Summary
The survival game genre has the ability to be one of the most immersive at capturing a completely realistic experience, whether through its graphics and visuals or crafting systems. Some aren’t so successful at delivering the same realism with the art style and mechanics likeMinecraftor the addition of zombies.
However,many games in the survival genre across all platformsoffer extreme attention to detail in the many parameters you need to maintain for survival, which inevitably makes things more difficult. These following scenarios, environments, and graphics will make survival as real as possible in game form.
Updated on June 14, 2025, by Dennis Moiseyev:Survival games are some of the most impressive when it comes to systems designs and are excellent at capturing realistic environments, tools, and mechanics. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of developers aiming to bring gamers some of the most intense survival experiences, and now, a few more notable ones have joined the club.
Mad Max may envisiona fictional barren post-apocalyptic wastelandwith some grotesque warring factions, but there are some realistic elements when it comes to survival. As in the films, Max has a vehicle here to traverse the environment, called the Magnum Opus.
Unlike most games where you get to drive a car, this one burns through gas fast, and you’ll constantly need to collect gasoline to fill it up. The back of the Opus also acts as storage for fuel cans for later use. The other factors that come into consideration are Max’s health, which relies on food and water. It is the desert, after all, so you have a canteen you can fill with water that you’ll drink to heal up. And you can also find canned goods like Dinki-Di dog food.
11Project Zomboid
True, the graphics may look far from it, but Project Zomboid may be the most realistic zombie apocalypse survival horror game out there. This isn’t the more action-horror tone of Resident Evil or Dead Island. Instead, Project Zomboid is only about survival, which includes water and power shut-offs, resource and food management, and some of the most detailed car maintenance mechanics.
This early-access game is pretty much a meticulous apocalypse simulator, asking if you truly have the savvy survival skills it takes to not only avoid getting bitten by zombies but keep yourselffrom dying any other number of bizarrely realistic ways you might not have anticipated.
Also in Early Access isArk: Survival Ascended, the remake of 2017’s Ark: Survival Evolved, not to be confused with Ark 2, the sequel starring Vin Diesel and Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho. It’s a whole new world redesign using Unreal Engine 5, so Ascendedgraphically looks far more realisticthan its predecessor, even if its prehistoric sci-fi premise is very fictional.
Aside from graphics, the physics and lighting have been updated to provide more realism with reflections, splashes, and foliage effects. The creature gameplay and survival craft carry over from the original and remain the core aspects of the game.
9Scum
Yet another realistic Early Acess survival game is Scum. Framed like a reality television show akin to Stephen King’s The Running Man, you play a prisoner dropped into an expansive 225 sq km map, where you must brace the wilderness and sometimes PVP battles with other fellow survivalist convicts.
The survival mechanics here are unlike any you had to consider, starting from your character creation. The most unique among them is metabolic activity. There are vitamins, minerals, digestive rates, oxygen, heart rate, and blood pressure levels to monitor. And yes, your character must pee and poop in Scum.
8Change: A Homeless Survival Experience
Here’s a survival game that touches upon real-life issuesand also mental health. Delve Interactive’s Change: A Homeless Survival Experience puts you in the shoes of a character going through this difficult period in their life, allowing you to choose your character based on a variety of circumstances that may have led to their sudden life-changing moment.
Based on real struggles faced by the development team and multiple years of research going into the design, this game is a hard, powerful, and realistic portrayal of homelessness, with mechanics and character interactions shining a light on the state of mind and unimaginable challenges the unhoused face every single day.
On the Steam page, the developer has stated that 20 percent of the profits from Change: A Homeless Survival Experience will go toward charities helping homelessness.
The Forestand its sequel,Sons of the Forest, are a genre mix of survival craft simulators and a survival horror aspect that comes in the form of thosedeadly mutated cannibalstrying to hunt you throughout the island. Other than that, the graphics and the animals and weapons all look incredibly realistic.
To make things even more realistic and to just enjoy the survival aspect without having to worry about those hostile cannibals, you’re able to play both games on Peaceful Mode. You’ll craft, build your base by chopping a few trees, hunt for food, gather water, and sleep soundly in the forest environment.
The premise ofStranded Deepborrows from The Forest in that a plane crash leads to you surviving on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. You havedetailed negative status effectslike diarrhea, bleeding, poisoning, sunstroke, and drowning, which are already more realistic elements coming into play when you’re in an unfamiliar island setting.
Then there are meat spits you may craft for roasting food over a fire, palm trees you can climb to collect coconuts to feed and hydrate yourself, and even build some water still collectors to capture your water. It’s a lot like The Forest, but rather than dealing with cannibals, you have many species of shark and giant marine life that look strikingly real.
5Medieval Dynasty
When you think of a game taking place in the Medieval Age, your mind immediately goes to fantasy likeThe WitcherandDark Souls.Medieval Dynastydoesn’t have sorcerers or dragons wreaking havoc on villagers; instead, it presents a more realistic life and survival sim where you build a village and keep everyone thriving.
You’ll use weapons and tools from the period to hunt and build various structures, along with farming, to provide grain and crops for your villagers. You can also ride horses and encounter all sorts of other wildlife as well as NPCs that can offer you quests, and be prepared for every season’s weather,though how fast they change is less realistic.
The graphics might be far from the most realistic inThe Long Dark, but the harsh frozen survival landscapeand permadeath mechanicbeg to differ. That’s right, as in real life, if you die from the adverse effects of your survival journey, your character here dies permanently, and you’ll be forced to start over with a new game.
The Long Dark is also unique in that it differs from lush tropical island settings or warmer forest and desert biomes. It instead puts you in the frozen Canadian wilds due to a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm. Aside from your usual hunting needs for hunger, you must do your best to keep warm and avoid hypothermia in the weather conditions, your clothing playing a big part.
ThisWar of Mineshowcases the civilian perspective of war and is a survival tale thathits very close to home for those living in war-torn countries. You’re responsible for a group of displaced survivors in the fictional Pogoren, Graznavia, hiding out and struggling with basic needs of medicine, food, and other materials complicated to come across with a war raging on their land.
There’s a counter for the number of days the war has been going on, the temperature conditions, the time of day critical for heading outside the shelter, and your characters having their names and pictures as black and white photographs. As these characters, you will make your own moral decisions for supplies that could mean life or death, and the fate of the survivors rests all on you.
