Three Pillars of Great Survival Games

Genuinely great survival games are rare. Here's what the best ones have in common.

SURVIVORMAN-HANDLED

Welcome to Day 42 of Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s dominion over my conscience. I really thought that finishing the bastard and writing a 5,000-word review about it would finally bring me closure. How very naïve.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spend another week diving into its every half-inspiring, half-frustrating intricacy. But Warhorse’s 2018 debut is such a dog’s breakfast of mechanics and ideas that some of them were inevitably going to persist in my memory after credits rolled. As it turns out, it’s the game’s interesting but ill-realized survival mechanics that are still living rent-free in my brain even after I evicted their indolent peers in the wake of last week’s review. Why? Probably because I hit intellectual maturity in the early-mid 2010s when every other game release was trying to repeat the unrepeatable triumphs of Minecraft and DayZ, and so survival as a core gameplay mechanic is one of the first ideas in game design about which I developed nuanced opinions. Accordingly, when I finally played all the way through KCD last month and found its survival systems so systemically lacking, a lot of unprocessed memories got dredged up.

I guess there’s also a certain wistfulness at play, since survival games were still riding high in the popular imagination back in 2018 only for their flame to dim over the first half of this decade. I had a look at PC Gamer’s recently updated list of the best survival games and found that a paltry six out of twenty-one entries saw public releases since 2020, and a couple of those really stretch the definition of “survival game.” Not a watertight heuristic by any means, but surely indicative of a trend in the market. I’d go a step further and say that no survival game has really transfixed the gaming commentariat since Valheim hit the scene, and that was way back in 2021.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance itself isn’t really a survival game at its core, instead presenting as a quest-oriented RPG in which survival mechanics are centralized without being focused upon. Therein lies my problem with their implementation: the industry-wide obsession with survival mechanics that characterized much of the previous decade inspired a lot of half-baked systems that tried to meet gameplay and verisimilitude halfway without an ironclad plan for pulling it off, ultimately betraying both. And that’s too bad! I know from experience that a thoughtfully designed and well-implemented suite of survival mechanics can make for an exhilarating and unforgettable game.

It’s a risky choice for a designer to make, though: relatively minor failings in substance, balance, or narrative cohesion tend to snowball over the course of a long campaign and can really harshen the vibe of an otherwise excellent game. All of the above defined my experience with KCD’s survival mechanics, so we might as well see what we can learn from them. By my reckoning, a great survival system needs to be harmonious with core gameplay, to balance its simulation against the substance of the game, and to remain pertinent to the player throughout the game’s runtime. Let’s discuss each of these in turn, and hopefully emerge with a better understanding of what makes survival games so compelling in theory but so rarely successful in practice.

HARMONY WITH CORE GAMEPLAY

I think my foremost issue with KCD’s survival mechanics was that they came across as tremendously out of balance with the game’s many other systems. The main culprit was the selection of perks from which to choose every two character levels¹: “Ascetic” reduces hunger rate by a flat 30% at level two; “Insomniac” reduces drowsiness rate by a flat 25% at level four; “Contemplative” disables the meters outright while you wait or sleep, available at level twelve. These are all the most powerful perks available at their respective levels by a considerable margin, and I struggle to imagine any players going without them unless they deliberately choose to limit themselves. So, by the time I hit level twelve less than halfway through the game, the entire survival system was all but vestigial.

Given the sheer volume of ancillary mechanics meant to support the survival system, e.g., hunting, cooking, grocers, herbalism, and so on, I can’t help but suspect that there was some breakdown in communication between the folks designing the survival mechanics and those designing the perks and the open world. How can we ensure the tight integration between those systems and the rest of the game that KCD lacked? I have a couple of ideas.

