Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>Profits from the next seven days of sales from This War Of Mine and Slipways will be donated to the Red Cross to support people affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both developers posted the announcement on Twitter today, with GOG joining in by saying that their share of sales of both games will also be donated.
]]>There's never been a better time to get into survival games on PC, as the recent revival of the genre means Steam is now awash in some truly great games, both in early access and in full release. There are more arriving every year, too, which is why we've done the hard work for you and ranked the very best survival games to dive into today. Fair warning - there are some early access games on this list, which mean they might be a little janky early on. Give them the time they deserve, though, and you'll find they often blossom into some truly great games over subsequent updates. We've only included the very best and most complete-feeling survival games on this list, though, so you can rest assured that every game here will leave you hungry for more. It's by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a nice selection of wolf-taming, base-building, carrot-picking action to choose from.
]]>Students in Poland could soon play This War Of Mine as part of their education, as developers 11-Bit Studios today announced the grim survival game set in a war-torn city will be on next year's school reading list. It'll be recommended for those studying sociology, ethics, philosophy, and history, and will be available free to schools. While schools have used games for years, it's pretty neat for a game to get so formally recognised - and such a non-edutainment game.
]]>Five years after launching This War Of Mine, developers 11 Bit Studios today gave the grim besieged survival sim a honking great free update they're calling the Final Cut. It adds new locations and a new scenario to the base game, it retouches old locations, and it polishes a few technical bits and pieces, all for free. Tidy.
]]>Epic Games started out giving away one free game per fortnight to lure people into their new Store. Then they moved to weekly giveaways. Now, this week, they have two games free for keepsies. I don't know where this acceleration of freebies ends, but I can tell you that you have seven days to grab This War Of Mine and Moonlighter.
]]>Today's Humble Caffeine Bundle is chock full of very good games for very little money, but a little hard to categorise. United under the banner of Caffeine - a "social broadcasting platform for gaming", not the life-giving stimulant - there's eight games here, each one representing a wildly different genre. We've got the Metroidy Headlander, platform roguelike Gonner, party game tank shooter Treadnauts, a historical novel adaptation and even a ninja stealth sim all up in here. There's only (in my opinion) one game that's not immediately worth your attention. See the full lineup and trailers below.
]]>They say truth is the first casualty of war, which makes This War Of Mine's latest expansion - The Last Broadcast - equivalent to playing on hard mode. Not only do you have to cope with the usual dangers of keeping a band of civilians alive and safe through a brutal, messy war, but this expansion has players riding the razor's edge - uncovering and reporting the truth through it all. It's the second of 11 Bit's three season pass scenarios, and introduces new systems, characters, locations and dilemmas to the uncompromising survival scenario. A trailer reportedly lies below.
]]>Frostpunk has quite a fandom here at RPS. Even if the game hadn't been good, we would still have given it coverage because we enjoy going Full Mr. Freeze with headlines like "Frostpunk ventures out into the cold" and my personal favorite "There's snow hope in this new Frostpunk trailer" which I'm borderline mad about. Look, I'd never do anything like that in my headlines. Luckily, we don't have to keep talking about wordplay, because Frostpunk's tremendous sales out of the gate mean post-release content isn't stuck in a freeze.
Please don't go.
]]>Hello from the Game Developer’s Conference, where every building comes with a blizzard-spewing air conditioner. I’ve just been to see Frostpunk, the societal survival game set in a pseudo-Victorian hellwinter, from the developers of This War of Mine. The frosty management game will support modding, they say, and there are plans for “additional scenarios”. That means both smaller, free updates and bigger packs of paid DLC. Although mod support “probably won’t be from day one”. And the developers haven’t decided what these later scenarios will contain.
]]>If you like your emotional gut-punches delivered via authored narratives rather than emergent stories, then I've got some great news. This War of Mine is stepping away from the wartime survivalist Sims strategy that makes up the the main game, and now wants to tell you about how miserable the lives of specific people are in more detail. "Father's Promise" is out today, and it's the first entry in the "Stories" DLC series that will tell a different story with each episode.
If that tickles your tear ducts (in a good way, I'm presuming), you can check out the trailer below.
]]>Frostpunk [official site] sounds like a musical subgenre invented on the hoof by a jolly Kerrang reporter but it’s not. It’s an upcoming videogame invented by the makers of the very un-jolly (but not bad) This War of Mine. It's set in a freezing future where earth is caught in a global whiteout and you have to manage a circular city that’s growing around a generator – your people’s principle source of warmth and energy. All the while tough decisions have to be made, like: "Graham is dead. Should we eat Graham?"
Here, there’s a new vid to show you.
]]>In the first week, we put the children to work. They weren't forced into dangerous jobs, so we told ourselves, but when you're living on the brink of extinction, what work is truly safe? One afternoon, a man collecting coal complained of numbness in his arm. Frostbite had taken hold. We could have left him to die but instead we opted for an experimental treatment.
He lost the arm and he's no longer capable of contributing to our dying society. One more mouth to feed with no body of work beneath it. What should we do?
Frostpunk [official site] is a city-building survival sim from the studio that brought us This War of Mine and it is beautifully bleak.
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>As you might have heard, the folks who put together the civilian survival management of This War of Mine are working on a chilly follow-up called Frostpunk [official site]. It’s set in a permanently wintry world where humans cling to life thanks to steam-powered machinery. We haven’t been able to discover much about it (and that will still be the case by the end of this post) but developers 11 Bit have at least graced us with a new trailer, offering a glimpse of where humanity has made its last stand against the nippiness.
]]>This War of Mine [official site] developers 11 Bit Studios recently announced their next game, Frostpunk, but they weren't quite done with This War. To celebrate the Sims-y survival game's impending birthday (it's Monday), they've launched a new free content update. Expect a new ending, new NPCs, and more as your rag-tag group of civilians try to survive in the warzone. That's a cheery little end to this laff riot of a week.
