Terraria
A 2011 sandbox that turned "dig, build, fight" into a full RPG and never stopped growing — fifteen years and counting of free updates, still one of the best-value games on Steam.
9.5 / 10
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Survival reviews
145 Survival games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
145 reviews
Minecraft
Fifteen years past release, the hardest part of reviewing Minecraft isn't judging whether it's good — it's telling a new buyer which of its two incompatible engines to actually install, and being honest about what stopped changing while the block count kept climbing.
9 / 10
Satisfactory
An automation game solved in three dimensions instead of two, where every belt run is something you physically walked and every ratio problem is also an architecture problem. Five years after leaving Epic exclusivity, its 1.0 release confirms it was worth the wait.
9 / 10
SOMA
A philosophical sci-fi horror game about consciousness, identity and what survives an underwater apocalypse — nine years on, still Overwhelmingly Positive, and still honestly criticized by a consistent minority for gameplay that some feel gets in the story's way.
9 / 10
Subnautica
An open-world survival game that strips out weapons almost entirely and replaces them with an oxygen gauge, a sound cue you can't place, and a lot of very dark water. Eight years after full release, it's still the best argument that dread works better than a sword.
9 / 10
Vampire Survivors
Poncle stripped aiming and attacking out of the action-roguelite formula and the result became one of the decade's most copied designs — a review of what actually holds four years later, now that the screen-filling spectacle has become the whole pitch.
9 / 10
Core Keeper
A mining sandbox that turns "just one more tile" into a genuinely well-paced RPG — skills level as you use them, bosses gate the map instead of a level counter, and up to eight players can dig through it together.
8.5 / 10
Don't Starve Together
Klei's co-op survival sandbox turns Wilson's original nightmare into a shared one, where the real threat isn't the Deerclops so much as what happens when nobody on the team remembers it's coming. A decade of free content updates against 49 mostly-cosmetic DLC entries makes it a genuinely useful case study in how to monetise a survival game politely.
8.5 / 10
Frostpunk
The 2018 society-survival strategy game that made keeping a city's generator running feel like a moral crisis. Eight years and 136,000-plus Steam reviews later, Frostpunk still holds a Very Positive rating — earned by a first playthrough nothing else quite replicates, and complicated by a second and third playthrough that keep finding the same optimal path.
8.5 / 10
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Warhorse Studios' medieval simulation grows up without losing its stubbornness — a sequel that fixes the first game's roughest edges while doubling down on the idea that realism should cost you something. The result is one of the most complete RPGs of the last few years, provided you're willing to let a swordfight or a bowl of stew go badly.
8.5 / 10
Oxygen Not Included
A space-colony simulation where the number that scales isn't a character level — it's the tangle of pipes, wires and thermal gradients you're personally responsible for keeping alive, and the game never once lets physics take a day off.
8.5 / 10
Palworld
Two and a half years after the meme that ate January 2024, Palworld's 1.0 finishes the job — a survival sandbox whose real subject is labour, with 72 more Pals, a level-80 ceiling and two new regions bolted onto the top of it.
8.5 / 10
PEAK
A breakout co-op climbing hit from a small Landfall-affiliated team, selling millions of copies for NZ$11.99 and earning genuine, chaotic devotion from its players — briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented EULA controversy the developers reversed within days, and by two specific, widely repeated complaints (no save option, a punishing difficulty spike) that a remarkably attentive year of patches has since substantively addressed.
8.5 / 10
Resident Evil 4
A masterfully modernized remake of one of gaming's most influential horror games — briefly and seriously undermined in early 2026 by a new anti-piracy DRM that tanked performance on an already three-year-old game, until Capcom reversed it within a month.
8.5 / 10
Shift At Midnight
A gas station job simulator where the real task is deciding, customer by customer, who's human — and living with what happens when you get it wrong in either direction.
8.5 / 10
SIGNALIS
A retro survival horror game that wears its Resident Evil and Silent Hill influences openly and still manages real originality — beloved for its atmosphere, queer storytelling and puzzle design, with one honest recurring complaint about how tedious that puzzle design gets.
8.5 / 10
Valheim
A Viking survival sandbox that gates its whole progression behind biomes, each one resetting your sense of safety from zero. Five and a half years into Early Access, with a firm 1.0 date finally on the calendar, it's worth asking how much of that reputation still holds.
8.5 / 10
Vintage Story
A voxel survival sandbox that replaces Minecraft's tap-a-block-get-an-ingot logic with real material science — knapping, pit kilns, bloomeries and alloy ratios you actually have to measure — sold direct from the developer for one flat price with no storefront in between.
8.4 / 10
Project Zomboid
Twelve years into Early Access, the isometric zombie survival sandbox just shipped its biggest update ever and got multiplayer back. The skill grind is still the best in the genre; the menus are still the reason half the people who buy it never see it.
8.3 / 10
Abiotic Factor
A co-op survival crafting game that traps scientists inside a Half-Life-flavoured secret research facility after a containment breach, Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 41,000 Steam reviews for its inventive setting and crafting depth — with a remarkably consistent, still-current complaint that its final act and late-game content don't live up to everything that came before.
8 / 10
A Dark Room
A minimalist text-based incremental that spends its first act pretending to be nothing at all, then quietly reveals it was building a survival story out of firewood, huts and silence the whole time.
8 / 10
Amnesia: The Bunker
Frictional Games' boldest genre pivot yet — a tense, resource-scarce, Alien: Isolation-style stalker horror game that thrilled a large majority of reviewers, while a real and consistent minority of longtime series fans miss the puzzle-driven, story-rich horror the studio built its reputation on.
8 / 10
Ascend to ZERO
Flyway Games turns a thirty-second countdown into a health bar, a currency and a weapon at once — a review of how far the time-freeze mechanic carries a roguelite built entirely around never letting the clock feel like punishment, and where cluttered onboarding and a softening difficulty curve hold it back.
8 / 10
BALL x PIT
A brick-breaker, base-builder and roguelite mashed together into something genuinely novel — and, by a large and coherent share of its own fans, something that runs out of ideas within its first ten hours and never quite finds a reason to justify the dozens more it invites.
8 / 10