Survival Games For PC Windows (7,8.1,10,11) & MAC

There are many excellent survival titles, a vast percentage of which are unfinished Early Access projects – though there are also plenty of cheap-and-nasty cash-ins. Our guide will help you seek only the best ones, like a survivor scanning abandoned cupboards for beans.

If you’ve got the grit to outlast the likes of the terrifying The Long Dark or the underwater wonder of Subnautica, our picks will help steer you toward the (not so) safe pastures of the best survival games on PC. Whether you like surviving the horrors of war or you’re into the new breed of hunger and disease management games, get ready to endure agony and plenty of pain in these scintillating survival adventures.

The best survival games are

DON’T STARVE

The most horrifying idea of survival has to do with your lonesome. That’s exactly what Don’t Starve makes you do, as it’s an entirely solo experience. The terror of fending for yourself in the wild is thankfully offset by the lovely Tim Burton-style 2D art and the collection of utterly bizarre creatures lurking in this sepia-tone world. Werepigs, Burgers, Deerclopses, and many more absurd monsters roam the land looking to make things difficult for you.

Don’t Starve focuses heavily on crafting to make your way through life, and so much of your time is spent harvesting raw materials – just like a crafting game. But rather than crafting houses like in Rust and Minecraft, this indie game is all about the tools and gadgets you can make. The Science Machine and Alchemy Engine will become your best friends before making way for ancient wonders and the art of magic. Like Minecraft, Don’t Starve happily embraces the mad and the mystical, which is all the more enjoyable.

THIS WAR OF MINE

For all the stress that some survival games can press on you, nothing compares to the harrowing 2D adventure. As you’ll find in our This War of Mine review, the game offers a different breed of survival. It’s a depiction of a group of civilians’ struggling to stay alive in their war-ravaged country. Trapped in a besieged house, pinned down by snipers, and attacked by other survivors looking to take what you’ve found, it’s a game of traumatic decisions and life-or-death consequences. It’s the side of the conflict that few war games genuinely deal with.

Each of your randomly-generated survivors has backstories, providing them with abilities for survival. Ex-firemen are fitter and more robust, while those who used to cook professionally can now feed the starving. But heading out into the world to find the things you need – medicine, ingredients, scrap to make beds – could bring you face-to-face with those willing to kill. And turning a survivor into a murderer leads to misery, depression, and – if not treated well – suicide.

It’s a bleak existence, and making what seems to be the right decision at one point in time can lead to disastrous conclusions. The war’s end seems like a pipe dream, and everyone will probably be dead before you get there. If you think you can live with yourself in such dire circumstances, though, this a must-play.

CUISINE ROYALE

This free-to-play battle royale started out as a PUBG spoof, but when players returned, it became apparent that Dark flow Software had found something largely absent across the battle royale games genre: light-hearted fun. Cuisine Royale is still all about surviving to the end and outlasting dozens of opponents. Still, instead of armor, you’ll be scrabbling around for colanders and baking trays to protect your fleshy parts from incoming bullets. Recent updates have embraced the silliness, adding ritual traps that can flood the map with water or plunge it into an eclipse.

SCUM

Like many of the survival games in this list, Scum is starting life in Steam Early Access, which means two things: it’s still quite shonky, and heaps of features are yet to be added to the game. But even early into its life, there is plenty to enjoy about this detailed survival game set on a maximum security prison island.

What makes it stand out among its peers is an incredibly meticulous metabolism system that makes Scum a simulation game that comprehensively tracks what you eat, drink, and excrete. Eat many more calories than you’re burning off, and you’ll get fatter; eat less than what you’re burning off, and you’ll have no energy and gradually lose weight. But it’s a lot more complicated than that: you’ll have to watch your vitamin levels, stomach, intestine, bladder, and colon volume, and ensure that you eat well before needing energy, as it takes time for your body to process anything you put into it. Scum puts the hunger and thirst mechanics of other survival games to shame. There are rewards for taking care of your body, too, as a fitter character deal more melee damage, runs faster, and possesses better weapon handling than their emaciated or overweight counterparts.

The result is a survival game where surviving is more important than amassing an arsenal of military-grade gear. Although once you’ve figured out how to take care of your body, you still have endgame goals such as exploring high-security areas, improving your supply of guns, and dabbling with PvP. If you need help with any of that, check out our top Scum tips, and if that’s not quite enough help, there are some handy Scum admin commands for you, too.

