Top 5 Hardcore Survival Games

Kicking off our list with #5 is Don't Starve by Klei Entertainment. Don't be fooled by the cute looks of this top-down 2D game, it's as hardcore as they come! Don't Starve will leave you, well, starving, and kill you off mercilessly in the end, no matter how well you build up your game. You will die, restart, and die again.

Don't Starve now also comes with the much awaited multiplayer expansion Don't Starve Together, so you can experience the thrill of helplessly wandering around before dying your gruesome deaths with a friend!

 

Don't Starve [Online Game Code]
Amazon Price: $14.99 Buy Now
(price as of Jan 10, 2015) Don't Starve is crazy, endless fun, and becomes even more exciting now that you can play with friends. You will have endless memories of your survival journeys together! Really great fun.

#4: This War of Mine

#4 on our list is the merciless civil war survival simulator This War of Mine. Here's another 2D game, but this time around just one look at the art style will tell you everything you need to know about this game's hardcore rep. In this world, it's all about survival.

You have to attend to your home base, the needs of your survivors, and the safety of it all so much it can easily drive you mad. What really drives everything home about this game's difficulty is that throughout the game you constantly need to make really, really tough decisions that will often times leave you feeling genuinely sad or shocked. This is how you tell a game's made well. You will start out fresh and optimistic, with a world full of resources and possibilities. And slowly your survivors will start to get sick, tired and hurt. Your home will be ransacked, your supplies will run out. Sick or starving children will beg you for food and you either won't be able to help them, or even worse, you just straight up refuse to help them. All this, even though it's "just a game", will leave you feeling extremely helpless and sad. Strongly recommend you check out this game.

#3: Fallout New Vegas

The classic post-apocalyptic hardcore video game series Fallout comes back with a vengeance in Fallout: New Vegas. This game is an absolute classic. With a huge, dynamic and detailed open world, hundreds of missions to do, and an endless amount of free user-created mods, New Vegas is a grueling survival experience that just doesn't end.

The game's own difficulty settings, as well as user-created mods make it so that you have to constantly watch your hydration, hunger, sleep and sickness status, and take care of yourself with limited resources in the post-nuclear culture of the Mojave Desert. This is a must-play, not just for hardcore survival enthusiasts, but for everyone really, since the easier difficulty settings are also great fun to play with!

Fallout: New Vegas - Ultimate Edition
Amazon Price: $14.99 $13.79 Buy Now
(price as of Jan 10, 2015) The Ultimate Edition of Fallout: New Vegas is really just that - the best possible edition of the game, with all the extra content and the bugs filtered out, this is one for a timeless collection. I picked this edition especially since it's very reasonably priced for the amount of content you get, which is endless, due to the nature of the game's design. Take it away!

#2: DayZ

The best zombie apocalypse simulator out there

Now we're getting downright nasty. DayZ started out as a mod for the popular super-realistic military simulator Arma 2 and got so popular that the developers at Bohemia Interactive decided it deserved it's own, standalone game. And here we have the now standalone, extremely grueling, unforgiving, hardcore survival game DayZ.

In DayZ, you have to watch for your hunger, thirst and medical needs, as well as zombies and bandits that roam around. This is a multiplayer game, and while the zombies are controlled by the game's artificial intelligence, everyone else you encounter is an actual, living player. Most of them are very selfish and unrelenting, so be wary of trusting anyone blindly. In the harsh survivalist conditions of DayZ, friends can turn foe, and common enemies can bind rivals together temporarily at any moment!

#1: STALKER - Call of Pripyat with the MISERY Mod

As if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wasn't tough enough!

And here's number 1! This is it, this is the most difficult, most unforgiving, biggest and baddest game of them all. If you can play Misery well, you can adapt to and overcome any challenge in the world of hardcore gaming, I am sure of it.

What is it? Well, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is a series of very hardcore post-apocalyptic games set in the nuclear contamination zone around Chernobyl. In the game's alternate reality, the nuclear explosion that happened there created all sorts of alien happenings around the area, which is referred to as "The Zone", and people called "stalkers" started coming to this place in hopes of finding artifacts and selling them outside the zone for good prices.

The world of these games is always supremely challenging and most of all, unforgiving. The Misery mod takes that concept and brings it to its extreme, by making survival tougher than ever for even the most hardcore of players.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat, along with the MISERY mod is an absolute classic that every gaming fanatic has to have in their gaming library. It is hands down the toughest survival game I have ever played.