Summary
The survival genre is a staple of gaming thanks to its ability to immerse you in a hostile universe for you to explore, create, and eventually subdue. There are different flavors of survival thanks to its versatility, and what better place to explore new ways to survive than in the indie sphere.
While many indie survival games became smash hits due to their multiplayer and cooperative capabilities, such as Minecraft, there are many that thrive on bringing you a single-player experience. They may have unique ways of approaching the formula or a story worth exploring, but these games will ensure that you can enter a world alone and eventually bend it to your will.
Updated July 26, 2025 by Zoë J. Osik:We’ve updated this list to include new titles so you can explore an open world to your hearts' content while building and surviving in harsh environments.
11Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Travel back in time with Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, surviving in prehistoric times as our early hominid ancestor. You’ll start at the bottom of the food chain, dodging predators while evolving beyond your initial capabilities.Evolution gives you new traitsto use on your way toward becoming one of the first humans.
The world is designed to be equal parts hostile and beautiful, utilizing heightened senses to navigate the jungles safely. Death is not even the end, for you’ll take on another clan member to continue your path toward evolution. Hopefully, evolution favours you enough to allow the hunted to become a hunter.
10Golden Treasure: The Great Green
In this narrative-driven survival game, Golden Treasure: The Great Green has you hatch into a painted worldas a dragon child, attuned to nature and destined for greatness. To become the great Draak-Kin however, you must forge bonds, uncover threats, and consume all that you may.
It blends interactive fiction with survival gameplay, exploring regions in a resource-driven way that allows for slower yet tactical gameplay. Each region explored greets you with gorgeously hand-painted scenes, reminding us all that survival doesn’t always have to be brutal and harsh. Nature is all about survival, and now you can be one with it.
9Don’t Starve
Don’t Starveputs survival into a 2D environment and makes you fear the dark every night. Following a stranded German scientist named Wilson, you navigate a pencil-drawn world in the hopes of finding the resources necessary to ensure that the upcoming night’s monsters don’t overrun you. Its bleak aesthetics capture the outlook perfectly as each day becomes a struggle between exploring to avoid running out of resources and risking not returning before dark, or pacing yourself to ensure a sense of safety as resources dwindle.
While Don’t Starve Together allows for multiplayer capabilities, it’s hard to beat the original solo experience. You can go for the infinite Sandbox mode or the Adventure to see if there truly is a way to escape.
8Miasmata
A gem that got buried at the height of Early Access survival games, Miasmata brings a ‘lighter’ survival experience as you attempt to find a cure for the plague-ridden protagonist. Landing on an abandoned remote island, you’re hoping to find hidden knowledge discovered by those who came before you while staving off exhaustion, fevers, and an unseen predator that stalks from the shadows.
Miasmata shines in its exploratory aspects as you triangulate your position to build a map that helps you navigate this lush island world. Those who came before have left clues and knowledge that can be uncovered, all in your quest to solve the puzzle of the plague. Hopefully without having to confront the creature watching you.
7Aska
Asks takes Norse mythology and gives it new life, dropping you into a dense landscape with nothing but your wits and creativity. While you can opt to build a thriving community of NPCs, there’s something special about traversing the land on your own and making mistakes along the way.
By earning the favor of the gods, you’ll increase your skills and develop new tools that can help you survive in the harsh wilderness. Keep an eye out for malevolent wisps and draugr at night, though.
6Rain World
Not a game you might expect to see in a survival list, but Rain World’s survival platformer is a fantastic exploration of two unlikely genres colliding. As a slugcat separated from family, you must use every resource at your disposal to navigate the landscape and find food while avoiding predators that love a good slugcat snack.
The only thing that matches the beauty of Rain World is itsbrutal difficulty. Enemies are terrifying monstrosities with ever-shifting AI making each run variable, and the movement system is so extensive that it could be an entire article. Survival in Rain World is not just against the environment, but against your own abilities.
5This War of Mine: Complete Edition
Set in a brutal war-torn city,This War of Mineoffers a heart-wrenching and brutal tale that shows the only thing harder than surviving alone is surviving with others. Following civilians struggling to survive in the fictional city of Pogoren, Graznavia, you’ll scavenge for supplies, reinforce the base, and keep morale up while waiting for a ceasefire.
A day-night cycle is used to separate the decisions, with day allowing for crafting and maintenance while night is a harrowing experience ofscavenging in the dark. The Little Ones DLC includes children as survivors for added tension and emotional immersion.
4Green Hell
Deep in the Amazon jungle is whereGreen Hellbegins, where you awaken in a camp with no context. This brutal survival game dives deep into survival mechanics, forcing you to manage more than just hydration, with protein and carbohydrates as well, all while learning about the wilderness through firsthand exposure. Inspecting your limbs can reveal injuries from any number of phenomenon, requiring treatment before you succumb to their effects.
you may dive into Green Hell with friends but the story mode’s inclusion gives you a single-player experience to test your survival skills while looking for the protagonist’s missing wife and the cause of her disappearance.
3Darkwood
Darkwood amps up the innate tension of survival games by setting you in a terrifying universe of abject horror. Played from the top down, you spend the day cycle exploring the worlds the forest has to offer, building upgrades, and cooking various skills that can have dangerous side effects. At night, however, you are stuck in your cabin and must fend off those horrors as they breach into your safety nest.
Separating its narrative into distinct chapters, it discusses themes of existentialism and dread while avoiding typical tropes of jump-scare horror. To Darkwood, existing and survival is horrifying in its own right, especially against the beings within the forest.
2The Long Dark
The Long Darkcaptures the truest essence of survival by pitting you against nature and nothing else. Stuck in the most frigid regions of Northern Canada with no electronics and no human company, you’ll scavenge through various regions in the hopes of finding enough food and supplies to make it through to tomorrow. Even if you have no guarantee that tomorrow will be any better, or if there is a future out here.
Its unique art style helps to draw you in, accompanied by agorgeous soundtrackto heighten the sense of loneliness yet peacefulness. With no base building, all you can do is wander the wilderness and avoid Canada’s greatest predator; the moose.
