I'm sure we've all played at least one survival game at this point, right? Minecraft. Valheim. Subnautica. Project Zomboid. ARK: Survival Evolved. Don't Starve. The list goes on.
So what makes something a "survival game"? Well, surviving, of course! The player will often have limited resources - food, water, stamina, oxygen - that will drain over time. They will have to secure more of these resources to survive by venturing out into the (often hostile) world, while also collecting other resources in order to progress.
Survive and progress are the two key objectives here. What progressing looks like can vary from game to game. Some are sandbox games where you set your own objectives. Some have technology trees to work through. Some have stories. All of them have some kind of balance between surviving and progressing. Too much focus on moment-to-moment survival and you'll never feel like you're getting anywhere; too much focus on progression and the survival mechanics feel sidelined.
I'll start with the latter. Minecraft is a perfect example of this, I think. For the first hour or so in a brand new world, surviving will be something the player has to focus on at (almost) all times. Food will feel scarce, enemies will feel scary and you really have to focus solely on survival. But then, after a while, you'll reach a point where you're got plenty of food and don't have to worry about it any more. You'll have decent armour and weapons so fighting monsters isn't risky at all. The survival aspect of the game becomes something you only really engage with when you're forced to - because your hunger bar is empty, because a monster is attacking you and you want it to go away - but it's more of a tedium than a system that's exciting or interesting to engage with. In fact, the more you progress (whatever your version of "progressing" is - building cool things, exploring, etc), the less engaging the survival aspect of the game generally is.
And on the flip side, you have something like Don't Starve. The game is all about survival, with the goal largely being simply to survive as long as possible, with very little in the way of non-survival progression. To its critics, this is to its detriment; the player rarely feels like they're making much progress, just prolonging their suffering. This is, of course, the tone the game is going for, but it doesn't make for engaging gameplay for many people. It doesn't have something they can get invested in - there's no reason to survive.
I've largely been talking about the negative aspects of survival mechanics so far, but I do feel they can have positive, interesting aspects to them as well. They can add to a game's immersion, for one. They can certainly make for great, personalised stories, too; not tailored narratives, but the sort of individual, one-off experience in a sandbox game that you remember. For example, you didn't just build a simple house...
You went on a dangerous journey into the forest to the west to get some wood. You'd just finished chopping the last tree you needed when a wolf pounced on you. Lucky you'd found that old, manky leather armour earlier, eh? You managed to kill it (with your bare hands after your spear broke) but you were losing blood and had to limp back to base with your lumber. You didn't have any medicine so you fashioned some from some plant fibre you'd collected - not ideal but it stemmed the bleeding for now. And at least you had enough wood to get some walls up around your cabin.
That's the kind of story made out of mundane events (well, "mundane" when it comes to video games anyway...) that you can only experience in survival games. Because in a game where you're not as invested in surviving, that sort of situation has far less impact. This leads nicely to my next point: there needs to be a cost to not surviving. The steeper the cost, the more invested in survival the player will be:
- the ultimate "cost" is a hardcore world/character, where the player loses all their progress if they die. I personally find this a little excessive, especially in games that are often already on the grindy side.
- a lesser cost is perhaps losing some XP, or losing all the items your character was carrying at the time. It's a great motivation to avoid death, but it isn't too punishing. It's nothing you can't bounce back from, at least.
- an interesting mention here is games like Rimworld or State Of Decay 2. You control a community of characters, each one having different stats and attributes. If a character dies, their death is permanent. It sucks, and it's almost always a major setback for your colony. But it also makes you really value each character's survival. And a character dying becomes part of your story in the game. It's woven into both the gameplay - you have to figure out how to adapt going forward without that colony member - and the history of the colony.
If there's no real cost to not surviving, there's no real reason to engage with the survival mechanics in the first place. None of it matters. If you can die, but 30 seconds later you've reloaded the game and can just carry on from where you were, can you really get that invested in the survival mechanics in the first place?
So what's the right balance? It's hard to say - it depends on the game! How deep and complex a game's survival mechanics are and what its progression looks like definitely affect what will feel right. But I think that, if a game is going to include survival mechanics, there should be an effort to make them interesting and rewarding (if not fun) throughout the entire game. If they can't be interesting and rewarding, players shouldn't be made to engage with the mechanics at all, and it should just be a problem that players can solve instead. And there needs to be more to the game than just surviving. There needs to be goals available - narrative, creative or otherwise - that give the player a reason to survive.
The process of surviving itself needs to feel interesting throughout the duration of the game. You need a reason to survive (something to work towards) and you need a reason to not die (some form of cost or punishment).
So do any games actually manage all this? I'm not sure... Subnautica probably comes the closest for me, personally. It does a great job of constantly pushing you to progress, but the more you progress, the more scary things get and the harsher the conditions you need to survive become. The survival mechanics are not just relevant but central throughout the entire game, but you rarely feel like they take too much focus away from the rest of the game.
I'd love to hear your thoughts!