachable genre, but then you have other titles like Green Hell that take it to the extreme, where you constantly feel like you're fighting against the environment in a tireless, hopeless battle.
8 Best Survival Games For Challenging Exploration, Ranked
Players who love a good challenge to go along with their exploration will enjoy what the following survival games have to offer.
If Green Hell sounds like it's right up your alley, but you'd like a bit more RPG and an open-world environment to boot, then I have a few grueling games to suggest. These games are easily the toughest on the market, and for multiple reasons. First, they tend to expect you to figure it all out on your own without any guidance or minimal explanations. Second, they go pretty deep into various systems, from metabolic rates to infections and weapon jamming. Third, there's few moments of respite, and every decision and move you make has to be carefully and strategically calculated. Surviving in these games is a marathon, not a sprint, and you won't find any easy-peasy power fantasies here. We'll rank these roughly in terms of depth and learning curve, from the most approachable to the toughest to master.
7 Days To Die
Plan Ahead Or Die At Blood Moon
The easiest of these hardest games is 7 Days to Die, but that doesn't mean you can saunter into this game without a care in the world. It's a grueling race against a seven-day time constraint from the get-go. The premise is that every seven days, the Blood Moon rises, and a zombie horde will come chasing after you. Each time, the horde's size increases, and with limited stamina, bullets, and other gear, there's only so much you can do and so far you can go to avoid the hungry zombies.
Oh, you survived one week? Better get ready for the next one and build an even better, bigger, and sturdier base with plenty of traps to funnel the horde through. You'll have to engage in all the classic survival gameplay features to prepare accordingly, from gathering resources to build your base, to venturing out into cities to scavenge for gear, all the while you're struggling to keep up with your basic needs, ranging from hunger to thirst, to your general, basic health.
Outward
There Are No Power Fantasies Here
Outward may seem like another great fantasy RPG at a glance, but it's in fact one of the toughest survival games out there. While many RPGs let you live out your power fantasies freely and adjust to the level of your character, Outward doesn't. The enemies don't scale, and if you run into a foe that's far beyond your current capabilities, the best solution is to just run away and come back when you're ready. With no fast travel available, Outward forces you to set out on foot, to traverse potentially dangerous biomes in search of loot, adventure, and progression.
The Greatest Open-World Survival RPGs Of All Time, Ranked
The wombo-combo of open-world, survival gameplay, and RPG elements is a tough one to get right, but these games succeed in it.
You'll need to eat, drink, and stop to rest regularly, and your injuries will affect you for a long time after a battle gone wrong. The most sinister and challenging detail in the game is how it handles death. You'll never know exactly what will happen to you when you lose a fight. It could be that you receive help, or that you're left to bleed out. You could also end up in a totally random location across the map with nothing in your pockets, forced to return to that place you were at before to retrieve your backpack. It's pretty frustrating, and it will punish anyone who dares believe they're the Last Dragonborn of Aurai.
SCUM
Unmatched In Metabolic Complexity
There's detail, and then there's detail, and SCUM definitely leans into the latter kind. On the surface, it looks like a bog-standard survival game set on a prison island with enemies, hazards, looting, shooting, scavenging, and surviving. Add to that PVP, and it almost sounds like a classic looter shooter. However, once you get to know your character's physiology and how much it affects the gameplay, you'll be blown away by the sheer detail.
The game goes as far as tracking your digestive speed, blood pressure, vitamins and minerals, and even how much muscle mass you have versus how much fat. And all of this isn't just for fun; it will affect your gameplay. It also means you really need to consider your diet if you want to stay strong and healthy. Shooting isn't straightforward either, with stamina and weapon hamming thrown into the mix. You'll really have to make sure your crafted gear is up to par, and that you have proper, clean bandages to apply when you do end up getting hurt. An infection will cost you dearly and make you a target for other players or the mutated monsters still lingering on the island.
