You never know how scary the night is until you’re standing in the middle of a dark field, alone, with nothing but the howling of the wind and the faint sound of gun shots as your companion.
That’s how I spent my first few nights on Rust Island.
It took a long time for me and my companion to coordinate a meeting to end our mutual lonely fear. Relaying to one another landmarks in the area and calling out beings in the night (“Is that your torch?” “No.” “OH GOD.”) was our only means of navigation in this unforgiving world. With monsters and animals roaming the land, whose only goal was self-preservation, we thought other humans, other players, would be welcoming.
As it turns out, on Rust Island, the humans are no different from the animals. Many nights, my companion “Fish” (a close friend, Oscar, who often traversed the scary expanse of multiplayer gaming with me) and I would spend a good five minutes trying to outrun a player with a gun, with our rudimentary rocks as our only defense.
Safety was never on our side.
Even after we established a base in the remains of a wooden fortress in the mountains. Even after we gained enough materials to make our own guns. Even after we killed another in a bout of self-preservation.
There was no safety on Rust Island.
I recall the morning of what would prove to be our last day together. We were sitting in our little shack, feeling more confident than ever about our set-up. Fish and I had been completely “kitted out”. With a M4 in my hands and a shotgun in his, we felt pretty unstoppable. We had become the people to fear. We had power.
We went out on a scouting run. Fairly routine. We had established a solid route in a wide circle around our base which had a number of respawning supplies scattered along it. It was something we had done for the past few hours with no issue. It was when we reached the end of our route that disaster struck. In a small irradiated town, just south of our base, Fish and I were nearly done with our pass through and we were just about ready to head back home.
That’s when we heard it. The cocking of a rifle. The scattered footsteps. And then it happened.
Bullets ripped from behind me and I screamed out to Fish, who ran out from a house he had been looting. He blasted his shotgun and took out my attacker. I let out an audible sigh. “Thank go-.” And then Fish fell to the ground dead. It seems our attacker didn’t travel alone. I cursed him and fired wildly. But it wasn’t enough. Down I fell.
Just like that, everything we had amassed was gone. We had a few supplies at our base, sure. But we had gathered some of our best equipment for that run and the bandits were sure to take it. Despite our preparation, despite our work, we lost everything in one fell swoop.
The two of us sat in silence for a moment. We sighed. And then we signed off of Skype and went to bed.
Rust had beaten us.
Over the last few weeks, I have been fending off bandits, hiding in the darkness, and keeping myself alive in three different games. Rust, Don’t Starve, and Project Zomboid. Each game features fairly distinct gameplay mechanics and completely different aesthetics, but each maintains one thing in common. The underlying theme of survival. Survival in gaming is not something entirely new, as the mind instantly travels to the survival horror genre, but nothing in the past quite matches the survival trend found in gaming today.
Games like Rust, Don’t Starve, and Project Zomboid are games based almost entirely on survival alone. Most games like these toss you naked and afraid into an open world with barely any supplies and, often, little to no instruction. You are meant to find your way in a hostile world, slowly piecing together the tools at your disposal until you are a full-on survival expert. That said, death is — not surprisingly — something you want to avoid. If death doesn’t mean the end of your game, it definitely means you’ll be struggling to regain the power you held before death.
The most popular game of this type is obviously Minecraft, as it served as a pioneer for the “craft and survive” mantra. Since then, the unofficial survival genre has exploded.
It isn’t to say that a lot of the mechanics were not present in the past, as open world games like Fallout helped introduce many of the survival mechanics that helped make up these games, but it was never quite the focus.
These survival games are tension-filled, frightening journeys that offer up some of the best storytelling in gaming today. Which is interesting, because on top of offering little by way of supply and support, these games also offer the bare minimum when it comes to narrative. There are some small bits of lore and even sometimes an end-game goal, but these aren’t games with traditional missions or quests. You really are left to your own devices.
And it’s for that reason that these games create moments on their own.
I was doing alright for myself. I had a pocket full of berries, more than enough rabbit traps to keep me fed, and a decent amount of supplies planted around my home base. Compared to the early moments of my journey, when I was doing exactly what the game asked me not to do — starving, I was doing alright.
I had just come back from the plains, where I had collected beefalo manure after learning that it was necessary to make a farm. All I needed to complete my new source of food was some wood.
There was no threat of attack, so there was no way I was ready for what came.
Mid-way through chopping down one of many trees in my tree farm, I heard rustling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the trees to my left shaking and growing. Figuring it to be nothing but another level of tree growth, hoping that I had somehow grown a “mega” tree, I paid it no mind.
Not until it started to walk towards me, a face of anger now hollowed out between its branches.
I ran. Outside the make-shift stone walls of my base. He followed. I ran around the edge and popped back inside. He followed. Night was coming. I needed to act fast. I did another lap around my camp and placed some logs into the fire. This gave me enough light to do another lap around my home without venturing into the danger of the darkness. This wouldn’t do.
