Not every new survival game has to be the next Valheim

Valheim, developer Iron Gate's co-op survival game, was a breakout indie hit in 2021. It landed amid the global pandemic, in a strange moment in time where we were stuck indoors, some of us feeling slightly isolated and searching for ways to connect with the outside world, and a lot of us were playing videogames. It provided whimsy, goofiness, challenge, and togetherness that was so sought after at the time. Starting out in Viking purgatory, and in one of the easier biomes, The Meadows, Valheim managed to marry up the uneasiness and disconcertion of surviving your first day with all the excitement of the possibilities afforded by this dangerous world. It was also very pretty, and even now, years later, I always think of Valheim when I see a silver birch tree.

Valheim's charm comes in the form of giant, lumbering blue trolls and irritating goblin-creatures called greylings that throw stones at you when you're busy trying to do anything useful. Whatever your preferred survival game experience, there's something here for you. Want to relax back at camp and build great halls for Viking feasts? Want to create a farm and grow veggies and raise a family of boars that love you? Want to forge a spiked mace and bash a skeleton on the head? The procedurally generated map also adds a layer of mystery to exploration that can lead to fun surprises and early deaths, as you unknowingly wander into danger.

There is just enough peril in the enemies and progression, in the threat of losing your gear and struggling to get it back, at hearing a wolf for the first time and glancing around the white hilltops, thinking 'that mound of snow definitely just moved', and then at finally setting sail after crafting a boat, only for a leviathan to attack out of nowhere.

That sense of striking out into the unknown also comes in the shape of Valheim's bosses, all unique and belonging to their specific biomes, and the camaraderie of stocking up on items and weapons before setting out to defeat them. Bosses are also a clever way to pace the game, as you can choose to summon each one to progress the materials you then use to forge better gear.

I can spend a long time talking about how great Valheim is. It's so great, in fact, that it's set a standard of what we should expect from the genre going forward. With the success of Valheim came a surge of survival games, some trying to replicate the formula, others trying to carve their own path, while still glancing at Iron Gate's blueprint. Of course, each game takes inspiration from somewhere; it's easy to see Valheim's Zelda influences, after all. But it's hard to miss how many new survival games pitch themselves as the next Valheim, or a mashup of Valheim and some other popular game, without ever fulfilling that expectation. It's made me reflect on all the survival games I love, why I love them, and why I want the next big survival game not to be another Valheim, but something I've never played before.

I recently dipped into 7 Days to Die, having managed to avoid any spoilers for 12 years (I have no idea how), and I've never experienced anything as truly nerve-wracking as my first Blood Moon. My group didn't know what to expect, how to prepare, or what was even going to happen, but as the game's name suggests, you have seven days until something bad goes down.

The first Blood Moon was thrilling, huddled in our makeshift fort, the floor scattered with spikes and mines, our guns pointing towards the hills framed by a mottled pink sky, and the screams of zombies on the horizon that would eventually turn into our own. It provided the same mystery as encountering your first cannibal in The Forest, as you leave the plane wreckage and cast your torch across the trees, and the same disbelief in Don't Starve Together that death can come so quickly after hours and hours of preparation. These types of survival games are also hard, and your long-term survival isn't a given.

On the more relaxing end of the genre's spectrum are gems like Raft, where you begin the game on a plank of wood and must catch passing flotsam to slowly build up your raft, adding features like sails, navigation, and farms, until you're sailing happily between islands, exploring the mysteries of the sea. It has that same bright, cartoonish appeal as Valheim or even Palworld.

Another recent survival hit is Jagex's Runescape Dragonwilds, which puts a magic-heavy spin on the genre. Still, it's hard not to feel like I haven't played this game before, and in the end, it failed to offer many compelling reasons to stick around once I'd built my admittedly cool-looking house.

There are so many subgenres of survival games, too. V Rising is a personal favorite that sees you dashing between the shade to avoid burning to death in the sun, or single-player ventures like The Long Dark, where I've spent many lonely hours trudging across its bleak, snowy landscape. Most attempt to offer at least one theoretically novel twist, with some upping the horror, others being more relaxing, and even the likes of Enshrouded, which I didn't enjoy as much, boasting the best base building I've ever experienced in a survival game.

But much like the first time I landed in Viking purgatory, the possibilities seem endless for where survival games could go next, so why are we seeing so much of the same, and why are they being compared to Valheim? As long as I get to pick up a stone and twig to make an axe (you can't take away that staple), I don't want the next survival game I play to be like Valheim, because when I think about the games in the genre that I've loved over the years, they all have one thing in common: the unknown.