The survival genre is growing and growing, so even fans sometimes lose track. We’ll help and introduce you to five titles that you might not have heard of.
A lot of gamers love the virtual fight for survival. It feels like hardly a week goes by without a new survival game. And even the one or other grey duckling suddenly celebrates the big successes after eight years of Early Access.
Strangely enough, the established AAA developers are mostly staying out of the genre. At least Blizzard has announced its own survival game in the meantime. The biggest piece of the pie, however, has so far gone to indies, which in turn have grown into big house numbers through their success.
But even far away from the biggest names like Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, The Forest or DayZ, there are new survival games that hardly anyone knows about yet, but that want to be at the forefront in the future. We will now introduce five of them to you.
Five new survival games you might not know yet
Winter Survival Simulator
(Subgenre: Survival Simulation – Developer: Drago Entertainment – Release: Second Quarter 2022)
There is a system behind the seemingly banal name. Because Drago Entertainment already brought a simulation with a very similar name onto the market with the popular Gas Station Simulator. And the developer is now planning further games along the same lines – including the Winter Survival Simulator. Here, too, the name is supposed to be the programme.
You have to survive the harsh weather in Mount Washington State Park after an accident on a leisurely winter hike has left you all alone in the wilderness. Your leisure activities consist of hunting animals, grilling steaks, not becoming bear food and not freezing to death.
You will also find abandoned bases in the game world that you can turn into a warm shelter. Or you can build your own wooden hut in the landscape, which is feasible but not necessarily efficient. After all, there are already huts.
The big goal is to rescue you from your predicament. To do this, you have to make your way to a ranger station. But this rescue should take some time due to the weather and the position of the person to be rescued (i.e. you!), which you should ideally survive as well.
Forever Skies
(Subgenre: Adventure-Survival – Developer: Far From Home – Release: 2022 (Early Access))
A severe environmental disaster turns the Earth into a debris field and toxic green dust covers the entire surface. But the smart people in Forever Skies simply build cities on stilts and continue to live their lives above the smog. You’ll soon be fighting for survival in this world for all it’s worth.
You are on the road as a scientist, collect raw materials, build your own airship, travel the earth with it, descend into the green haze, explore, research, farm. And grow plants in your own base.
Polish developer Far From Home is made up of many an industry veteran and plans to release Forever Skies in Early Access on Steam before the end of 2022. Oh, and by the way, the game looks really, really smart.
Ixion
(Subgenre: Construction Survival – Developer: Bulwark Studios – Release: 2022)
Space, infinite vastness. And infinite ways to die. At the beginning of the survival build-up game Ixion, the unfinished space station Tiqqun is all that separates you and your people from airless death.
The fact that the moon in the story of Ixion was blown to pieces during an engine test of the Tiqqun shows how deadly things can be in space. Who is to blame? What is behind it? That remains nebulous for the time being. The story is the programme in Ixion and reminds us of Frostpunk with its moral decisions – only in space.
You construct facilities and buildings on the space station Tiqqun and send ships to collect resources deeper and deeper into the star system to build even more. And you manage your citizens, have to make political decisions and research new technologies. All to uncover the story surrounding the ambitious but enigmatic inventor of the Tiqqun. And hopefully have fun doing it.
Wild West Dynasty
(Subgenre: City Building Survival – Developer: Virtual Magic Games – Release: 2022)
The similarity in name to the medieval city-building survival hit Medieval Dynasty is no accident. Wild West Dynasty is the western spin-off of the series, which moves the building of your own settlement and survival to the Wild West.
You start out as a lone wolf in the vastness of the prairie. Now you can raise your own ranch from the dust. Then you build a settlement around it and, in the spirit of the series, collect new inhabitants. You can (and should) marry them, have offspring with your partner and thus create your own dynasty. After all, you want to continue playing as your offspring when Grandpa Cowboy bites the dust one day.
In addition to story missions and role-playing elements, there are thematically appropriate game mechanics. For example, the valuable resource of gold, which will even make you the mayor of your own gold-mining town.
Derelicts
(Subgenre: Adventure-Survival – Developer: Romain – Release: Unknown (Early Access))
The solo developer of Derelicts is coding like a whirlwind on his survival game, which was heavily inspired by The Forest and relies on a complex interaction of physically calculated machines. The technical basis is the new Unreal Engine 5.
Apart from the modern technology, the game mechanics remain quite classic. You build a base, defend it against mutated invaders and, of course, have to take care of food and water to stay alive.
The story is mysterious: an ominous defence mechanism has contaminated the earth and mankind has retreated into orbit. You are supposed to find out the origin and explore the game world in the process. All this after you crashed your spaceship at the beginning. Sounds a lot like The Forest, only more futuristic and with physics:
Derelicts wants to shake up the survival genre with physics and Unreal Engine 5
Now it’s your turn: Are you looking forward to a title from this list? Or are you already happy with another game? Feel free to write us your opinion in the comments
