The 30 best survival games on PC -Part 2

Let's pick up from  where we left, So here are the rest of Games from Most Popular Survival Gamaes.

15. Starbound
Developer: Chucklefish

Release date: 2016

The problem with Starbound is that it is very easy to get lost in the side quests and the objects that the player can pursue in the game are almost countless. At some point, however, you will be able to see how far you have come. You will one day reminisce about the time when you first put your first forge in your first mud house because now, you have more important things to attend to. You’re constructing massive space stations now and changing whole planets, warring in space and constructing large science fiction cities.

It does take time, yes, but there are so many things to do on the way there and by the time you realize it, you are already there. It is possible to find a giant anchor on a planet that you have chosen randomly, and, flying above it, there is a pirate ship. Down below you can find everything starting with the ancient temple devoted to horrible elder gods and ending with the laboratory with ape scientists. It is quite active I would say. We must admit that we usually perform on the easy mode, as far as the game is concerned. This implies that there is no need to starve and there are no extra costs for dying. Starvation can motivate a survival game, but Starbound does not have the scarcity to make it a problem. It’s just a nuisance. There are other survival issues that can be encountered even when there is no hunger. Acid rain, freezing and scorching temperatures, hostile aliens – the list of how to die is virtually endless.

14. Darkwood

Developer: Acid Wizard Studio

Release date: 2017

The words unfurl in a manner that one could barely slit through the forest; thick with dread, a lingering fall to get used to. It’s a very much old school, two dimensional, horror game that restricts your vision and then puts all the horrors of your imagination in the background. Your view is always limited and you can never know what is around the corner, a number of terrifying creatures could be hiding in the dark waiting for you and you won’t even know.

When there is light you can go out to search for these resources but when it becomes dark you have to hustle back to the comparatively safer house and wait for the night. Close the widows with wooden bars, change the position of the furniture, place traps at the foot of the windows and by the doors and then let the flies in. Initially it is sounds that start moving, sounds like scratching on the walls, knocking, banging and soon it will not remain that way. In conclusion, your barricades will be destroyed into pieces. The forest is very phantasmal and is constantly becoming more phantasmal and, thus, more detached from reality, so the player will always be kept on the back foot. I am the keeper of the law, I lied and cheated so I can’t trust the Darkwood or its inhabitants.

13. Grounded

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Release date: 2022

Grounded is what you get if you take the Honey I Shrunk The Kids scenario and put you in a relatively typical 1980s backyard, or perhaps more accurately, a bug’s eye view of one, as when you’re a mite, even the mundane is a bug-infested nightmare. You and your friends’ objective is to sneak into these little science facilities to find out what the heck is going on, and to also beat the living daylights out of the creatures, and turn their mandibles and shells into pants and armor respectively, like some sort of Monster Hunter game.

In Grounded, the game’s review that Hayden has made, he states that the game is one of his favorite video game locations since the world feels like a living ecosystem better than the other games. Of course, the base-building here isn’t as slick or as easy to get your head around as some of the others on this list, but the game as a whole is more than worth getting involved with. I mean, how often is it you get to live a bug’s life, eh?

12. Oxygen Not Included

Developer: Klei Entertainment

Release date: 2019

It is like playing a game of chess and watching it grow from a basic concept to a complex strategy game with incredible intricacies.

Starting your odyssey in the middle of a flat asteroid with only three stupid clones (known as dupes) to command, you have to excavate some kind of a home, gather some sources of food and oxygen to avoid suffocating in the first couple of days. Then it’s all about moving outwards even further and further in the hopes of finding solutions that are slightly more renewable, all while attempting to prevent your unbelievably suicidal dupes from getting what they want most.

Oxygen Not Included does not hold your hand, which is perhaps why some people do not get what makes the game so great. Sometimes it may seem like you are juggling half a dozen plates with a probability that at any second, one of them may catch fire. And that is something that makes you feel rather scared or at least the feeling is not far from that. However, spend enough time tending to your little dupe-farm you will soon be conversant with the jargon of pipes and plumbing, ladders and bladders, pollution and prostitution (we made up the last one but there must be a mod out there somewhere).

11. Don't Starve

Developer: Klei Entertainment

Release date: 2013

Maintaining your belly full is a constant in Don’t Starve, but starving to death is far from the only thing that’s going to kill off any survivors unlucky enough to be stuck in this gothic wasteland. Killer bees, territorial pig men and giant, one-eyed birds will kill you, but other dangers are not so easily defined. Your mind then turns against you and starts to conjure up dark apparitions which inflict pain that is as real as anything can be.