Kenshi
You're A Nobody, And You'll Feel It In Your Bones
Kenshi is a unique game. It gives you a ton of freedom to become who you want to be, but it doesn't hand you the tools to do that. In fact, it actively seems to work against you, dropping bandits and slavers in your face and beating you down over and over again without mercy. Most likely at first, you'll spend a lot of time staring at your character bleeding out in the wasteland without anyone to help you. Welcome to the classic Kenshi experience.
Your first order of business is not to show the world what a badass you are, but simply survive in it. That means getting food, and most likely a safe place, like a town, where you can work on your skills, particularly toughness. It says a lot that something like building your own base, which is typically a basic first step in many survival games, is considered an endgame feature in Kenshi. That's how punishing the world is. There's someone constantly at your throat when you're wandering out, and even if you manage to build a walled, protected outpost with turrets, it's still possible to get overrun by enemies if you're not careful enough.
Project Zomboid
A Story Of How You Died, And That Says A Lot
Project Zomboid comes in a few different difficulty flavors, but Apocalypse is often cited as the default way to experience the game. As the only survivor in Knox Country, you pick your starting skills, and you spawn into a random house and have to find a way to thrive. The world is huge, yes, but its resources are not limitless, and most locations are swarming with zombies that can spot you and hear you from afar. One bite, and it's over for you. You'll have to plan your first week carefully, set up water, food, and even electricity for the eventual moment when electricity will get cut off. Getting injured means you'll be recovering for days, experiencing pain, and losing out on your strength.
10 Most Complex Survival Games
These excellent survival games offer the most depth and complexity to satisfy the most extreme survival enthusiasts.
It's truly a bleak experience where combat should be avoided in favor of stealth, but sometimes you simply have no choice. Given how getting bitten is a death sentence and basically the end of a character's run, it can be pretty infuriating if you're caught off-guard because your character is panicking or fatigued and is jumped by a horde. Building up your skills, especially Carpentry, is a long but important process, and basically your only hope of living just a little longer.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
If Dwarf Fortress And Project Zomboid Had A Baby
If you loved Project Zomboid and would like something even deeper and more complex, you should play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a zombie survival packaged in a traditional roguelike format, with that classic grid-based movement you might recognize from games like Dwarf Fortress. You have skill progression like in a classic RPG, as well as tons of survival gameplay elements that are extremely well-developed and detailed. Jump into a post-apocalyptic New England, and see how far you can go. Just be warned: the game doesn't hold your hand one bit, and will assume from the get-go that you think and behave like a real human being in the apocalypse.
That includes realism with small things like painkiller dosage, losing stamina as you run, line of sight controlling what you can and can't see, and making too much noise being lethal. Being sloppy or greedy will get you punished in a second, so you're constantly on edge. Add to that the rather beginner-unfriendly UI, and it's clear why Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead isn't exactly the easiest game to jump into blindfolded. You'll probably want some advice and guidance on getting started if you're not used to games as obscure and punishing as this one, but boy, does it reward you for mastering its systems.
UnReal World
Freezing In The Finnish Winter
UnReal World is an interesting one, as it has roguelike as a flavor to it while also featuring a procedurally generated open world, RPG elements in the form of skill progression, and various different cultures you can start off as, as well as grueling survival gameplay. Your job? Survive life in the hostile nature of Finland by hunting, gathering, fishing, and combating the cold. The systems are a bit obscure, with no HP bar to give you exact damage numbers, for example, which adds to the challenge this game presents. It's an old one, too, having been around for over three decades since 1992, which speaks for its depth and quality.
The possibilities are near endless, and with survival as your only goal, just like in Kenshi, you get to decide what path you take. Be careful, though, as you'll have to be prepared for life in the wilderness, for combat, and for possible injuries if you're caught unprepared. One bad step can set you back for days to come, and that single injury could spell disaster if it isn't properly treated. It puts a major mental load as you're constantly calculating your next move, trying to keep yourself warm, fed, and hydrated, and with how dense the systems are, it's more than likely that you'll need a bit of outside guidance and a lot of trial and error before you can start thriving in UnReal World.
Open-World Games That Punish You for Playing on Autopilot
Get lazy and distracted or try to rush through these open-world games, and they'll swiftly send your character to the death screen.