What's Your Favorite Survival Game?

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The survival genre can encompass a lot of things. The not-obvious of Minecraft, The Last of Us, and any game in the battle royale genre. And there's the super obvious: Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, The Long Dark, and so on.

Next week (or starting today, if you pre-ordered the "Ultimate Edition" of the game), Microsoft's latest exclusive State of Decay 2 will drop. The first game was something of a cult hit, where despite its clunkiness and impenetrable surface, it gained a following of adoring fans who loved its hardcore management sim side.

Even though zombies are a little played out now, Caty surprisingly enjoyed it and found the game a lot more accessible than the prior entry in the series (as you can read in her review). Though, she advises that you will have to stomach quite a few bugs. So for this week's community question, we're asking this: what's your favorite survival game?

Nadia Oxford, Staff Writer

Toot toot, here comes the most boring and predictable answer possible: Minecraft. I'm not a survival game connoisseur; the genre stresses me out a bit too much for my liking. But Minecraft strikes up a nice balance between building and fighting, as well as realism and fantasy.

True, Minecraft's probably more popular for its building elements than its survival elements: It's probably more popular for letting you build giant dongs out of obsidian blocks than for challenging you to stay alive. But there's a rush that comes with every new Minecraft game, a struggle to forage for as many materials as possible before the sun goes down and the zombies come out to play on that first long, dark night you need to live through. Minecraft's whimsy is lightly flavored with a struggle to stay alive, and I appreciate that. I don't, however, appreciate Creepers teleporting inside my stronghold and exploding. Jerks.

Matt Kim, News Editor

I realized while thinking about my answer to this week's community question that I haven't played a lot of pure survival games. I've played a lot of survival-horror games and battle royale games, but none of the pure survival ones. There are a few I'm looking forward to playing like The Forest and The Long Dark, but I haven't actually played either of those in earnest yet.

So because of that I'm going to have to answer Metal Gear Solid 3, even though the survival elements are ambient at best. Sometimes I wish that the survival elements of Metal Gear Solid 3 would be spun off into its own game—wait that's just Metal Gear Survive. Nevermind then.

Caty McCarthy, Features Editor

I would say PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, if we were counting the battle royale genre in this. But to keep it strict to literal survival games, I'm gonna go with the Nintendo DS game Lost in Blue. Lost in Blue is similar to some other survival games with its non-linear approach, but there's context surrounding all of the sandbox goodness that makes it really special. You're stranded on an island and have to make do with your surroundings to survive, as the story of survivors Keith and Skye unravels. It's a relatively hard game to find, and since I never owned a DS, I didn't play it until I had a 3DS many years after its release. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't hold up as well anymore, but it's definitely a unique twist on the survival-sandbox genre that's always stuck out in my mind, and I recommend hunting it down if you get the chance.