I had a spear. I had armor. Maybe I could take this tree beast. This was my home. No way was this tree b****** going to ruin me now.
I ran at him. Angry that he had come at such an inopportune moment, sad that I may lose my progress towards the coveted farm that I had been working towards for some time now, and fearful that this would prove to be the end of my journey.
One, two, three, four, five hits before he took a swing at me. He had taken a chunk of my health out, sure, but I felt good about having been able to hit him so much. Another five and he hit me agan. I was scraping the bottom of the health barrel, but I was certain there was no way this beast could survive another five.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Fi-.
The tree beast swung one last time and I watched as my supplies flew out from my character. He fell lifeless to the ground and my score counter came onto the screen. I watched as the tree beast wandered out of my base and placed his roots just outside of it.
I had just about accomplished the game’s main goal of not starving when the tree beast finally ended me. I was frustrated, but I felt my mind make a very clear note. “No more tree farms.”
Don’t Starve is one of my new favorites of the survival genre. With an interesting art style and a 2D riff on the Minecraft formula, it got its hooks into me fairly quickly. It also served as the inspiration of this very article. It was after the moment I detailed above that I realized just how powerful games like these had become. How these games could offer up some amazing tools for storytelling.
While the idea of crafting your own story in a game is nothing new, it’s commendable that a game populated with so little actual story can bring some of the best moments in gaming out of the player, based solely on what they can make of their own unique experience. It is these moments which make up today’s gaming landscape. Water cooler chat in today’s gaming world is sharing the latest chaotic run you had in a survival game with your friends. Sharing how a tree beast destroyed you in Don’t Starve or how you and a pal barely made it through a few hours in the world of Rust. When pushed to survive, the mind opens itself up to create these moments that are unlike anything else in gaming.
Another key to this trend is how many of these games feature randomized worlds and experiences. Through procedural generation of the actual physical game world and the randomized location of materials and enemies within that game world, every player’s experience becomes truly unique. That stands to make these moments even more impressive, as developers are not able to simply funnel players through crafted scenarios, but instead are able to rely on their brilliant worlds to cause great things like these to just… happen.
Survival games have effectively created their own (familiar but altogether new) brand of storytelling and I couldn’t be happier with it.
To finish, I leave you with another moment from my time with Project Zomboid.
Bleeding and tired, I found myself desperately running through a forest just behind a line of houses which had become overrun by zombies that left me with the bandaged scars on both of my arms. I cursed, realizing I had left a collection of food and supplies in those houses, but I pushed forward.
Weakened by my wounds, I was soon forced into walking. The supplies I carried on my back proved too heavy, and my rattled mind wasn’t accepting further exertion.
I continued down the dirt path that had formed in the middle of the forest. I took a sharp breath, noticing a small cluster of trailers just around the corner of the tree line I had been following for the last few hours. Somewhere to rest.
But just as quickly as the hope had stirred in my chest, I felt it instantly sink away. As I turned the corner, I found myself face to face with a mob of zombies. Acting fast, I made for the trailer closest to me. I made an attempt to open the back window and, to my luck, it opened with ease. I clambered into what I would soon find out was the bathroom of the small trailer and closed the window behind me. I quickly searched the drawers of the bathroom and was lucky enough to find a bed sheet, which I fashioned into a curtain which I placed over the window behind me. No zeds would see me now.
I wandered into the next room and found a still zombie standing just in front of the door. I raised my frying pan, an unexpected yet effective weapon, and quickly put an end to the threat. I didn’t have enough sheets to cover every window, but I wasn’t ready to lose my clothing just yet. I settled for placing the remaining sheet over a window that sat directly above the cot in the corner of the room. The cot welcomed my weak form, and I fell into a much-needed sleep. Through the night, the sound of zombies beating on some faraway doors haunted my dreams. Their groans had become a constant in my life and I had essentially accepted that constant when suddenly I heard glass shatter.
Woken by the new sound, I found that two clueless zombies had wandered into the trailer. It seemed the mob was ready to expand their control of the area. They hadn’t noticed me, so I raced towards the window I had covered before my rest. Without thought, I climbed through, only to find myself facing the rest of the mob. Almost as if they had planned it. As if they knew. But they couldn’t have. They are mindless.
I raised my pan and began swinging, but it was useless. They closed in and soon there was no breathing room. They surrounded me and I was gone.
Post-Script: Looking back, having written this a while back, I realize what this all really calls back to. And that’s table-top gaming. Dungeons and Dragons and RPGs of that type. Setting a group of players free onto a world with little to no supplies and free reign. It creates moments similar to the moments that D&D players call back to during a particularly intense session. What do you think? Let’s talk it out in the comments below.
