I am known to be a lover of survival games. It’s important to understand here that I don’t mean survival horror or survival crafting or all the other genres that call themselves “survival” when they’re more about running away from zombies or punching trees. To me, a true survival game can have some of those elements, but the key feature is the kind of nitty gritty, daily life mechanics that feel more like chores than play: feeding yourself, dealing with being tired, dressing for the weather, and moving your body through space. You know, boring stuff–the very best kind of video game stuff there is.
For me, the absolute pinnacle of the survival genre is The Long Dark, but there are other standouts too. Subnautica gets it right with your oxygen meter, and with the way traversing its underwater depths requires so much planning and effort. Recent cozy game Winter Burrow has its brutal cold that makes short journeys outside intense. Don’t Starve is a little heavy on the crafting but makes up for it with its day/night cycle. Games like Project Zomboid and Neo Scavenger have absurd levels of detail that see you worrying about the kinds of things video games usually make trivial, like being bored or thinking about the physical item–shopping cart, plastic bag, your hands–in which you’ll carry your inventory.
I get why people might not be keen on this stuff. Feeding yourself or packing a bag are annoying in real life, the kind of tiresome stuff you probably don’t want to think about in a video game. Being too cold or too hot is one of the worst things about having a physical body. Video games invented fast travel for a reason: because having to tediously walk across a map, especially if you also have to worry about hunger and thirst and weight and stamina, is usually the interstitial stuff between the “real” gameplay and not the game itself. I understand why you hate it. I do. But you’re also wrong.
For one, I love feeding my guy. The way I frame this is probably telling–I remember a debate somewhere on social media a while back about whether, in a survival game, you are meeting your own needs or whether you’re caring for someone else like a tamagotchi. In my mind, I’m caring for a little creature that is also kind of me. In The Long Dark, I often talk back to my character when they complain about the cold or being tired– “I’m working on it, Astrid;” “Here’s a cup of coffee for you, Will.” Like maybe some of you, I’m not great at taking care of myself in real life, but I am quick to care for others, and I get to play out this instinct in a game without having to talk to my therapist about self-care. And hey, maybe I benefit from it too–that whole “talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend” thing can find a new expression in a video game.
But beyond the potential psychological benefits, I also like how seeing my character as a little guy gives me a place to anchor myself in the vastness of a hostile survival game world. I have this little home base of a body to always return to, one that has predictable needs I can strive to achieve. I find a lot of comfort in this, even when everything is going wrong. There might be a bear outside my Long Dark cabin or a terrifying fish outside my Subnautica base, but my character still needs to eat and drink and breathe, a bit of safe repetition in an ever-changing world. No matter what a survival game is about or what’s going on in it, you also always have that same set of tasks to return to.
And unlike other video game skills that require timing or complicated button presses–boss fights in games, combat moves–, it’s not that hard to get good at the basics in survival, where it’s at most a handful of button presses to cook some food, or an in-game evening spent managing your inventory. Survival games, stripped down to their very core, are easy to understand and to master: the whole game is built around these same set of elements that don’t change much. You don’t get some escalating series of recipes the way you get harder and harder Hollow Knight bosses. Once you know how to boil a pot of water in The Long Dark, you’ll never face some new variation that will have you throwing aside your controller in outrage.
Of course that doesn’t mean survival games are easy. A great thing about them is the way all their challenge and drama springs from these easily-mastered basics. Their repetition and reliability is what makes them so hard; the fact that your character always needs to eat means your character always needs to eat, and you have to venture out into a dangerous game world sooner or later. It’s these needs that push you out of your comfort zone, and it’s that same soothing regularity that makes them drive a survival game’s gameplay. This pushes you to get creative and think ahead, to problem-solve and take chances. A survival game isn’t always you against a boss or horde of enemies; it’s you against yourself, your appetite for risk or your ability to plan ahead, or–as is so often the case for me in The Long Dark–your ability to sit with boredom or to make good choices, to embrace your curiosity without letting it drive you into doing something stupid.
Most survival games feature permadeath, which can sting when a long run ends and you lose your high-level gear or bustling survival economy. It can feel dispiriting to start again in these moments, but unlike non-survival games where you have to level up your character more or grind through low-level fights again, the gameplay available to you at the beginning of a new survival run is essentially the same as at the end. You might not have the best shelter or clothes, but you get to dive right back into the game. At its core, when you die in a survival game you get to just keep playing, instead of having to earn your way back to where you were when you died. In a way, each survival game run is an episode in one long game; you aren’t so much starting over as you are carrying on.
For me, the more granular all of this the better: the more core needs I have to always return to, the more little moments I can take to find comfort and care, the more opportunities to push myself into adventure and exploration. I can put down a survival game and come back to it without having to watch a lengthy YouTube explainer to remember the story, or dig through my settings to remember a bunch of controls. My survival needs are always there, never solved but also never changing, both a comfort and a challenge in a world of endless new video games and endless new real-life horrors. My little guy will always need a snack and a nap (much like me in real life), and I’ll always feel better–in game and in real life, both for my character and for myself–when I give it to them.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
Read More
Log in
