6 Isolating Survival Games

Highlights

• Survival games often immerse players in isolation, making them rely solely on themselves in harsh, unforgiving worlds.
• The narrative of human vs. nature in survival games captures the essence of early human struggles against the environment.
• Being alone and facing imminent death is a common theme in popular survival games set in remote, treacherous locations.

Survival against seemingly impossible odds is a theme that has always resonated with humanity. This makes sense. Early humans would have related to tales about their constant struggles against a hostile environment. The never-ending search for food, resources, and shelter all while avoiding a thousand different ways to die can make for a simple but dynamic conflict of human vs. nature. To facilitate this type of narrative, survival has often gone hand-in-hand with another major theme: isolation.

Unsurprisingly, just as it has resonated with literature, television, and movies, survival narratives have also become popular in video games. Sometimes survival is more thematic, as in Far Cry or Tomb Raider, but many like to incorporate it into gameplay. And with this style of gameplay naturally comes a sense of being alone. Survival games often like to isolate the player, usually by throwing them into a remote setting with few people around, if any. They often add extra challenges by including mechanics like hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, sometimes enhanced by weather and body temperature mechanics. These types of games are meant to make the player feel alone.

1 The Long Dark (Survival Mode)

Take On A Canadian Winter By Yourself

Hinterland’s game about a pilot stranded in the Canadian Wilderness has gained a reputation for its intense survival mechanics. While some of these are downplayed in story mode, the game’s survival mode is built around the player being completely alone. They don’t even give the player hope of being rescued, just the basic directive of “keep going until you die.”

They even avoided a co-op option that would give the player support (though it is made possible by a mod). Isolation is naturally a big part of The Long Dark, where the player has to rely entirely on themselves to make decisions and try to stall their imminent demise just a little longer.

2 Praey For The Gods

Stranded On An Already-Dying Island

This indie adventure game wastes no time making the protagonist feel alone. From the start, she is stranded on a frozen island in a world that is already dying. The only “ally” she has is a mysterious wolf that may or may not be acting in her best interests.

Staying warm and finding food are both important to gameplay, but the isolation factor is only increased as she explores the island and finds the bodies of past occupants and visitors, as well as journals chronicling their tragic experiences. The closest things to living people are undead soldiers, ghosts, and half-dead giants, all of whom have a chance of killing her if the cold doesn’t do it first.

3 Rise Of The Tomb Raider (Endurance Mode)

Embrace The Cold Of The Siberian Wilderness While Hunting Treasure

Rise of the Tomb Raider throws Lara Croft into the remote Siberian mountains, and she spends most of the game cut off from the outside world. Lara isn’t completely isolated in the base game, where she has several allies and an entire guerrilla army on her side, but that changes with Endurance Mode.

This amps up the survival aspects of the main game, with Lara having to manage food and body temperature, but it also isolates her. Jacob, Sofia, and Jonah are nowhere to be seen (though an ally can be gained through co-op). The only other people around are Trinity Soldiers, who will shoot on sight, and arrive in greater force. Somehow she has to survive all that plus find ancient artifacts long enough to be rescued.

4 Stranded Deep

Can Players Survive The Pacific?

Beam Team’s intense open world begins with the player character surviving a plane crash only to be stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Aquatic survival becomes essential. To have any chance of lasting long enough to escape, players will need to find food, build shelter on islands, and navigate treacherous waters.

It can be done in single or multiplayer mode, but either way, they’re stranded in the middle of the ocean and cut off from the rest of the world. It’s like an extreme version of Robinson Crusoe.

5 Subnautica (Survival Mode)

Alone On An Alien Planet

Unknown Worlds’ indie adventure centered on an astronaut stranded in an alien ocean after his ship crashes. That alone is already a daunting prospect, not helped by being the only one left. The closest thing protagonist Riley Robinson can get to any human allies is the occasional pre-recorded message of other crew members’ doomed survival efforts, sporadic one-way transmissions from home, and the voice of an automated computer.

They don’t even clearly mark objectives, making it hard to figure out what the player needs to do. The isolation factor also goes one step further with a big reveal after the first rescue attempt fails, that something on the planet itself is actively blocking his escape…

6 Voidtrain

Surviving The Void’s Isolation

This strange Early Access indie game sees the player as a customizable engineer who wanders into a scientific experiment that opens a portal into another dimension. Gameplay mixes base management, in the form of running and building the titular train, with survival and exploration. The void itself is a very isolating environment, where the player runs along extensive tracks through seemingly empty space.

The only humans around are the mysterious “Blue Light Corporation”- a very authoritarian faction that will shoot the player on sight. The only allies the player gets are strange gooey creatures called “Rofleemo.” The fact that several tracks lead through very large skeletal remains also seems to hint at something very nasty being hidden somewhere.