The year 2020 certainly brought forth a compelling wave of video game releases, particularly within the ever-expanding genre of survival. As highlighted in the accompanying video, this period was a showcase for innovative concepts and fresh takes on what it means to gather resources, build shelter, and endure against daunting odds. These aren’t just mere challenges of survival horror, but rather experiences focused purely on resilience, strategic planning, and adapting to unforgiving environments. Many gamers eagerly anticipated these new survival games, eager to dive into worlds that test their wits and their will to thrive.
From desolate alien landscapes to the perilous depths of a shrunken backyard, developers pushed the boundaries of what players could expect. The emphasis moved beyond simple resource management to intricate ecosystems, complex crafting systems, and often, compelling narratives woven into the struggle for existence. Understanding the diverse approaches taken by these titles helps illuminate the richness and breadth of the genre. We’re talking about games where every decision, from crafting a rudimentary tool to establishing a sustainable outpost, holds significant weight in your continued perseverance.
Exploring New Survival Game Mechanics and Concepts
The allure of new survival games often lies in their unique mechanics and the inventive ways they challenge players. 2020 introduced titles that dared to blend established genres with core survival elements, creating experiences that felt both familiar and refreshingly new. This era saw a creative burst, moving beyond the traditional zombie apocalypse or deserted island tropes to explore truly imaginative scenarios and gameplay loops. Developers were clearly keen on offering distinct narratives and interactive systems to captivate a broad audience of survival enthusiasts.
Windbound: A Zelda-Inspired Survival Journey
Imagine the aesthetic and exploratory wonder of a Zelda game, then infuse it with the demanding realities of survival, and you get a glimpse of Windbound. Launched on August 28th for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC, this title draws clear inspiration from iconic Nintendo franchises, particularly “Breath of the Wild” and “Wind Waker.” Players navigate a treacherous ocean, sailing between procedurally generated islands, each offering new challenges and vital resources. The core loop of gathering materials, crafting tools, and building increasingly robust boats is central to progressing and staying alive in this vibrant yet dangerous world.
The game expertly blends roguelike action-adventure with its primary survival focus, meaning each death sends you back with certain penalties, encouraging careful planning and resource management. This element adds a layer of consequence and replayability, urging players to learn from past mistakes. The emphasis on exploration and discovering hidden coves, combined with the constant threat of hunger and the need for shelter, makes Windbound a compelling entry for those who enjoy a blend of high adventure and meticulous survival. Its distinctive art style and engaging gameplay promise a memorable experience for solo adventurers.
The Eternal Cylinder: Surviving the Unthinkable
Perhaps one of the most visually striking and conceptually bizarre new survival games of 2020 was The Eternal Cylinder, a truly open-world adventure game. Players control Trebhums, strange, adorable creatures that must adapt and evolve to survive in a surreal alien landscape. The central, terrifying gimmick is an enormous, destructive cylinder that constantly rolls across the world, flattening everything in its path and forcing players into a continuous, desperate scramble for safety. This constant threat creates an unparalleled sense of urgency and dynamism, redefining the typical survival pacing.
Beyond escaping the impending doom, the game incorporates classic survival elements like gathering resources and growing your herd, but with a unique twist: Trebhums can mutate and take on new forms by consuming different flora and fauna. These mutations grant new abilities, essential for navigating the world, solving puzzles, and evading predators. The game’s otherworldly beauty, reminiscent of a surrealist painting, alongside its innovative survival mechanics, makes it an unforgettable entry in the genre. It’s a testament to how far developers can push creative boundaries while maintaining a core survival loop.
Away: The Survival Series: A Nature Documentary Unfolds
Breaking away from human protagonists, Away: The Survival Series offers a truly unique perspective by putting players in the paws of a sugar glider. This game takes its inspiration directly from nature documentaries, aiming to translate the awe and peril of the animal kingdom into an interactive experience. While a release date and demo were not available at the time of the video, the footage alone revealed a breathtakingly gorgeous world and intriguing gameplay mechanics that promised something fresh and captivating for fans of new survival games.
Players navigate lush, detailed environments, gliding through trees, hunting for food, and evading larger predators, all from the perspective of a small creature. This shift in scale and focus provides a distinctive challenge, emphasizing stealth, agility, and a deep understanding of the ecosystem rather than base building or combat. The idea of truly immersing oneself in the life cycle and daily struggles of a wild animal, experiencing survival from an entirely different viewpoint, resonated strongly with many looking for a unique take on the genre. It represented a bold step towards an empathetic and visually stunning survival experience.
