In 2020 we were all forced to confront our own mortality. That we will all die one day is a universal truth, but most of us don’t expect this to arrive for decades. We will have lived so much by then that we will be different people. Thus, we won’t ever die - someone else will die in our place. We don’t really think about dying because most of us barely think about what will happen next week, let alone what will happen in 30 or 40 or 50 years time. But the pandemic changed that, and changedsurvival gameswith it.
With the pandemic, death went from a distant threat that would eventually, and peacefully, come for some other version of ourselves to a looming possibility. Even though death amongst the young and healthy was rare, it was a lot less rare than dying from someone coughing near you was in 2019, and seeing headlines every day about rising body counts while being locked inside your own four walls tends to bring out the anxiety in us.
Survival games have always had a substantial foothold in hardcore gaming culture, but since the pandemic it has enjoyed a boom not just of popular releases but of viral breakouts and of fresh ideas. From 2018 to now, the survival genre has probably generated the most success stories per capita, and while it may not be a conscious reaction, or even a direct result of the pandemic, it’s fascinating to think of survival games in the context of COVID-19.
Since then, three of the biggest breakout titles across all of gaming culture have beenValheim,Sons of the Forest, andPalworld. Other survival games have garnered interest too, from the upcoming duo ofNightingaleandPacific Driveto the recently releasedEnshrouded, as well asV Rising,Raft, andGrounded. These games are heavily in vogue right now, and it’s hard not to view them through a pandemic lens.
Survival games break down the basic building blocks of, well, survival. In some games it will be monitoring your sleep and hunger, in others it will be avoiding deadly contagions (very on the nose, that one), and in others still it will be about ensuring your shelter is as safe and secure as possible. These are things we have the luxury of taking for granted in our regular lives, but during the pandemic, even that was disrupted. Is there something about filling these meters that is more relatable after we lived through lockdown?
Or perhaps there’s something in the routine - survival games give you a purpose, with small goals growing into larger goals as the routine becomes self-sustaining. We lived through a period of abject aimlessness, with nothing much to do as we were cut off from everyone in our lives. But maybe it’s not just the repetition, but the relief that comes with the catharsis.
One of my favourite pieces of pandemic art is Sam Fender’s song Howdon Aldi Death Queue. A lot of post-pandemic art explores the creativity it generated, from Taylor Swift’s isolated twin albums Folklore and Evermore about the fantasy of freedom to the wild and frustrated Bo Burnham’s Inside. They look at how art has changed through the circumstances of the pandemic. But Howdon Aldi Death Queue is about the rage it brought about. Fender, immunocompromised and on the NHS vulnerable patients list, angrily laments his chances of dying at 25 from something as dull and as necessary as getting the groceries.
Survival games tap into this rage, consciously or not. While most games include violence, this violence is often exacted against creatures trying to harm us. It is a necessary violence. A tree is not going to punch you back, and while it is technically required for survival (trees make wood make fire make food), it’s a natural punching bag of catharsis and oak. It is directionless rage given a direction.
Most survival games start with smashing rocks and chopping trees, sometimes just by virtue of punching them. It’s been nearly four years since the peak of lockdown, and that intense rage and frustration we felt has faded away, but there might be something in the satisfaction of punching a tree to fell it that the struggle of, say, an Elden Ring boss can’t provide. Maybe these games are just all flowing into each other, profiting off their predecessor’s popularity, but it’s still interesting to see the first major trend of the post-pandemic gaming era be lo-fi viral survival crafters.
The pandemic changed us forever, mostly in ways we may not even be actively aware of. For all the trajectories changed by those different circumstances though, they seem to have created the perfect environment for the humble indie survival game to thrive.
Survival Week at TheGamer is brought to you by Nightingale -available on PC in early access February 20
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
