Whether that hostility takes the form of extreme weather, horrid beasts, or the accumulation of noxious waste gases in an asteroid colony, is entirely dependent on your personal tastes. But we've chosen a set which, at their very hearts, feel like they're about keeping yourself - or others - alive in the face of a hostile universe. That's obviously a pretty key concept to a lot of PC games, admittedly. There are games on this list, in fact, which have barely anything in common with each other, beyond the fact that the player must, y'know, survive. It's worth noting that we're being pretty broad with our definition of 'survival', here, as we wanted to offer something slightly different from a big list of first person wilderness games where a) you get hungry and b) stuff clips through walls all the time. It's not exhaustive, but it'll certainly give you enough fishing, crafting and wolf-avoiding to keep you busy for a good while. How, then, can you pick out the gems from this big pile of survival game detritus? Easy we've made a list of 24 of the best. More still were overlooked for high levels of jank in their early days, but have since grown into beautiful things thanks to regular updates. A good few of them were brilliant many, many more were not.

For a while, back in the late 2010s, you couldn't seem to move online, for the sheer number of early access survival games lying around the place.