Many survival games start off the same way. You have little at your disposal but the sweat on your brow, and through punching trees and kicking rocks, you build new structures and gain ways to punch trees and kick rocks more effectively. You take wood and stone for granted and move onto bigger aims, going from the humble tent you start with to a house, and then a mansion, where trees are punched and rocks are kicked to get the resources needed for a marble fireplace rather than a simple campfire required to stave off the deathly cold and heat up your humble meals. So isAnimal Crossinga survival game?
It’s something we’ve discussed at TheGamer as we cover the survival genre in its totality forSurvival Week. It’s on the fringes of the survival genre, if it even qualifies at all, but surely a week celebrating all things survival would include the fringes too? The arguments on both sides are pretty clear cut. For the pros, Animal Crossing is a game about cultivating resources and effectively using the natural environment in such a way that you go from relying on it for basicsurvival(stick that in your cap and call it spaghetti) to harvesting it for luxury, for personal vanity, and for social betterment.
Add in that you raise a settlement as others start to rely on you for their own survival, and you have the clear progression of resources and building ability that many survival games rely upon. There’s even a focus on nature as you collect fish and insects in the name of completionism, another foundational ideal of the survival genre.
The argument against it is even clearer: you don’t need to survive. Get stung by a wasp or bitten by a spider and the screen will turn black, but there’s no consequence for death, or even the vague threat of it. These early tents and campfires that you ‘need’ to build are only necessary because the game won’t allow you to progress without them. In ‘actual’ survival games, you’ll freeze to death or starve if you don’t get started with a fire and shelter in good time. Most add extra factors to be concerned with into the mix too, like needing oxygen to breathe freely or avoiding exposure to radiation, the aim of which is also to breathe freely but with extra steps.
Here’s where it gets messy - we let a lot of other games off for abandoning survival traits in these ways. Consider a survival horror game likeResident EvilorAlien: Isolation. Neither of these have much in the way of crafting, we go through a linear story, and there are no extra resources to harvest. However, both games use limited ammo (in the case of Isolation, this exists only to make the enemy flee rather than kill it) and only offer saves at specific points in the game, putting the onus on you to survive the horrors it throws at you until then - ergo, they’re survival horrors.
There’s a similar debate as to whetherThe Last of Uscounts as a survival horror. It’s at the opposite end of the spectrum to Animal Crossing, but the spectrum is a horseshoe and the pair end up very close together. While Animal Crossing is almost completely sanitised of violence and The Last of Us is dark and nihilistic, both have a straightforward progression that depend on engaging with the mechanics. If you stay in one place in Alien: Isolation, the Xenomorph will eventually find you, because it’s always hunting. Every second of that game, you are actually surviving. With The Last of Us, you can chill out as much as you want after specific combat areas.
I say Animal Crossing is ‘almost’ sanitised of violence because we’ve all attacked an ugly villager with a net before. Namely Pietro.
The Last of Us has crafting (like Animal Crossing), it has no hunger or oxygen or radiation meters (like Animal Crossing), and it’s only a ‘survival’ game as a proxy to progress (like Animal Crossing). Though the deaths are very different, both games see the screen go black and start you back where you were, as opposed to dropping your resources and needing to go out in a loincloth to recover them as is often the case in ‘true’ survival games that sit at the centre of the horseshoe. If surviving death or a fail state was a barrier to the genre, you could arguably deem the majority of every single video game ever created as a survival game.
You’re telling me you don’t want to throw sticks at this thing?
The answer is easy for some people - neither are true survival games. But if we accept The Last of Us as a survival horror game, despite only having light resource tracking and abundant checkpoints on the basis that it has limited ammo, should we accept Animal Crossing too? One thing’s for sure, Animal Crossing would be more interesting if we could find a few bullets lying around. Just a couple. Just one. I’m coming for you, Pietro.
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.