Probably the best way to do it is to make survival itself the core of the experience rather than questing, combat, or whatever else. In other words, to design a survival game rather than an action-adventure game with survival elements. This might sound overly constraining on first blush, but I think it might be pretty broadly applicable. There’s a reason why man’s struggle against nature has remained a fundamental locus of storycraft for as long as stories have existed, which is that it’s inherently relatable and thus immediately compelling. I think the most well-known example of a game built principally around survival mechanics is 2017’s The Long Dark. It centralizes its survival mechanics such that they’re a constant consideration in the moment-to-moment gameplay, and its exploration and story progression layers (such as they are) were built atop the survival mechanics in order to support them.

Above: The Long Dark’s character status interface. Every gameplay-significant mechanic in this game is connected to its survival loop, and variables like nutritional density are tightly integrated into core gameplay. | Source

Could such an approach work for a sprawling, narrative-focused RPG or indeed for some hypothetical version of KCD that we never got? Sure it could! It’d take some adjustments to the formula, of course. For one, the narrative would have to lean into the satisfaction of contending with a harsh and unforgiving environment rather than that of overcoming it. We’d also have to strip out any mechanics that lessen the moment-to-moment impact of the survival systems unless they come with some proportional trade-off. KCD would become a game about a peasant lad who, deprived of the community that ordinarily acts as a guarantor of basic needs in medieval Europe, survives against long odds by force of will. It’d be a different experience to be sure but, in my view, no less faithful to the game’s thematic inventory as it exists.

Failing that, I reckon the second best approach is to use survival mechanics to enhance a narrative. I can imagine this latter strategy working for KCD since, after all, its narrative follows a protagonist from whom everything is taken and who has to find his own way in a pre-industrial world where survival is already a daily struggle for nearly all people. The main quest already has prominent sequences in which said protagonist learns to how to fight, how to read, how to stay out of trouble in an urban settlement, and so on, all of which contribute to his ability to make it on his own. In light of all this, it’s odd that the first introduction to the hunger system is when the player is pointed toward a pot of free lentils that somebody else has prepared off-screen, which then becomes the principal source of nourishment for most playthroughs. It’s the part where most survival game tutorials would go “alright, take this hunk of raw meat and go cook it on the stove” or something like that.

Actually, that’s a good segue into our next topic. Let’s talk more about integrating survival mechanics into primary gameplay.

SUBSTANCE AND SIMULATION

It’s well and good to design a survival system that plays nicely with the other systems around it, but that alone doesn’t make for engaging survival gameplay. A survival system needs a clear and consistent role in the gameplay loop and should demand players’ attention without degenerating into a series of repetitive distractions. In practice, I find that most survival games miss the mark and land on one of two extremes instead: the systems are either so heavily abstracted that they fall into the background inamongst a bunch of more wholly realized systems, or else try too hard to painstakingly simulate the relevant experience out of a ham-fisted attempt at facilitating immersion.

KCD is a prime example of the former, implementing grounded simulations of everything from lockpicking to blade-honing to alchemy while the processes of harvesting, cooking, and eating food are all but entirely menu-driven. I’d submit Red Dead Redemption 2 as an example of the latter, in which your rousing cowboy adventures are regularly paused so that you can watch a series of animations of Arthur opening tin cans or wiping his face with a napkin while conspicuously not playing the video game. In both of these games’ cases, the gameplay-relevant substance of the mechanics is at odds with the level of simulationism in which they indulge — KCD falls short and doesn’t sell its survival system, while RDR2 overindulges and turns its system into an anesthetizing drone that gets in the way of the game around it. It’s a balancing act, and a difficult one at that.

You know what game absolutely nails this balance? Pathologic, arguably the most oppressive survival-focused game ever to see a commercial release in the West. At a programmatic level, its survival mechanics are little more than simple meters that you top off by using specific items, but their genius is in how it’s all balanced against the game’s item economy. Food, medicine, etc. are relatively easy to come by in the early game as you find your bearings, but quickly become rare and expensive as the catastrophe evolves. Besides, you’ll find lots of reasons to expend precious supplies aside from your own survival that strain your resources further still — everybody else needs to survive, too, and there’s just not enough to go around. Aside from being a shining example of game-mechanical storytelling, this system is the source of most of the game’s challenge and its associated tension. It’s exactly as complex as it needs to be. Lose the simulation aspect, and the substance of the system is reduced to an exercise in topping off meters. Double down on simulation, and Pathologic’s ennui-inspiring gameplay loop would cross over into straight-up boredom territory.

