Summary
- Survival games offer unique challenges, often featuring existential threats and common gameplay elements like hunger and thirst mechanics, resource gathering, and base building.
- Tools, equipment, and player-created items are essential for survival, with crafting systems varying in complexity across different games.
- Points of interest provide challenges and valuable loot, while deadly threats, such as zombies or harsh environments, drive the overall game flavor.
Survival games appear somewhere on the list of most popular game genres year on year. These kinds of games offer players a unique challenge, pitting their wits against adversity to thrive and survive. Most commonly, the player will face an existential threat, such as a zombie apocalypse, that has left humanity in tatters, and turned a comfortable world into a hostile environment.
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There are certain gameplay styles that are common to most survival games. Indeed, these are the definitive features that fans of the survival game genre look for. Almost all survival games will include some if not all of these gameplay features.
7 Hunger And Thirst
Cooking And Preparing Food
Almost every survival game has some form of h unger and thirst mechanic. Generally, the player will need to eat and drink regularly just to stay alive. Some games simply have looted or harvested food the player can eat, others have advanced cooking systems to create food.
Food and drink in survival games are often tied to some kind of buff mechanic or healing. For example, in 7 Days To Die, eating food will restore a portion of a player’s health bar, and drinking will increase the player’s stamina regeneration. Some games take the hunger and thirst mechanic even further, such as in the game SCUM, which completely simulates human metabolism, requiring the player to manage their nutrition on a macro scale.
6 Tools And Equipment
Aids For The Player
Survival games often require the player to perform actions that need specific tools. For example, an axe might be needed to chop down a tree. Additionally, the player may be able to equip certain items to increase their stats, such as armor or clothing.
These kinds of tools and equipment are generally either looted or crafted in survival games. Quite often, different levels of tools are used to gate certain resources. For example, in Valheim, the player cannot mine copper until they have procured an antler pickaxe, which they cannot gain access to without killing the first boss.
5 Resource Gathering
For Crafting And Base Building
Fans of survival games know that resource gathering is one of the primary gameplay loops in most games that fit within the genre. Resource gathering can take a couple of different forms. Firstly, gathering using tools, such as using an axe to chop down trees. Secondly, resource gathering by looting, which is a common mechanic for procuring rare materials.
Resource gathering in survival games is often the precursor activity for more advanced gameplay loops, such as crafting, cooking, or base building. Almost every survival game will require some level of resource gathering to take place.
4 Base Building
Constructing A Home
Most survival games have some form of base building. This can range from creating a simple dwelling that is simply used for storing loot and materials, to advanced bases that are used for defense.
Some games roll base building into a more advanced, tower defense gameplay loop. Both 7 Days To Die and Valheim have this feature. The player’s base is attacked, and defenses need to be built to fight off these attacks. Bases also have a role when playing a PvP survival game such as The Front, becoming a safe haven for players, and a raid target for their enemies.
3 Player Crafted Items
Manufacturing Weapons And Armor
Player-created items are a staple of survival games, to one extent or another. In some games, crafting is quite simple, and may simply consist of cooking food or similar consumables, relying on looting to equip the player with more advanced equipment.
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Some survival games have complex crafting systems, requiring the player to collect and process raw materials into intermediary resources, before crafting a final item. Games such as SCUM favor this style of crafting, meaning the player needs to unlock recipes and track down rare materials to create new, powerful artifacts and equipment.
2 Points Of Interest
Places To Explore And Loot
Although it can be fun to run around in nature, collecting resources, and building a comfortable base, most players require some kind of challenge to overcome. Many survival games have points of interest that contain enemies such as monsters or zombies, which the player can take on in combat.
Quite often, these same POIs are used as spawn points for valuable loot or rare crafting materials. This forces the player to meet the challenge of clearing the POI if they want to be able to get to this loot. POI also gives game designers locations within which to spawn quests or missions, or random enemy spawns.
1 Deadly Threats
Something To Survive
A survival game needs something the player is surviving from. There are a few games, such as The Long Dark, where simply surviving the harsh weather and environment is a significant challenge. However, most survival games pick an established trope such as a zombie apocalypse or alien incursion as the main threat the player must overcome.
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The deadly threat the player has to face will drive the overall flavor of the game. For example, players know that if they are playing a zombie survival game, they will be facing undead enemies, and that nighttime will be more dangerous. And of course, in PvP-enabled survival games, the deadly threat is the most deadly of all, other players.
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