Holiday in the wastelands

When you aren’t dying instantly, these post-apocalyptic worlds are quite cushy.

Survival games are a genre of which there are not a great many console games. They largely appear to be mini-games on Steam, or ancient PC games for people who love a challenge. Albeit one that involves sitting safely behind a keyboard with a cup of something brown and tasty. By far the most famous survival game is Fallout 3 and there’s a very good reason for this; Fallout 3 is very, very easy, where most survival games – including the Fallout series before Bethesda got hold of it – are exceptionally tough.

As the name suggests, survival games are about not dying. You try to find food, while trying not to be food yourself. It’s incredibly easy to poison yourself, drown, fall down a ditch, walk into a trap or a sharp set of teeth. In times when video games are adjusted to be less punishing and more optionally challenging, Fallout 3 was the first survival game (that I know of) to have the survival elements there, but the risk of death reasonably low.

Stealth: In the eye of the beholder

Stealth games have improved a lot in recent years, favouring less tactical step-by-step avoidance of passing human drones and more inventive means of averting detection using the map design. Later incarnations removed the necessity of lurking in the shadows and also lessened its effectiveness somewhat; improvements in AI also made the patterns of movement more difficult to spot and predict. Yet there are still odd details left unchecked.