Above: At left, Pathologic’s very simple status interface and its commensurately straightforward meters. At right, its shopping interface. Pathologic is a masterclass in survival mechanics that are more than the sum of their parts. | Source

Before we move on, let’s talk about the simulation of accumulated fatigue and of the sleep that relieves it. There are very few survival games that do justice to sleep, and I observe that this is usually because fatigue mechanics lack substance altogether. In their most common form, they involve a fatigue meter that you top off whenever it’s convenient without any particular constraints, and the whole thing becomes a glorified means of passing time when it gets dark out. Maybe you get a temporary buff if you sleep on a mattress instead of a straw pile, but rarely does engaging with the fatigue system feel the least bit rewarding. KCD suffers from this problem even though it pretends not to with its opaque “comfort” system, a mechanic so threadbare that I couldn’t even find an explanation of it in the game’s documentation.

I think the central issue is that most survival games treat tiredness like a second stomach that can be refilled more or less at will with beds instead of food. In reality, of course, getting enough high-quality sleep is a prerequisite of good health whose fulfillment requires conscientiousness and preparation. Naturally, we don’t want games to simulate everything from putting on pajamas to fluffing pillows, so there’s once again a balance to be struck.

A favorite example of mine is the fatigue system in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: GAMMA,² a modpack whose praises I just can’t sing highly enough. Sleep in this game is, in substance, very straightforward: if you’re exhausted, you’ll perform like shit in combat, so you need regular sleep. But the linchpin of its simulation is that your character, being a grizzled mercenary who exists in a state almost constant distress, can only fall asleep when actually tired. You’re mechanically incentivized to plan out your day so that you get enough activity to end up fatigued come nightfall. If you’re not, you can consume liquor or pharmaceuticals to induce fatigue, but this interrupts the natural healing process and can cause you to oversleep such that your schedule is thrown off for the following day. If you’re wired on stimulants or try to sleep in a crowded or uncomfortable location, you’re liable to wake up early and be unable to fall back asleep. It’s one of the few survival games I can think of where there’s an appreciable strategy to getting your forty winks. Quite a bit more interesting than your character falling asleep as his head hits the pillow and then sleeping for exactly the right amount of time by coincidence — here I lift my gaze and angrily stare at almost every game with interactable beds.

For you see, survival isn’t supposed to be easy, and it’s here that we come upon the most common misstep of them all.

SURVIVAL, NOT THRIVAL

Now, I’m no medievalist, so forgive me if I underestimate the extent of communalism in late-medieval Bohemia. But it’s my understanding that, while the peasantry of the time exhibited a sort of faith-related mechanical solidarity that inclined similar folk toward mutual generosity, one couldn’t expect to easily find cauldrons of hot, nutritious food at which one could freely gorge oneself without notice. And even if there did exist a few crassly bounteous and commensurately generous communities that gave away free food to any passing blackguard, I don’t suppose they were to be found in every single human settlement regardless of size or prosperity.

Seriously, I don’t know that there’s a single camp or village in the entirety of Kingdom Come: Deliverance that doesn’t have at least one pot of free stew simmering over a tended fire. The existence of these communal pots of lentils is a real drag on the immersive quality that survival systems tend to bring to their games. Why bother with side activities like hunting, cooking, etc. given the foreknowledge that there’ll be practically unlimited free food at any destination? Not once over the forty-plus hours of this recent playthrough did nourishment feel remotely scarce, nor did acquiring food ever meaningfully factor into my decision-making process. It started out straightforward, and progressively became trivial as the game went on.