Base Building & Resource Management in Novel Environments
A cornerstone of many top survival games is the ability to construct, expand, and defend a base, transforming a hostile environment into a safe haven. The year 2020 brought several titles that pushed this concept into exciting new territories, from futuristic alien planets to the vast expanse of Mars itself. These games challenged players not just to gather resources, but to strategize their expansion and defense, highlighting the critical role of careful planning and engineering in their ultimate survival. The blend of construction and combat often created a dynamic and engaging experience for those who enjoyed both.
The Riftbreaker: Sci-Fi Survival with a Twist
The Riftbreaker is a potent cocktail of survival, base building, action RPG, and even bullet-hell elements, offering a high-octane experience. While its full release date was only “sometime in 2020,” a playable demo provided a taste of its exhilarating gameplay. As Captain Ashley Nowak, piloting an advanced Mecha-Suit, players establish a base on a distant alien planet, gathering resources and constructing a network of facilities. The primary objective is to survive waves of aggressive alien creatures while simultaneously building a rift that will transport you back to Earth.
What truly sets The Riftbreaker apart is the intense urgency it injects into every action. Resource management and base defense aren’t passive tasks; they require quick thinking and active engagement, as enemy attacks can be devastating. The demo alone proved that the constant pressure to expand, defend, and optimize your operations created an incredibly exciting and rewarding survival loop. It skillfully combines strategic base layout with satisfying hack-and-slash combat, providing a comprehensive experience for fans of complex new survival games.
Occupy Mars: The Game: Colonizing the Red Planet
As its title suggests, Occupy Mars: The Game plunges players into the daunting task of colonizing and surviving on the unforgiving Martian surface. Released as a prologue shortly before the video’s discussion, the game immediately captivated players with its detailed simulation of life on the red planet. Players start with limited supplies, aiming for self-sustenance by exploring, setting up farms, and constructing habitable modules. The ultimate goal is to expand operations, turning a barren wasteland into a thriving human outpost.
A key challenge in Occupy Mars revolves around managing vital resources, particularly water, which is crucial for survival and expanding plant life. Every activity, from mining ice to maintaining atmospheric processors, feeds into this critical loop. The game’s open-world sandbox design allows for extensive exploration and creative base design, while the developers’ responsiveness to player feedback from early builds demonstrates a commitment to refining the experience. Its impressive visuals and deep simulation mechanics make it a standout among new survival games, offering a genuine sense of accomplishment as you gradually tame an alien world.
Micro & Macro Survival Experiences on Earth
Some of the most engaging new survival games of 2020 demonstrated that survival isn’t just about massive worlds and grand threats; it can also be about shifting perspectives or returning to primal roots. These titles offered fresh takes on what it means to struggle against the elements, whether by shrinking the player to a minuscule size or by transporting them to a long-forgotten era. The creative use of scale and time periods allowed for innovative gameplay mechanics and immersive environments that captivated a wide audience of players looking for something truly different in the survival genre.
Grounded: Tiny Heroes in a Big Backyard
The concept of Grounded is instantly appealing: “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” as a survival game. This brilliant premise, released into early access, immediately resonated with players, realizing a childhood fantasy many had harbored. Players are shrunk to the size of an ant, forced to survive in a suburban backyard teeming with massive insects and towering blades of grass. The familiar world becomes an alien, dangerous landscape, where everyday objects are colossal landmarks and even the smallest bug poses a significant threat to existence.
The game expertly leverages its unique scale for both challenge and creativity. Building forts out of twigs and discarded items, foraging for dew drops as a vital water source, and battling giant spiders or ladybugs provides an entirely new dimension to resource gathering and combat. This distinct perspective creates endless opportunities for exploration and base-building within an environment that feels simultaneously nostalgic and terrifying. Grounded proved that sometimes, the most innovative new survival games don’t need fantastical realms, but simply a fresh way of looking at the familiar.
Wild: Prehistoric Possessions and Primal Survival
Wild transports players to a stunningly rendered prehistoric world, offering an open-world survival experience unlike any other. While updates on its release date have been scarce, the concept and gameplay footage revealed a richly detailed environment where humans must contend with ancient beasts and rival tribes. Players control a human character, but a truly unique mechanic allows them to possess various animals. This ability to embody different creatures offers distinct strategic advantages, whether for scouting, hunting, or engaging in combat.
