Some survival games today are so demanding that committing 100 hours will barely scratch the surface. Progress is slow by design, and that is exactly what keeps players invested for weeks or even months. These survival games typically drop players into hostile lands filled with dangerous creatures, hunger, thirst, and enemies that do not care how prepared anyone feels.
The Next 5 Huge Survival Games
Fans of the survival genre who are looking for their next favorite game should keep an eye on these upcoming releases.
It’s also important to know that survival in these games is not only about combat. Players even have to figure out how to survive bad weather. Players who enjoy living inside a world, regardless of the threats, rather than finishing it quickly, will have a swell time playing these survival games.
The completionist times in this list were pulled from HowLongToBeat, so actual completionist time may differ from player to player.
Conan Exiles
Completionist Time: 129 Hours
- Brutal fantasy land where players build shelters, tame thralls, and survive harsh climates.
- Exploration, crafting, and combat drive long playtime.
Conan Exiles is a brutal game because it puts players in a harsh environment where they must gather resources, fend off threats, and build to survive. Players begin as exiles freed by Conan, starting with minimal gear and needing to craft clothing, tools, and shelter to survive extreme heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.
Players must manage survival systems like hunger, thirst, and temperature, which affect health and performance, especially in harsh climates. Overall, Conan Exiles is built around freedom of choice. Players can focus on building massive bases, exploring dangerous lands, mastering crafting systems, or testing their strength against the toughest enemies the Exiled Lands have to offer. Anyone who is willing to explore the entire Exiled Lands and survive whatever it throws at them should be ready to commit around 129 hours.
7 Days to Die
Completionist Time: 326 Hours
- A zombie survival sandbox focused on scavenging, crafting, and surviving increasingly deadly hordes.
- Large map with deep progression systems and base building.
In 7 Days to Die, there’s a lot of crafting, scavenging, exploration, and combat against the undead. Taking out zombies is just a fraction of the job. Players also have to gather food, water, tools, and weapons to stay alive. One of the signature mechanics is the Blood Moon, which by default appears about every seven days. During a Blood Moon night, huge waves of zombies attack the player’s location, pushing survivors to prepare strong bases or clever defensive structures. If unprepared, these nights can really become long.
Progression in 7 Days to Die depends on exploration, leveling up, and unlocking skills. Players find magazines and books in loot caches or from traders that unlock new crafting recipes and increase the quality of gear they can make. Simple items can be crafted early, but advanced weapons, vehicles, and higher-tier equipment require reading the right magazines and investing in skill perks.
Rust
Completionist Time: 65 – 188 Hours
- A multiplayer survival game where other players are the biggest threat, not the environment.
- Finishing everything requires mastering complex systems.
Rust is a multiplayer survival game with no official ending, where players create their own goals through survival, crafting, base building, and PvP combat. Because there’s no story or formal win condition, “completion” time varies widely depending on what a player considers success. But it’s very likely players will spend close to 200 hours in Rust, or even more, because it’s a pretty hard open-world survival game.
This is another game where players begin almost defenseless, spawning without gear on a beach with only basic tools like a rock and torch. From there, they gather wood, stone, and other materials to craft better tools, build shelters, and survive in a harsh open world. The biggest challenge often comes from other players, since combat and raiding are central to the experience.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Completionist Time: 246 – 301 Hours
- Island full of dinosaurs that players can tame, ride, and use for battle or resource gathering.
- Completionists must travel across different maps to defeat powerful bosses and unlock the Ascension.
ARK: Survival Evolved is popular for its dinosaur taming mechanics, which are some of the most time-consuming in the genre. When a player wants a dinosaur, they typically must knock it unconscious and feed it preferred foods until it becomes loyal. Larger or rarer creatures tend to take longer to tame, adding to the time investment.
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Teaming up might make these open-world games easier, but playing alone can be even more satisfying.
The game also has a lot of caves to explore. These caves often contain unique artifacts. Collecting the right artifacts is necessary to summon bosses at the map’s obelisks, which are giant structures used as gateways to boss arenas. The exploration, dinosaur taming, and long fights are what stretch ARK: Survival Evolved to as long as 300 hours of completion time.
Valheim
Completionist Time: 145 Hours
- Norse-inspired survival game focused on exploration, crafting, and boss-driven progression.
- Vast procedural worlds and dangerous biomes slow progress and reward careful planning.
Valheim does not have a traditional ending or a story campaign, which is why completion time varies so much between players. In Valheim, progression is tied to defeating biome-specific bosses. Each boss requires preparation, exploration, and crafting better gear. Finding boss summoning items alone can take many hours, since they are often hidden deep in dungeons or spread across a large procedurally generated world.
