The world of survival games offers a wide range of different games that are all worth exploring. MeinMMO reveals 5 games that make it particularly easy for you to get started in the genre.
Why play survival games? The survival genre appeals like no other to the ancient survival instinct of humans. It plays with adrenaline and thrills, the desire to progress, and combines these with a sense of exploration and creativity.
Survival games are also known for being especially unforgiving and awakening your ambition. Therefore, a certain tolerance for frustration should be present. With our five beginner tips, you can venture into the genre particularly well.
How did we select? For the games, we looked at several criteria:
- Survival mechanics: How difficult is survival at all?
- Community: How easy is it to connect with other players?
- Co-op: Can I play with friends? You will also find single-player titles in the list.
- Interaction: Is there PvP?
Diverse games with various settings and from all possible areas came together. The final selection is ultimately a list based on the author’s experience, who has meanwhile spent many hundreds of hours in various games of the genre.
The Long Dark
Developer/Publisher: Hinterland Studio | Release: August 1, 2017 | Setting: Modern | Platform: PC (Steam and Epic), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch
The criteria:
- How difficult is survival? Moderate, you need to pay attention to food, temperature, and nutrients.
- How easy is it to connect? The Long Dark is a single-player game.
- Can I play with friends? No.
- Is there PvP? No.
What is The Long Dark? You play as pilot Will Mackenzie, who is separated from his partner Dr. Astrid Greenwood after a plane crash in the northern Canadian wilderness, following your plane being struck by a flash of light.
You are to find Dr. Greenwood and try not to die in the process. To survive, you must fight your way through an unknown snowy wilderness where food and warmth are scarce but wild animals are plentiful.
What are the highlights? Your survival is primarily secured through hunting, fishing, and trapping. You need to explore your surroundings and can even climb. Various difficulty levels offer different challenges.
The story of The Long Dark is divided into several chapters, in which you experience the story in sequence. The story continually leads you further and is the core of the game.
A major focus is placed on exploration and details. You’ll find notes and letters in cabins, later even a small location where you can learn more about the events.
The Long Dark relies on a largely realistic setting. You don’t encounter zombies or mutants, but wild animals and must protect yourself from the dangers of nature – particularly the biting cold.
Why is it especially good for beginners? In the story mode (“Wintermute”), you are guided through the difficulty level and slowly introduced to the key mechanics of the game. Especially for newcomers to the genre, this is a pleasant tutorial. The story mode also does not have a permadeath function.
Once you have familiarized yourself a bit with the world, you can increase the difficulty or throw yourself into survival mode, where you experience a sandbox without a real goal. This way, newcomers can decide for themselves when they are ready for what level of survival.
The Long Dark is not yet complete; some episodes are still missing and will be continually developed. The story is therefore not yet finished.
Subnautica
Developer/Publisher: Unknown Worlds | Release: January 23, 2018 | Setting: Sci-Fi | Platform: PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch
The criteria:
- How difficult is survival? Moderate. You need to pay attention to oxygen primarily and avoid being eaten by sea creatures.
- How easy is it to connect? Subnautica is a single-player game.
- Can I play with friends? No.
- Is there PvP? No.
What is Subnautica? At its core, Subnautica is a classic Robinsonade. You crash-land on a foreign ocean planet and try to escape it. Equipped only with the meager contents of the landing capsule, you must first survive somehow.
More than endless expanses of water, there isn’t much on the planet, which is why you are constantly diving into the ocean to search for materials and supplies.
What are the highlights? The game’s standout feature is the picturesque underwater world. You explore reefs and encounter strange creatures that you would never see on land.
Along the way, you build better and better equipment to go deeper and further. In the standalone expansion Below Zero, a frozen sea where more creatures can be discovered is added to the rather tropical deep sea.
Additionally, on your journey through the seas of the planet, you explore the history and background. Because, without spoiling too much: your crash was not a technical failure of your ship …
Why is it especially good for beginners? Subnautica is largely peaceful, and you will rarely encounter conflicts except for a few hungry sea creatures. This allows you to focus more on important survival mechanics like oxygen.
You are not constantly under pressure to somehow survive; instead, you just need to “also survive.” The survival aspects even fade into the background more as the game progresses, allowing you to focus better on exploring.
Valheim
Developer/Publisher: Iron Gate/Coffee Stain | Release: February 2, 2021 | Setting: Norse mythology | Platform: PC
The criteria:
- How difficult is survival? Difficult, but deaths are not too tragic
- How easy is it to connect? Moderately, the community is large, but many players play alone or mainly build
- Can I play with friends? Yes, both via a local server and rented servers: This is how you play Valheim with friends
- Is there PvP? Only if both parties explicitly want it (“consensual PvP”)
What is Valheim? You play a fallen Viking who, after your death, comes to Valheim , a kind of afterlife. There, you are to fight against Odin’s enemies and accumulate glory and honor for the Allfather.
In the process, you gather resources to build a base, craft equipment, or cook delicious food and brew mead. You do all this to strengthen yourself and take on the mightiest foes of Valheim.
What are the highlights? Bosses are the highlight of Valheim. In every detailed biome of Valheim, there is a boss – currently, there are 5. These bosses serve as somewhat of a “culmination” of a chapter of the game.
You receive items from the powerful bosses with which you can gather new resources for better equipment or survive in new biomes. Thus, you gradually become stronger and explore more of the world.
The bosses themselves have special abilities and can be correspondingly difficult depending on your skill. Many players like to compare the battles and the combat system to Dark Souls.
Why is it especially good for beginners? Even though you will likely die early and often, deaths in Valheim are not too bad. You lose your equipment, but you can reclaim it or simply craft new ones.
