It’s Survival Week here at TheGamer and the theme has me thinking about how my life as a video game player has been influenced by the rise of the genre. As someone who doesn’t play a ton of survival games, it would be easy to shrug and say, “not much”. But playing mainstream video games in the last decade has meant being downstream from two genres: survival andSouls. The biggest games were drawing on these niche subgenres, sometimes leaving the jagged edges intact, but much more often sanded them down to make them palatable to a mass audience.
This wasn’t immediately obvious to me as it was happening.Minecraftlaunched on PS3 (the only way I would have had to play it) in 2013, when I was already in college and taking a break from the hobby. So I missed out on the survival game that brought millions of new players to the genre.
When I got back into games in 2016,The Last of Uswas one of the first games I played. It was similarly the first game I playedwith a crafting systemand, at the time, I had no frame of reference for it. As a fan of Uncharted, I was annoyed that this other cinematic Naughty Dog game wasn’t as easy to pick up as the series I came of age with. Eventually I got used to it, ended up loving the game, and as I moved onto other new triple-A games, I found similar systems everywhere.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wildwas one of those games, and its implementation of systems from survival games was more intense than The Last of Us. BOTW took much of what was happening in hardcore genres, like survival and Souls, and synthesized it in a way that made it massively appealing. It was Zelda through and through, but it had Dark Souls and Minecraft in its blood.
The combat was more thoughtful than in previous games. It was easy to get overwhelmed if you ignored one enemy to focus on another, which pushed you to think strategically before initiating contact. That’s an influence from Dark Souls. To get an edge in those combat encounters and to survive in unfriendly climates, you needed to craft helpful food items and potions. You needed to track down special gear. You needed to manage your meters — an influence from Souls and survival games, and an evolution of the stamina system introduced to the series in Skyward Sword.
As someone getting back into games in the middle of the last decade, survival and Souls were the poisonous, spore-filled air that I breathed. There were corpse runs in games like Hollow Knight, Dandara, and Journey to the Savage Planet, but Souls combat was far more ubiquitous with games like Nioh, God of War, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and the RPG-influenced Assassin’s Creeds leaning into light and heavy attack-focused combat, often with those attacks assigned to the triggers. There were crafting systems in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3, God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley, and No Man’s Sky.
There are other genres that broke through in the 2010s, with roguelikes being the one that hit the hardest. But, roguelike elements have just started to make their way to triple-A games in the past few years. Returnal, which launched in 2021, started the trickle, but in the past few months the dam has burst with The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered and God of War Ragnarok both bringing live, die, repeat modes to big-budget Sony games. It’s possible that the next decade will be defined by roguelikes. But the past decade belongs to Soulslikes and survival games.
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.