You have to go through all of that, even going out to the sanity-reducing wilds to scavenge for materials to keep your science and alchemy machines going. There is also the race to get home before it becomes dark, which is also accumulated before the world becomes even more dangerous. The closer you get to the campfire or your base, the safer you are, but the lure of the unknown is irresistible.

10. Rust

Developer: Facepunch Studios

Release date: 2018

It is worth noting that the initiation process of Rust is a bit of a pain in the arse. Waking up naked and with no idea of what has happened to you, you will be spending hours beating rocks and cutting trees like some sort of Neanderthal slave, and you can be sure that before you can have the chance of constructing a little base, you will be food for wild animals.

Once you are able to shield oneself, however, Rust’s draw is more easily discernible. It is a lot more interesting to go on a gathering expedition if you are likely to meet and shoot it out with packs of other players. The competition forms the predators and the prey which may result to extreme fights that are unbalanced but the feeling of fighting back and winning is even more satisfying.

9. No Man's Sky

Developer: Hello Games

Release date: 2016

It is tempting to say that No Man’s Sky was a failure at launch and has only been redeemed in the subsequent years of updates. It is closer to the truth to state that it did a tremendous job of offering a certain sort of experience at launch (and shifting millions in the process), and now it offers a broader array of experiences. Among those, one has been survival from the beginning to now. If you want to play No Man’s Sky on a set of hostile worlds, trying to scavenge enough material to build some kind of shelter or to power the next attempt at a jump to the stars, you can do that. It will now reward you with better and more diverse planets, sandworms, mechs to control, friends to accompany, and many others. Yes, there are other better survival games on this list – twenty of them to be precise – but none of them can come close to No Man’s Sky when it comes to sheer size and quality.

8. Escape From Tarkov

Release date: 2016

Craig Pearson summed up Escape From Tarkov best in his quest for toilet roll: It can be seen that ‘winning is just a matter of coming out of the large levels with more things than you went in with’. Sure, it is an online survival FPS and plays somewhat like battle royale, but the objective is as ‘basic’ as getting out alive with some things, as long as it is more things. To do so, you will have to face dimly lit corridors, non-player characters who can kill you on sight, and other players who, and this is quite understandable, also want to get out.

As you might have expected, the game is not as intense as a Call Of Duty or an Apex Legends. It is violent and unkind, with shooting that is closer to pseudo-realistic military simulators than it is to the arcade. Nonetheless, if one is able to look past this realism, there is much storytelling to be had here.

7. Kenshi

Developer: Lo-Fi Games

Release date: 2018

Kenshi is many things to many people, but this is a strategic building survival RPG that is all about taking what you’ve got and making it pay. Where many survival games lose their sense of direction once you have established a reliable food source, Kenshi extends more options. Whether it is to set up a farm that one can hire people to defend it or to become a master thief to steal for one’s needs, Kenshi is a rich bounty that caters for every type of gameplay.

Its world doesn’t bend to your whims and desires, but it is not exactly out to get you or something. Anyway, it is also necessary to understand that the most frequent ‘bandits’ are just groups of hungry people who fight for a piece of bread. All of it lends our rather lowly camp an air of aspiration that is not purely materialistic. This land could support people, we suppose. Perhaps if we could safeguard it, then perhaps we could begin to alter the world for the better. And before we know it, we have a team of recruits running a factory in our absence while we lead our tiny founding trio out into the world, camping out under twin moons, fending off unfamiliar animals, and accidentally offending a powerful faction of religious bigots. Well, we guess we have enemies now, gang. Best head back home and try to find a way to survive this as well.

6. Minecraft

Developer: Mojang Studios

Release date: 2011
Minecraft is best known for the creative endeavours it’s inspired, like building all of Middle-Earth, but there’s a survival game in there too, full of deadly nights and Creepers waiting to blow up everything you’ve worked so hard to create. Hunger, thirst and death accompany you as you dig underground and explore infinite, procedural worlds full of monsters and dungeons.

A brilliant crafting system means that you have a great deal of freedom when it comes to how you survive. You might build automated systems and sprawling mines, becoming an industrial powerhouse; or maybe you’ll choose the simple life, rearing animals and growing crops. All the mods and game modes mean that you can essentially build your own survival game, or you can focus on something else, like building a flying pirate ship with a bunch of mates. And if you fancy an additional challenge, there’s a hardcore survival mode that deletes the entire world when you die. It’s not for the faint of heart.

5. Frostpunk

Developer: 11 bit studios

Release date: 2018

There is no real sense of pride in Frostpunk, which is quite unusual when it comes to making decisions in games. With the world frozen over and the last dregs of humanity huddled around a titanic furnace, you’ve got one overarching goal: maintain it alive. To do this, your people require warmth and food, but that is easier said than done.