]]>This War of Mine developers 11 Bit Studios are returning with another grim survival scenario to ponder how much we're willing to give up our humanity etc. This War of Mine's modern-day-ish setting was inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo, with regular people trying to get by in a war-torn city, but 11 Bit are going a bit more unreal with their next. Today they announced Frostpunk [official site], set in a frozen world with steam-powered technology. I'll tell you one thing about morality in this hard world: I'll devour the first nobber I see wearing a top hat with goggles.
]]>This War of Mine's [official site] take on resource gathering and survival leans heavily on its setting - a besieged city caught up in the horrors of a modern war - and The Little Ones expansion, now available on PC, Mac and Linux, turns the screw by adding new playable characters and NPCs. They're the titular little ones. Children. You might start the game as a parent, or find children hiding from danger, alone, or have them approach your shelter looking for safety and security. Once you've taken them in, you'll not only have to protect them from harm, you'll have to make an effort to understand the world through their eyes.
]]>This War Of Mine [official site] is a sobering experience. Like most of us, I've never been involved in an actual war, thus any knowledge I have regarding the atrocities of conflict has been accrued from modern media. This War Of Mine may be a fictional, video game take on these realities, but its Sims'-esque slant on war zone resource management delivers something which, at the very least, feels real from a position of relative ignorance.
Update 1.4, named "New Beginning", adds Steam Workshop support, meaning players can now share the scenarios they invent in the game's editor suite.
]]>Winners have won, partiers have partied, and another year's Independent Game Festival awards are done. It was a less predictable list of finalists this year than in recent times, and in turn the winners weren't ones you could spot a mile off or who'd already won in years past. I'm happy about that, though it does leave me in the mildly awkward situation of not having played most of the winners yet.
Sci-fi exploration title Outer Wilds (which we've only ever mentioned here, more fool us) proved to be the festival darling of 2015, taking home both the Grand Prize and the Excellence In Design award. while This War Of Mine also wandered off with a gong. The full list is below, you'll be unsurprised to hear.
]]>Finalists for the 2015 Independent Games Festival awards have been announced, and it's a good-lookin' list full of many-splendoured things. Croteam's The Talos Principle, Klei's Invisible Inc and 11 Bit's This War Of Mine are the most recurrent PC games (that we're all able to play already) in the list, but there are quite a few other splendid titles you might have seen on RPS over the last few months in there too. A whole bunch I really need to check out myself, too. I hear particularly good things about Grand Prize finalist Outer Wilds, which is perhaps the most outsiderish contender in there. Anyway: everything in the running is below. What do you make of the line-up this year?
]]>There are several ways conflict-from-the-civilian-perspective effort This War Of Mine could have gone. Maudlin, shoegazing dialogue piece; inappropriate And One Shall Rise hero saga; icy-hearted death toll calculator like Plague Inc or DEFCON. What I didn't expect was The Sims During Wartime.
]]>What a left turn This War of Mine is. 11 bit studios previously made the markedly un-serious Anomaly games, festivals of tactical explosions, air-strikes and all the other hoo-rah wargasms we're generally exposed to. A sombre survival game exploring the vulnerability of civilians trapped in warzones wasn't where I would have pegged them to go next.
These twists on the formula are where I'm finding my interest in survival games peaking. As Pip pointed out in her interview with senior writer Pawel Miechowski, it's taking what zombies have long been a metaphor for and going literal. Now 11 bit have announced we'll get to be war-torn on November 14th and thrown a trailer into the mix as well.
]]>"An experience of war seen from an entirely new angle". That's how 11 Bit Studios are pitching This War Of Mine. The new angle they're referring to is the fact that, instead of being an action-packed military shooter, their warzone is a city under siege and requires you to keep a band of civilians alive. Its desire not to glorify war reminds me of Ubisoft's recent Valiant Hearts but in terms of how the game works mechanically it's closer to Zafehouse Diaries – a zombie survival game with a diary storytelling element. I spoke to the game's senior writer to learn more.
]]>This War Of Mine is a game set in the ruins of a wartorn city. Rather than playing a soldier on either side of the conflict, as is traditional in the world of games, players control a group of civilians who are trying to survive in a place where the essentials of life are thin on the ground. The game doesn't match its mechanics to its theme as smoothly and powerfully as Papers, Please, instead opting to tread unfamiliar ground in familiar shoes. It's a resource management game, in which survivors craft, explore and scavenge to survive. I played through the first few days and discovered the irony of it all.
]]>RPS is at GDC! It's a match made in heaven because both of our acronyms are three letters long. Each day of the conference is jam-packed with formidable amounts of intrigue - far more than any single person could take in on their own without suffering catastrophic brain combustion. And so, I have elected to gather cadres of knowledgeable humans each day this week to discuss the best, most important goings-on. Expect very special guests shouting over each other and probably using words like "cultural zeitgeist" and "doodieface." Today, somewhat belated and also very bad at staying on topic: John, Cara, Hayden of PCWorld/my floor infamy, and myself all gathered on John's hotel bed for an uncomfortably salacious chat about This War Of Mine, The Stanley Parable's emotional aftermath, SoundSelf, weeping American eagles, hedonism, and Cara's refusal to stop posting PORNOGRAPHY on our virgin website that's exclusively for children.
]]>"In war, not everyone is a soldier." That's This War of Mine's tagline, and while you wouldn't know it from playing videogames, it's definitely true. 11 Bit Studios is designing a game around that idea, with a core focus not on mowing down every gun-toting, evil-mustache-twirling ultra-terrorist in your way but instead on simple survival. You control a group of a civilians in a wartorn town, and the rest, well, that's up to you.
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