ARK: SURVIVAL EVOLVED

Ark isn’t just the best dinosaur survival game you can buy; it’s arguably one of the greatest dinosaur games ever made. After all, prehistoric beasties make everything better. It’s a survival game that fills every edge of the template: punch trees to get wood, use wood to build shelter, kill animals to find food, and inevitably die because you forgot to drink water. Yet Ark transcends the typical survival game pattern by including leathery leviathans that both want to hunt and eat you, but with some perseverance, you can also tame and ride. Moreover, cold wars rage between mega tribes as they seek dominance over their world. Master builders push the limits of creativity in a survival game. Dedicated players rack up years of playtime.

Everything Ark does is rock-solid. The survival elements may be similar to what you’ve played before, but they’re the bedrock for the game’s more ambitious features (and an intense Ark mods scene). Your character has RPG-like stats, and you can head into the world to hunt sci-fi secrets that offer a little more incentive to play rather than ‘stay alive.

These various promises make playing Ark worthwhile: other survival games rely on you being satisfied with making it through the night, whereas Studio Wildcard sets you long-term goals such as ‘tame and ride a T-Rex.’ Having a true sense of progression and aims makes your time in Ark feel valuable, which is something many other survival adventures struggle with.

The two-part Genesis expansion launched its first half in February and heavily focused on exploring simulated regions packed with volcanos, icy mountains, and vast underwater biomes.

DAYZ

The one that kicked it all off. This shuffling undead treat remains one of the best zombie and survival games. In other words, it’s the king of zombie survival games. By today’s standards, DayZ could even be considered one of the leanest virtual survivors, with barely any crafting to speak of and no objectives beyond staying alive. Food and water are vitally important, and getting sick can quickly kill you should you ignore your symptoms. Walking without shoe cuts and infects your feet, and blood transfusions of the wrong type will see you slip away for good.

If you’re content with fighting against disease, bodily functions, and zombies who occasionally phase through walls, you’ll get to DayZ’s best feature: exploration. The world of Chernarus is a Soviet wasteland, and Bohemia has captured that Eastern Bloc atmosphere with the towns and villages around the map. DayZ’s forests feel genuinely life-like rather than artificial imitations, while there’s a true sense of isolation out in the wilderness.

It’s best played with a friend or two, a camping trip where things could go wrong. And by ‘wrong, we mean being captured by a gang of bandits who will force-feed you bleach and make off with your can-opener. So yeah, proceed with extreme caution.

MINECRAFT

If you’re after the best crafting survival game out there, look no further than Minecraft. At some point, it seems someone decided survival was all about grueling punishment, sloth-like progression, and murdering anyone who isn’t you. But before the big survival blow-out on Steam, we had Minecraft: a fun, colorful, creative survival sandbox game. Sure, some zombies will eat your face and spiders, skeletons, and dragons, but with Minecraft skins, you at least always end up blocky and cute. No one minds a cartoon monster having you for breakfast.

More importantly, though, how you survive in Minecraft is entirely up to you. You could build an elaborate fortress and play a defense-style game, fending off the creatures of the night. Or you could craft exciting weaponry and venture out into the world’s most dangerous zones, testing your mettle and metal. The world is endless and filled with incredible natural wonders, begging to be explored. Just remember to eat something now and again, and you’ll be fine.

We spend so much time focusing on the game’s creative side and its many Minecraft mods, Minecraft maps, Minecraft seeds, and all the other unique possibilities out there that we sometimes forget that the vanilla Survival Mode is just as exciting in its way. And if you want to make an automated mining production line in Survival Mode, don’t let us stop you. Just make sure the creepers don’t put a spanner in your works.

CONAN EXILES

With the massive success of games like DayZ, it was only a matter of time before a licensed IP decided to try the survival genre. Taking its cue from one of the best PC games you can play right now in Dark Souls 3, Conan Exiles shunts you into the Hyborian Age as everyone’s favorite barbarian looks to duff people up and avoid death.

