The Outlast Trials
A genuinely frightening co-op horror game that's 93.9% positive — and whose most invested players, with sixty-hour averages, are now leaving negative reviews over the studio's use of AI-generated art.
7.5 / 10
Browse by genre
Survival reviews
145 Survival games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
145 reviews
Witchfire
One of the best-feeling shooters on the market, wired into a progression system that several of its own designers appear to have disagreed about — and, after two years in Early Access, finally close to 1.0.
7.5 / 10
Wonderia
An alien-planet survival and building sandbox — described by one of its own players as "stitched from Don't Starve, Terraria, Stardew Valley and RimWorld" — that launched into Early Access with a punishing hunger system and has spent thirteen straight days of near-daily patches turning early frustration into a genuinely glowing recent reception.
7.5 / 10
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
A shipwreck-survival action RPG that turns rescuing NPCs into a settlement-building system and backs it with some of the fastest, most readable real-time combat Nihon Falcom has ever shipped. The PC version carries genuine baggage from a rough 2018 launch and a since-rewritten English script, but the game underneath both has aged well.
7.5 / 10
All Will Fall
A post-apocalyptic colony sim where the city is a physics object first and a spreadsheet second — every beam, platform and tower obeys weight and tension, and the rising and falling tide can take a whole district down with it.
7 / 10
Banished
A one-person city-building survival game from 2014 that still holds a Very Positive Steam rating across 37,800-plus reviews, built on a genuinely unusual pitch — no money, no skill trees, no combat — that a decade of players keep bumping up against the same mid-game ceiling to enjoy.
7 / 10
Colony Survival
A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.
7 / 10
Dark and Darker
A first-person fantasy dungeon crawler where every raid ends one of two ways — you walk out through a portal with everything you found, or you die and hand it all to whoever killed you. Two years into Early Access on Steam, the extraction loop is still the sharpest thing about it, and the studio's legal history is still not fully behind it.
7 / 10
Dead by Daylight
Ten years, 38 DLC packs and 924,876 reviews later, the complaint isn't the licensed horror store — DLC appears in nine of a hundred negative reviews. It's each other.
7 / 10
Dead Space
Motive Studio's remake of the 2008 survival-horror classic remains Very Positive across nearly 70,000 Steam reviews, widely credited as one of the finest remakes ever made — a reputation undercut by a real, severe, persistent Denuvo-caused stuttering problem and a mandatory always-online requirement for an entirely single-player game, both of which this review can confirm went unfixed after EA redirected developer Motive Studio to other projects roughly two months after launch, with the studio's own pitches for a sequel subsequently rejected.
7 / 10
Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite
A 20-minute survival roguelite that lets you rebuild your creature from over 125 evolutions every run, wrapped in a living ecosystem where you're just as often the prey as the predator — sharp and addictive early, but the same handful of builds start resurfacing once the novelty wears off.
7 / 10
Read review of Everything is Crab: The Animal Evolution Roguelite
Frostpunk 2
11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.
7 / 10
Green Hell
A survival-crafting game that replaces its genre's usual menu-driven fiddling with a diegetic system — you inspect your own wounds, dig leeches out with your fingers and physically reach into your pack for a fire kit — built around a sanity mechanic that can hallucinate you to death. A separate, heavily narrative Story Mode sits alongside the open sandbox and has drawn specific, credible criticism for how it depicts the Amazon's indigenous Yabahuaca people.
7 / 10
Infection Free Zone
A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
Kin and Conquest
The Fox Knocks follows up their mining incremental Kin and Quarry with a tighter, faster hybrid — Vampire Survivors-style bullet-heaven combat wrapped around a genuine incremental gear economy — and lands it well enough on day one that the loudest complaint is simply wanting more of it.
7 / 10
Lost Vessel
A free-to-play sci-fi idle RPG built around a genuine, developer-stated no-pay-to-win promise, an active in-game chat community, and an engaged solo developer — praised by a striking number of very-high-playtime reviewers, with real friction over gear durability and one serious, unverified allegation about how the launch event tracked activity.
7 / 10
Medieval Dynasty
A first-person survival sandbox about hunting, farming and building a village that eventually runs itself, wrapped around the promise of a multi-generational dynasty that almost nobody who owns it ever actually reaches — a Very Positive, 42,000-plus-review Steam favourite that has spent the last two years answering "what's missing" with paid cosmetics instead of the content its own late-game silence keeps calling for.
7 / 10
METAL GEAR SOLID Δ: SNAKE EATER
One of the greatest games ever made, rebuilt shot for shot and shipped at NZ$114.99 with performance problems Konami stopped patching in January — now 60% off, eleven months later, for reasons the review page makes obvious.
7 / 10
MISERY
A chaotic, genuinely addictive co-op survival game set in a STALKER-flavoured nuclear exclusion zone, praised by players for its dark comedy and bunker-crawling tension even as a substantial share of the same review sample argues its "1.0" label is misleading for content this thin — and whose launch was briefly overshadowed by a real, well-documented DMCA dispute with STALKER 2 developer GSC Game World and an admitted offensive Discord incident from a member of the small development team.
7 / 10
Nova Lands
A pixel-art automation game that grafts Factorio-style conveyor belts onto a Forager-style hand-gathering loop. The first ten hours are genuinely charming; the back half turns into a long wait for timers to finish, and a cluster of recent reviews accuse it of bundling data collection players can't fully switch off.
7 / 10
Once Human
A genuinely strange free survival MMO whose defining flaw — seasonal servers that wiped everything you built — has quietly been fixed, while its veterans have moved on to a different argument entirely.
7 / 10
Phasmophobia
One of the biggest co-op horror games ever made, sitting on 836,000 reviews and a movie deal — and, right now, absorbing the fallout of a May 2026 customisation update its own top reviews call the worst in the game's six-year history.
7 / 10
Planetbase
A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.
7 / 10
Rogue: Genesia
A densely systemic bullet-heaven survivor-like that grew from a simple, focused Early Access hit into something several hundred-hour veterans now describe as buried under its own added complexity — alongside real, current complaints about difficulty balance and performance.
7 / 10