For instance, possessing a crow allows for aerial reconnaissance and distractions, while riding a bear can turn the tide in a skirmish against a pack of cannibals. This innovative animal possession mechanic promises a depth of gameplay that encourages creative problem-solving and strategic thinking, making every encounter fresh and dynamic. The combination of its lavish, epic-looking world and the potential for unique gameplay scenarios firmly places Wild among the most anticipated new survival games, offering a fresh take on primal struggle and inter-species interaction.
Classic Survival with Modern Twists and Community Focus
Even as developers explore new frontiers, the core tenets of survival games—resource gathering, crafting, and enduring against environmental and adversarial threats—remain universally appealing. Several titles in 2020 showcased how these classic elements could be refined, updated, and presented with fresh artistic styles or enhanced multiplayer options. These games often leveraged early access models and community feedback to create robust and engaging experiences, proving that the genre continues to evolve through iterative design and player involvement.
The Survivalists: Crafting Adventure in a Familiar Universe
Set in The Escapists universe, The Survivalists is an adventure sandbox survival game that manages to look both new and familiar, thanks to its charming, older JRPG-inspired aesthetic. A demo was readily available, allowing players to dive into its procedurally generated wilderness. The game focuses on classic survival loops: gathering resources, building a base, crafting essential items, and ensuring your character’s well-being. Its vibrant, pixel-art style provides a refreshing visual contrast to the often gritty world of survival games.
What makes The Survivalists particularly enjoyable is its emphasis on multiplayer and dungeon crawling, making it an ideal choice for friends seeking a cooperative survival experience. The procedural generation ensures that each playthrough offers new challenges and discoveries, keeping the exploration fresh. With a planned release in Quarter 4 of 2020, it promised a formula for engaging social play and satisfying progression, proving that traditional survival mechanics can still feel new and exciting when presented with a distinct visual style and strong multiplayer focus.
Survivlist: Invisible Strain: Zombie Survival, Comic Book Style
For those who appreciate a more simplified yet open-ended take on traditional survival games, Survivlist: Invisible Strain offered a compelling option with its distinct comic book visual style. This early access title, priced at an accessible $6.99, presented a world ravaged by a zombie outbreak. While fighting the undead is a necessary evil, the game maintains a strong emphasis on core wilderness survival, ensuring players must balance combat with critical tasks like foraging, securing shelter, and managing their hunger and thirst. It offered a unique blend of narrative and gameplay elements.
The game’s aesthetic gives it a unique charm, distinguishing it from many other zombie-themed survival titles. Being in early access, it continually evolved with player feedback, hinting at a promising future for its development. Its low price point made it an attractive entry for gamers looking to try a zombie survival experience that prioritized the strategic aspects of staying alive over purely action-driven encounters. Survivlist: Invisible Strain demonstrates that innovation in new survival games can also come from stylistic choices and a clear focus on fundamental mechanics.
Deadside: Refining the Open-World Shooter Survival
Deadside, which launched into early access in April, rapidly gained a reputation as a formidable contender in the open-world shooter survival genre, often drawing comparisons to DayZ but with significant improvements. Gamers quickly noted its superior graphics and vastly enhanced AI, which made encounters more dynamic and challenging. The game successfully provides a robust framework for player-versus-environment and player-versus-player interactions within its expansive, desolate world, focusing on realistic weapon handling and intense skirmishes.
While still in early access at the time, and with some content expansion still underway, Deadside established a strong foundation for a deeply engaging experience. Its commitment to smooth mechanics, responsive controls, and an immersive atmosphere set it apart. As its map and feature set continue to grow, it is poised to become one of the most compelling open-ended DayZ-like new survival games, offering a polished and genuinely fun experience for those seeking challenging combat and persistent world engagement. The continuous development and community engagement around Deadside highlight the evolving landscape of survival titles.
The year 2020 proved to be a remarkable period for new survival games, showcasing a diverse range of concepts, settings, and mechanics that pushed the genre forward. Whether through unique artistic styles, innovative gameplay loops, or ambitious new worlds to explore, these titles provided countless hours of challenging and rewarding experiences. The ongoing evolution of **survival games** continues to captivate players, promising an exciting future for this dynamic genre.