The setup is mainly familiar – grow crops, build settlements, club enemies to death – but Conan has a back-of-the-box bullet point that none of the competition can claim: human sacrifice. Should you be able to wrestle someone to an altar and butcher them, you can invoke the favor of the gods and shift the balance of power your way. That unique concept sets Conan Exiles apart from the pack.

RUST

This grim tale of endurance has become infamous for its naked men – but it’s not the size of a man’s particulars that’s impressive about Facepunch’s survival game (and we all know that doesn’t matter anyway… right?). No, it’s the forts that players can, ahem, erect. Rust’s strong point is construction: as you gather materials from its wilderness, you can begin to lay down various items in a Sims-like manner, creating your perfect rural retreat by slotting together floors, walls, staircases, and Windows 7,8.1,10,11.

While there are many servers where the traditional shoot-on-sight mentality exists, Rust has plenty of havens for those seeking a more civilized lifestyle. You can find player-created towns, complete with attempts at government, trading, and even prisons. It’s one of the nicest reminders that fantastic achievements can be made if people pull together and share their resources.

Rust underwent a massive overhaul that saw most of the original game scrapped in favor of a slightly new approach and utterly new base code. The change ripped out quite a lot of the game’s core features, such as zombies and rad towns, but over time they’ve gradually been reapplied alongside new ideas.

SUBNAUTICA

With its dreamy underwater setting – partly created by its community – and compelling gameplay loop, Subnautica is one of the best exploration survival games on PC. Subnautica is much more hopeful and relaxing than many survival adventures. Sure, you’re a lonely man lost at sea on an alien planet, but it’s a game all about terraforming your new environment and making unfamiliar ground your home.

The art direction helps push the idea of hope home, with bright and shiny technologies, beautifully blue oceans, and schools of tropical fish filling your vision at every turn. You explore the ocean depths in your submarine, searching for new materials in marine trenches and coral reefs. And when you’ve found everything, you can construct bases on the ocean floor.

The game’s survival elements include the food and water requirements that most fun in the genre do, but there’s a more pressing issue in Subnautica: oxygen. You can’t breathe sea water, so your oxygen levels and consumption must always be on your mind. Seeing as you’re continually threatened with drowning, you should read our Subnautica guide to ensure you squeeze every last drop out of your diver’s life. Every survival game has the ominous shadow following you around, but here it’s simply good old O2.

ASTRONEER

Astroneer is one of the best games from Steam’s Early Access platform: solid at launch but transformed into something special after two years of consistent content updates and polishing. In Astroneer, you crash land on an alien planet and carve out an existence by developing your life support pod into a fully-fledged base with vehicles, power sources, and laboratories. Of course, as in all the best survival games, you’ll need a lot of resources to start building the best base modules, and to do that, you’ll need to explore your planet, hoovering up rare crafting materials and shaping the terrain to unearth resource-rich caverns.

Astroneer isn’t as bleak as most other survival games, despite being just as treacherous. There’s a gorgeous low-poly art style that promises to soothe you as you crest every new horizon, and then there’s the fact that you can have your pals join you at any time, thanks to drop-in/drop-out co-op. There’s also a sense of progression in Astroneer, as you can eventually blast off and start colonizing the other six planets in your solar system, providing tangible goals for you to work towards rather than mere existence.

THE LONG DARK

This chilly adventure is similar to most of the games mentioned above but with some of the best horror games in it. Unlike other titles on this list, The Long Dark has a reasonably attractive story mode (Wintermute) to sink your teeth into.

Set in the bitter cold of northern Canada, The Long Dark trades zombies for bears and tropical islands for dead snow drifts. Mother Nature is your true adversary here, and to combat her, you’ll need to keep your calorie count up, your body hydrated, and a flame roared whenever you curl up for the night.

The stylish aesthetic makes it quite an arty game, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this slows the pace and forces you to think long and hard about what you’ve done. The Long Dark is a natural, challenging survival game with real bite.

Conclusion

That’s it; you’ve survived! Whether battling a ruthless Xeno aboard Alien: Isolation’s Sevastopol or taking on hostile Minecraft mobs, the above titles aren’t just deliciously tense – they’re some of the best PC games available. As you wait for the best upcoming PC games to hit Steam, why not get familiar with some of the survival sensations above? Just remember to keep a calm head and take regular deep breaths. Do that, and survival is assured.