The Forest

Nails the two biggest things that most survival games fumble: Having a compelling end goal and packing enough variety to keep things interesting. Its systems lead to cool emergent gameplay, but there's also a nice helping of curated events slipped into the mix. I also love the horror components and the sense of exploration, although it began feeling like searching for a needle in a haystack when there was a single item somewhere on the giant map that I needed to progress

Light enough on the survival elements for me to not find it tedious, and some enemy designs that tick all my boxes.

I thought it was a survival game. Then I found out it's an alien adventure game.

This solved the issue I had with other survival games (toxic communities) by... just having AI and allowing co-op. I gave up on thinking online survival games would be a fun experiment, so it's nice to see a game that has legitimately awesome AI. Seriously, it's fantastic. The building is good but the menus need work. They don't tell their story in a way I LOVE, but it's decent and it's not really why I played the game anyway. While survival games aren't my jam, this is one of the best.

A survival base building game with a unique spooky kind of tribal feel. Hard to explain.