Resources can be found anywhere after a certain point, and you will manage the game with mediocre weapons and armor – only bosses require more preparation.
Valheim is therefore especially suitable for helping you get used to dying in survival games and understanding that a character’s death is not as terrible as it sounds.
A bonus: Valheim can even be played on 10-year-old computers.
Fallout 76
Developer/Publisher: Bethesda | Release: November 14, 2018 | Setting: Post-apocalypse | Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
The criteria:
- How difficult is survival? Moderate, you need to eat and drink, but rather rarely. More dangers come from the world itself.
- How easy is it to connect? Very easy, the community warmly welcomes new players.
- Can I play with friends? Yes, easily as a team on a public server or with a paid Fallout 1st subscription in a private world.
- Is there PvP? Yes, but only in contested areas (workshops)
What is Fallout 76? After a brief but intense nuclear war, the world lies in ruins. Or at least the USA does. You are one of the few survivors who managed to secure safety in one of the protected vaults.
As some of the first to return to the surface, you are to clean up and rebuild the USA – starting in Appalachia, West Virginia. Here begins Fallout 76, in which you gradually reconquer the nuclear wasteland.
What are the highlights? Fallout 76 carries on the series’ quirky humor and offers a ton of wacky weapons (portable atom bomb launcher, anyone?), exaggerated power armor (exoskeletons), and mutants of all kinds. Most of these mutants want to kill you, some … just want to drink with you.
Especially the camp system is very popular, with which you can create your own house, crazy traps for unsuspecting players, restaurants, or your private vaults. You can even easily pack up and take your camps with you.
The story is also a big highlight. Fallout 76 takes place chronologically before all other Fallout titles, so you get to witness how the famous Steel Brotherhood rose to its size and fame.
Why is it especially good for beginners? Above all, the community of the game makes Fallout 76 ideal for newcomers. No matter when and where you play, if you are new, veterans will greet you warmly.
If you have trouble getting started, someone will likely provide you with clean water and food so you don’t die of thirst or hunger. Especially nice players will even supply you with weapons and starter gear.
Though there are always a few bad apples, no one can really “grief” you or kill you intentionally, which makes exploring the already dangerous wasteland at least more humane.
Grounded
Developer/Publisher: Obsidian/Xbox | Release: July 28, 2020 | Setting: alternate reality | Platform: PC (Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
The criteria:
- How difficult is survival? Moderate. Cooking and eating are a real problem at the beginning, but you can keep away from the greatest dangers.
- How easy is it to connect? Very easy. The game explains all mechanics to you, and Grounded still has many players, thanks to Xbox Game Pass.
- Can I play with friends? Yes, in co-op with up to 4 players.
- Is there PvP? Not directly, but friendly fire is active, so you can fight with friends.
What is Grounded? A mysterious incident while rampaging in the garden leads to you shrinking to tiny people, and even ants become your enemies.
You must find out why you are suddenly so tiny and survive the typical dangers of a garden. For you have definitely lost your status as alpha predator. Spiders, ladybugs, a nasty bird, and other creatures come after you.
To protect yourself, you build a fortress out of the blades of good English grass and sticks, explore and craft new weapons and armor, and have to make sure that the ant colony doesn’t steal all your supplies.
Grounded is still in development but already offers a decent amount of content for survival players.
What are the highlights? Grounded takes typical survival mechanics and packages them in sweet comic graphics with a great setting that everyone can certainly relate to. The “big” critters feel familiar. It’s fun to discover the details in the garden and build a fortress out of grass remnants.
Over time, you learn how to utilize your garden’s resources. Dew helps with thirst, bugs with hunger, and later mushrooms enhance your fortress. New enemies bring you new raw materials with which you can craft additional items.
Grounded also features a story, but it is currently still incomplete. Within the quests, you will find out why you are tiny and perhaps even how to return to your normal size.
Why is it especially good for beginners? Grounded guides you well at the beginning and explains everything to you. At the start, you have quests that explain the mechanics and guide you through the beginnings. Even later, new possibilities are well explained by the game.
The fight against the critters can be tricky, though. Especially at the beginning, you are often not yet ready for many creatures and should keep a safe distance. However, if you die, you can recover your belongings without losing anything.
You can also play Grounded together with 3 friends in co-op and explore the garden together. Other players don’t have to worry about you – there is no PvP. However, you can deal damage to your teammates – which allows friendly skirmishes.
Bonus: Rust
Rust is not really a good title for beginners in the survival genre. However, it is currently the largest survival game on Steam (via steamcharts.com) and belongs to the most popular games in the genre. By now, Rust is even available on PlayStation and Xbox.
In Rust, you will frequently encounter hostile players who will shoot you to grab your loot. As a rule of thumb: Nobody ever gifts you anything, and veterans advise you to get used to dying.
Nonetheless, Rust can be suitable for beginners for several reasons.
Why is Rust suitable for beginners?
- Official servers are regularly reset (through “wipes”), so no veteran has a permanent advantage.
- Due to the wipes, deaths and destroyed bases are less severe – nothing is permanent anyway.
- You will quickly find out where it is relatively safe and where it is less so.
- Survival mechanics and the urge to survive are highly pronounced.
Rust is not necessarily easy for beginners, but it can still efficiently introduce you to the survival genre if you have enough tolerance for frustration. In our list, it would be the “jump into cold water”, so to speak. Alternatively, other “big survival games” that have established themselves over the years, such as:
In all cases, they do not make it easy for beginners, but they carry the survival concept well. ARK even has a bigger focus on PvE but is somewhat confusing due to extensive dinosaur mechanics.
Was there a survival game in our list that you will check out? Which game would you recommend to your friends to start with the undeniably toughest gaming genre? Write it in the comments!