It is not sufficient to place the correct sort of structures in the correct places and then simply direct your population out into the world to gather resources. You require to foster a society that can survive an ice age and if that entails passing an emergency shift law to keep the workers on their toil for 24 hours to give you the coal that would sustain the community for the next day, then it has to be done. Your workers will not be too happy about this but you will have to endure that potential disaster later on.

It is a lot of work to try and keep people happy and alive, while at the same time trying to maintain some sort of balance – that is the essence of Frostpunk. Even when you know that there is a revolt in the offing and the frost is already creeping in, there is always the hope that reshuffling some of the workers or passing a new law will do the trick. What if you are on the brink of victory, you are actually on a thin line between life and death and all it takes is for some refugees to come and disturb the balance of your city.

4. Valheim

Developer: Iron Gate AB

Release date: 2021

Valheim is a Nordic treat where you and up to ten bearded friends try to escape the randomly generated purgatory. In order to do this, you’ll have to go out and collect some items, craft yourself some lovely equipment, and defeat a few large villains located throughout the world. Early on, purgatory is actually pretty pleasant – at least, by the standards of a medieval Italian. First you find yourself in a lovely forest environment with boar and cute goblin-like creatures, then it will be in the dark forest and plain area with large ogres and those awful giant mosquitoes.

For a game that is still in it’s early access, it is not just packed with things to dominate, but the finer aspects as well. The character of PS1, the fact that you can’t just put a fire in a room and have the smoke just disappear, the bees and their joy. Honestly, it is a fantastic waste of time with all the features of a good survival game and more.

3. Terraria

Developer: Re-Logic

Release date: 2011Your first thought may be to compare it to a 2D Minecraft, due to the mining and crafting, but Terraria takes as much from action and RPG games, sending you beneath the surface of its procedurally generated terrain to kill monsters and take their stuff. And because every dungeon worth its salt has a village full of people ready to help adventuring heroes, you can build one yourself. Shelter, NPC friends, and workbenches will allow you to go on more complex expeditions gradually.

This game has been out since 2011 and Re-Logic have been very generous with their updates so there are so many magical weapons and useful tools you can make, and so many monsters to fight them against. The deeper one gets into it, the more it turns into the wild, wild west. For hours you can just sit in the Wiki, reading about how to get rocket boots or a gun made out of sharks, but there is also a lot of fun in finding things on your own in Terraria. It’s very unpredictable and you never know what you are going to uncover once you start hacking away at a cave wall with a pick-axe.

2. RimWorld

Developer: Ludeon Studios

Release date: 2018

RimWorld’s stranded colonists have a lot to contend with: from wild animals, raider attacks, diseases, drug addiction and even their fellow colonists. It is a rather unforgiving environment and maintaining their survival requires effort.

The elaborate simulation means that surviving is a lot more than feeding colonists and keeping them alive. If one of your colonists gets into a big fight with their partner, they become depressed, stop eating, it won’t help if you have a lot of food stored in the freezer. And what if that colonist is also the only doctor? Now, if someone gets badly injured, which is inevitable, they cannot get the medical assistance they so desperately need. Stress, hot weather and many other factors are fatal to your colony as they will be affected by all these.

As you can imagine, we have grown to know failure very well but we are not bored of beginning all over again. Again, it is impossible to list all the options that are completely opposite to each other. We have colonized within mountains, farmed in villages, commanded a group of thieves and attempted to get wealthy by setting up a company for trade. It is incredibly liberal and even after spending hours and hours on it, one has only scratched the surface.

1. Subnautica

Developer: Unknown Worlds Entertainment

Release date: 2018
Survival games don’t come more alien than Subnautica, or less hospitable to human life, and though a sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero was released in 2023 and it still continues to grow from the base created by the first game. Stranded on an underwater planet, you have to scavenge for food and other supplies under the water, and later build your own underwater habitats and submarines.

3D movement and no oxygen, even the process of picking up scraps is an exciting mission. The danger can be anywhere and if one stays for too long underwater, one is reminded that one is the alien on this planet, as one dies choking. Vehicles, air pumps and oxygen tanks enable one to stay under longer and as the world becomes more familiar, it becomes like home.

Kelp forests as big as continents, underwater mazes, endless abysses with behemoths the size of islands – every biome is a planet unto itself. You are a far cry from Bear Grylls, documenting the inhabitants of the sea and attempting to solve the enigma of the sea. Though there is a never-ending stream of urges to eat, drink, and, of course, breathe, Subnautica is one of the most laid-back survival games out there. Despite all the dangers that are hidden in the water, it is largely about the contemplative discovery of a beautiful extraterrestrial planet.

These are the most popular  survival games among users.
You can catch the first part of the list here :  Best Survival Games.