Two new survival video games show that the genre is thriving

You’ve responded to an advert seeking crew for a dangerous naval expedition. A flyer for the polar voyage promised months of darkness, low wages and a slim chance of safe return. From the very start of the game The Pale Beyond, it’s clear that you’ll be lucky even to survive.

There aren’t many games where success isn’t at least somewhat contingent on survival: totalling your car or taking an arrow to the knee tends to impact negatively on quests, albeit temporarily. What generally sets apart survival games is the lack of objectives beyond not dying; the fun is in the challenge of staying alive, rather than what you achieve with that vitality.

It can be a difficult genre to define, as evidenced by the release this month of two titles at rather different ends of the spectrum: the icy, dialogue-driven The Pale Beyond, and the open-world, immersively first-person Sons of the Forest. Both, however, are underpinned by the kind of unfamiliar surroundings and constant jeopardy that make adapting to your situation the key to success.

Of the two, Sons of the Forest errs more towards the traditional tropes of the genre. You’re on the trail of a missing billionaire when your helicopter crashes off the coast of a remote island. The welcoming party you wake up to is a beach strewn with corpses impaled on sticks. In single-player mode, you’re joined by Kelvin, an AI companion who has clearly taken a blow to the head — you can only communicate by thrusting paper notes at him. In multiplayer mode, he can be accompanied by as many as seven of your actual friends. Either way, you’ll be grateful for the company when night falls and you start wandering the island’s cannibal-infested forests.

Whether through deliberate minimalism or its “early access” state, the game doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding. Your trusty Improvised Survival Structures Handbook shows you how resources come together to form cabins, fires and quaint island furniture (skulls are very in this season), and your GPS will point you approximately towards points of interest. Beyond that, you’ll need to take the initiative. Trees are there to be chopped, plants harvested and wildlife hunted, if you want to survive.

It’s impressively overwhelming at first, if a little rough around the edges: load times can be punishing, Kelvin makes for a rather dopey companion — head trauma notwithstanding — and the story and the base-building can feel as if they’re dragging you in slightly different directions. Unlike my beachfront construction attempts, though, Sons of the Forest has solid foundations, including a clever death sequence: die once at the hands of the locals and you’ll be imprisoned in one of their camps. Die a second time and it’s game over.

The Pale Beyond is less graphic, but no less brutal. You play as Robin Shaw, a sailor on the trail of The Viscount, a government ship gone missing after attempting to locate the magnetic south pole of a familiar but not-quite-terrestrial world. It’s no great spoiler to say that things don’t exactly go to plan, and you soon find yourself trapped in the ice with 35 weeks to survive before rescue.

What follows is a “narrative survival hybrid”, according to developer Thomas Hislop. Morale must be balanced with dwindling fuel and food, with dire consequences should you neglect either. And when crew members come to you with requests — some sensible, some selfish, some utterly futile — you must decide at what point pragmatism takes priority over intrigue or indulgence. “Your story matters, but not to the ice,” says Hislop.

As resources run out, impossible questions pile up: do you lie to your crew to raise morale, or face the hard truths that will better prepare you for hardships? Do you act impartially, tending to those who need it most, or prioritise those who will support you as captain? Do you even begin to sacrifice crew to reduce the number of mouths to feed? My choices, evidently, are not enough to stave off mutiny, and my first attempt ends after 17 frostbitten weeks. It is a punishing and surprisingly affecting narrative, let down only by the odd visual glitch.

Further attempts to push the boundaries of the genre will come later this year. Nightingale’s scavenging and base-building may feel familiar, but the transdimensional “gaslamp fantasy” universe it takes place in sounds anything but. Pacific Drive, meanwhile, is attempting to make good on its promise of a “first-person driving survival game” as you cruise through an anomaly-prone corner of the Pacific Northwest. If this crop of titles is anything to go by, the genre isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving.

‘The Pale Beyond’ is available now on PC. ‘Sons of the Forest’ is available in Early Access on PC