Survival game

Survival games are a subgenre of action video games that generally start the player off with minimal resources, in a hostile, open-world environment, and require them to collect resources, craft tools, weapons, and shelter, and survive as long as possible. Many survival games are based on randomly or procedurally generated persistent environments, with more recently created games often playable online, with multiple players on a single persistent world. Survival games are generally open-ended with no set goals, and are often closely related to the survival horror genre, in which the player must survive within a supernatural setting, such as a zombie apocalypse.

Survival games are considered an extension of a common video game theme where the player-character is stranded or separated from others, and must work alone to survive and complete a goal. Survival games primarily focus on the survival parts of these games, while encouraging exploration of an open world. They are primarily action games, though some gameplay elements present in the action-adventure genre—such as resource management and item crafting—are commonly found in survival games,and are often central elements in some titles, like Survival Kids. At the start of a typical survival game, the player is usually placed alone in the game's world with few resources. It is not uncommon for players to spend the majority or entirety of the game without encountering a friendly non-player character; since NPCs are typically hostile to the player, emphasis is placed on avoidance, rather than confrontation. In some games, however, combat is unavoidable and provides the player with valuable resources (i.e., food, weapons, and armor).

In some titles, the world itself is often generated randomly so that players must actively search for food and weapons, with knowledge from previous games being used for visual and audio cues about where resources may be found nearby. The player-character will typically have a health bar, and can take damage from falling, starving, drowning, stepping into lava or similar deadly liquids, or being attacked by monsters that inhabit the world. Other metrics may also come into play; the survival title Don't Starve features both a separate hunger gauge and a sanity meter, which (if allowed to fully deplete) will cause the death of the character. In some games, character death is not 'the end'; the player may be able to return to the point at which his character died to retrieve lost equipment. Other survival games use permadeath: the character has one life, and dying requires that the game be restarted from the beginning. While many survival games are aimed at constantly putting the player at risk from hostile creatures or the environment, others may downplay the amount of danger the player faces and instead encourage more open-world gameplay, where player-character death can still occur if the player is not careful or properly equipped.

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