Players start in the relatively safe Meadows biome and gradually progress through increasingly dangerous areas like the Black Forest, Swamps, Mountains, Plains, and Mistlands, each offering unique resources and stronger enemies that require preparation and proper gear, and all that takes a great deal of time.
The Long Dark
Completionist Time: 228 Hours
- Realistic survival experience set in a frozen wilderness.
- Long-term survival depends on managing hunger, cold, wildlife threats, and limited supplies across large regions.
This game is a quiet survival experience set in the frozen Canadian wilderness. There are no zombies, only the cold and wild animals, so the big question on the minds of many is: why does it take so long? Well, just trying to survive for a long time and map the whole world takes forever in The Long Dark. In fact, to get the Faithful Cartographer achievement, a player has to map every named location in the game.
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These excellent survival games set players loose in hostile settings, where they must avoid being hunted by dangerous foes.
Mapping in The Long Dark is slow work. A player has to stand outside in the cold and use charcoal to draw the map. They have to do this for a lot of locations. And the weather also forces players to wait. If a blizzard starts, a player has to hide in a cave or house and wait for it to pass. This can take all day. Surviving involves a lot of daily chores like melting snow for water, repairing clothes, and hunting deer. So The Long Dark requires a lot of patience.
Project Zomboid
Completionist Time: 433 Hours
- Huge map with permanent death system makes surviving even a few in-game months a major achievement.
- Deep zombie survival simulator.
Project Zomboid is a pretty tough zombie survival game. In an effort to survive, players will find themselves not just looting but also crafting, farming, and fighting. The map is based on real towns in Kentucky, and it is huge. There are lots of buildings to loot. The sheer number of items to collect and organize takes a lot of time.
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Permadeath is an intimidating concept and a devastating outcome, but these games put a creative spin on it that keeps things interesting.
One of the toughest mechanics in Project Zomboid is permadeath. If a zombie scratches a player, there is a chance they get infected. If they get bitten, they are 100% dead. And if a character dies, they lose all their skills. So a player has to start a new character from zero. To complete the game usually means surviving for as long as possible. This lets the player see all the seasons change. Surviving winter is very hard because crops don’t grow, and fishing is difficult. Trying to live that long without making one fatal mistake is a massive challenge.
Core Keeper
Completionist Time: 134 Hours
- Large cave networks, crafting progression, and boss encounters encourage long exploration.
- A top-down survival game filled with monsters and hidden biomes underground.
Core Keeper is an underground adventure, where players wake up in a cave and have to dig to find secrets. The reason it takes over 100 hours is the mix of mining, building, and fighting. Players have to dig through miles of walls to find new biomes like the clay caves or the stone ruins.
The game also encourages building automated factories. Players create complex drills and conveyor belt systems to mine ore automatically. Setting up these systems, along with farms for rare crops, eats up a lot of time. There are also multiple optional bosses hidden in the outer biomes, such as Azeos the Sky Titan and Omoroth the Sea Titan. Players must farm summoning items to fight them. It’s that combination of boss battling with satisfying, block-by-block mining and factory construction that keeps players underground for weeks.
RimWorld
Completionist Time: 312 Hours
- Instead of one person, players crash-landed survivors trying to build a ship and leave a dangerous planet.
- The story is controlled by an AI that creates random events like sickness, pirate raids, or weather disasters that players must overcome.
RimWorld is a sci-fi colony simulator where players manage a group of crash-landed survivors. The goal is to build a ship and leave the planet. But the game is designed to throw problems at the player constantly. A Storyteller AI decides what happens next. It might send a raid of pirates, a heatwave, or a pack of mad squirrels. Dealing with these disasters stops a player from working on the ship.
Researching the technology for the ship takes a very long time. The colony needs a lot of resources, like steel and components. Players have to trade with other settlements and drill deep into the ground to get what they need. They also have to keep the colonists happy. If a colonist is sad, they might have a mental break and destroy the base.
Kenshi
Completionist Time: 273 Hours
- This is a sandbox where players are not heroes and can choose to be a trader, a thief, or a warlord in a giant desert world.
- Deal with different factions and harsh weather.
Kenshi is a sandbox RPG with no linear story, yet it keeps players occupied for nearly 300 hours. The first few dozen hours are often spent just trying to survive being beaten up, which ironically raises the character’s toughness stat. Leveling up combat stats to a point where the player can fight a simple bandit takes a long time.
The true completionist goal in Kenshi is to change the world state. Players can build their own city, recruit an army of dozens of characters, and wage war against the major factions like the Holy Nation or the United Cities. Recruiting soldiers, training them, and crafting armor for them takes dozens of hours. Because the game is so open-ended, players can get lost in managing their squad and exploring ruins for hundreds of hours without nearing completion.
Survival Games Where The Biggest Enemy Is Yourself
In these survival games, the biggest threat isn’t the predators or even the environment, but the player’s fragile body and mind.
