Hey, you! Don't just stand there half-naked with your stomach growling. Grab a stick, pick up a rock, craft a rope from whatever the heck "plant fiber" is, and combine them to make your first crude axe. Then chop down some trees, build a mech suit (I may have skipped a few steps), climb in, and start running as fast as your sprint meter will allow.
The reason I'm rushing you is because right over the horizon are a bunch of exciting new survival games. The survival genre had a great year in 2024, with original and diverse survival games like Pacific Drive (singleplayer survival in a car), Abiotic Factor (co-op survival in a Half-Life-esque world), Frostpunk 2 (a survival city builder), Enshrouded (a survival RPG), and Soulmask (I didn't play it but it had souls and masks, I think?).
That's a heck of a crop, and there are more exciting survival games headed our way in 2025 and beyond. And while the games industry can sometimes feel like a big machine that only churns out sequels, there's a nice mix in the games coming our way: some are sequels to beloved survival games, but there are plenty others that are completely new games I can't wait to starve to death in.
The only thing I could ask for is more concrete release dates: a lot of the games below haven't announced when they're coming, or even narrowed it down to a specific year. Here are the survival games we're looking forward to in 2025 and 2026, and maybe even further out. I've also given each a rating from 1-5 for how excited I am to play them.