But I don’t want to throw too much shade, because it’s a difficult problem to solve. See, there’s a sneaky paradox at work whenever one sets out to design a survival system for a game: games typically rely on a feeling of progression in order to maintain players’ engagement, and “progression” in the context of a survival game generally equates to “abundance.” This is a problem that KCD would have even if every communal lentil-pot were plucked from its world, since it’d still be easy to neuter the hunger system just by playing the game normally. Money is too plentiful, hunted animals yield too much meat, perks reduce the amount of food you need in the first place, and so on. But even if it were all perfectly balanced, you’d still run into the problem that KCD is an RPG in which character progression is an inevitable fixture of the experience, so the protagonist becomes ever more capable of providing for himself even as his needs remain static. How the hell do we get around this?

Above: An UnReal World character uses herblore to identify an edible plant. URW trades graphical fidelity for one of the most engaging and nuanced survival simulations in all of video gaming. | Source

Well, it’s hard to isolate a specific formula, but I can again offer an example of a game that manages it. UnReal World — a Finnish survival game with a thirty-year development history that I’d really like to write about in the near future — does it by moving the goalposts as a given character progresses. For now, I’ll spare you a comprehensive overview of its premise and gameplay and focus on the important part. In the early game, you need to secure a reliable source of food from the wilderness. Depending on your chosen strategy, this might not be all that hard: you can fish no matter the season; you can trade simple crafted items for food at villages; if you’re savvy enough to bring down a stag or a bear, it could yield enough meat to sustain a character for a year or more. Difficulty curve broken, right? Hell no! Factors like spoilage, predation, and the expense of supplies make it difficult to accumulate food in the first place, so your focus shifts to security and preservation. If you pull it off, mid-to-late-game activities like settlement-building and warfare become gigantic resource sinks that give you more mouths to feed and fewer daylight hours for so doing.

Point is, if you’re thriving in the absence of scarcity, survival is a solved problem and you’re no longer playing a “survival” game as such. You’re playing some other kind of game that periodically interrupts the action so that you can fill a meter. If the utility of engaging with survival mechanics is to gradually make them impertinent to the gameplay experience, they might as well not exist in the first place. Instead, these systems should make it easier to inhabit a character, a setting, a narrative, or all of the above. In short, I don’t want my adventuring interrupted by a low hunger meter. I want the act of satisfying that hunger meter to feel like a part of the adventure in and of itself!

HARD PROBLEM

And now that I’ve gathered all these thoughts into one place, I feel like I have some insight into why survival-focused games have become considerably less common in the 2020s. As it turns out, designing a compelling and consistently engaging survival system is really goddamn hard. Alas that there’s no perfect formula by which to design the ideal survival game — the set of relevant mechanics and their mutual interactions have to be thoughtfully adapted to each project, and each of those adaptations must be made in consideration of the game’s other systems. The more involved and intertwined those systems, the more complex their integration with the survival mechanics becomes.

Given all that, could we possibly fix Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s laudably ambitious but conspicuously flawed survival mechanics? Honestly, I’m not so sure. I had a look at the Nexus page to see if the community had taken such a project upon itself — you’d think years of modding support would tease out the potential of just about any underbaked mechanic — but the impression I get is of a playerbase that prefers to sideline this aspect of the game altogether so that the already-great parts can be focused on and improved. Of course, I still need to see for myself whether the sequel improves much upon the survival mechanics as it seems to improve upon other aspects, and I welcome the opinion of those of y’all who’ve played it down below.

And with that, I think I’ve finally tamed the swirling cloud of nitpicks with which my KCD playthrough left me. But I don’t think I’m done talking about survival games just yet — I got some really terrific food for thought on the subject from some learned correspondents earlier this week, and I want to more thoroughly investigate what separates the memorable triumphs of the genre from the forgettable trend-chasers. Get yourself subscribed if you’re not already, then pack your bedrolls and non-perishable foodstuffs for next week.

1. I’m specifically referring to the perks from increasing the overall character level, but there are also some in the various skill trees that cheapen the survival mechanics in a less direct manner.

2. I think this system or something like it is also found in some of the other major modpacks for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, but I still haven’t gotten around to playing them. Forgive me if the system I’m about to describe turns out to be a fixture of the Anomaly modding scene.