Best Open-World Games That Let You Hunt To Survive

Hunting for food makes open-world games much more engaging because it’s essential for survival. Unlike finding items in chests, food in these games is alive – it runs, hides, and can even defend itself. Players need to be strategic, carefully track animals, and accept that they won’t always succeed on their first try just to get a meal.

These games are all about stealth and strategy. You’ll need to carefully move through environments, listen for enemies, and hope the wind doesn’t give you away. It’s a tense experience that relies on your skill, a little bit of luck, and a lot of patience. If you enjoy the rewarding feeling of successfully tracking and ‘catching’ something after a challenging hunt, you’ll likely love these open-world adventures.

The Long Dark

A Frozen Wilderness Where Every Calorie Counts

In The Long Dark, the challenge isn’t monsters – it’s surviving the harsh Canadian wilderness. Players must contend with the cold, hunger, and wildlife as they search for food and resources. You can gather berries and find canned goods, but to truly survive, you’ll need to hunt animals like deer, rabbits, and even wolves for food and materials. The game focuses on the primal need to hunt, conserve resources, and know when to seek shelter, making you feel like you’re truly living as an animal.

A really unique aspect of hunting in The Long Dark is that wolves and other wildlife can follow your scent and the sounds you make. This means avoiding detection while you hunt is just as crucial as actually finding prey, making survival much more difficult.

Green Hell

A Brutal First-Person Survival Experience Set Deep In The Amazon Rainforest

In Green Hell, you’re dropped into the dangerous Amazon rainforest and must fight to survive. This means finding food, maintaining your health, and protecting yourself from the many threats around you. You’ll need to hunt animals for food and materials, collect plants and insects, and craft tools from bones and hides.

As a big fan of Green Hell, I’ve learned that getting food isn’t just about survival, it’s about how you hunt. Honestly, it’s way safer to build a blowpipe, set some snares, or lure animals with bait than to just rush in! The game really connects hunting to your overall health – a bad fight or messy butchering can lead to infections, and eating raw food can make you sick or weaken your defenses. It’s cool how your mental state is affected too; if you don’t eat enough, you start to feel it in the game – your actions become weaker and your aim gets worse. The Hunter Challenge perfectly shows this, giving you specific hunting goals but putting you on a timer, so you have to think strategically about how you get your food.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Realistic Tracking And Hunting Support Food, Crafting, And Camp Needs

In Red Dead Redemption 2, hunting is essential for survival as an outlaw. The game features a detailed wildlife system with over 200 animal species. The quality of an animal’s pelt—and its value for selling or crafting—depends on how cleanly the player kills it. A precise shot with a good weapon will yield a valuable pelt, while a bad shot or the wrong weapon can completely ruin it.

Arthur’s “Eagle Eye” ability helps him find animals by highlighting tracks, scat, and broken foliage, essentially revealing where they’ve been. After a successful hunt, players can skin the animal, store the meat and hide on their horse, and then choose to cook it, sell it, or contribute it to the Van der Linde gang’s camp. The camp is where you really see the benefits of hunting. Providing the gang with meat and animal hides keeps everyone fed and allows for improvements to supplies, ammunition, and the camp itself. Pearson, who cooks and crafts for the gang, can even use certain hides to make bigger satchels or warmer clothing for Arthur. This means hunting isn’t just about getting food—it’s directly linked to improving Arthur’s abilities and helping the gang survive.

ARK: Survival Evolved

Hunt, Craft, And Tame Dinosaurs to Survive

Unlike most games where you run from dinosaurs, ARK: Survival Evolved lets you tame and ride them. You begin with almost nothing and have to collect resources, hunt, and build shelter. Hunting isn’t just about finding food in ARK; it’s how you get materials, tame creatures, and gain strength. To survive, you’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst, and body temperature, all while facing dangerous animals, harsh environments, and, in online play, other players.

At the beginning of the game, hunting is essential for survival. Players use basic weapons to take down small dinosaurs like dodos to get food and resources. However, players quickly discover that not all creatures need to be killed. Some dinosaurs are much more valuable as allies – they can be tamed to become companions, defenders, or even help with tasks.

Rust

Harsh Multiplayer Survival Where Hunger, Wildlife, And Other Players Can End You

In Rust, players don’t truly own anything. Whether it’s food, weapons, or even the structures they build, everything is temporary. This is what makes the game so compelling. Rust isn’t primarily about surviving the elements; it’s about surviving other players.

Rust makes even simple tasks like hunting more challenging than just finding food. Nearly everything you do carries some level of danger, including killing animals. Making noise while hunting – like firing a weapon – can attract unwanted attention from other players who might be looking for the same resources or hoping to steal your supplies. Even once you’ve established a secure base and gotten good weapons, you still need to hunt. Some players focus on hunting animals to survive, while others prey on each other for resources and loot.

Far Cry Primal

Savage Stone Age Hunting And Tribal Warfare

Released in 2016, Far Cry Primal was a fresh direction for the Far Cry series, known for its modern weaponry and action. This game went back to basics, removing guns, cars, and even radios. It’s one of the few games that truly immerses players in the Stone Age, relying solely on spears, fire, and the instinct to survive. Everything in Far Cry Primal – from clothes and weapons to healing items – is crafted using resources gathered from hunting and foraging. Because tools break and supplies dwindle, players are constantly rebuilding and replenishing their resources through the natural world around them.

One of the coolest things about this survival game is you can actually tame beasts! It unlocks about halfway through the story, and suddenly I went from trying to survive the wilderness to basically ruling it. I mean, I went from being hunted to having my own pack of predators following me around, which is seriously awesome. Forget going it alone – now I’ve got a little army of fangs and claws at my back!

The Forest

Survival Horror In A Cannibal-Infested Wilderness

Hunting in The Forest is useful for survival, but it also creates risk. Killing animals can draw the attention of dangerous cannibals, and certain hunting techniques are particularly risky. As you venture further, you’ll discover caves inhabited by disturbing mutants and evidence of those who came before. The world gradually reveals itself to be more than just a wild landscape – it’s connected to a much darker, potentially terrifying mystery.

Even in this dangerous world, hunting is central to survival. Everything players do – making weapons, finding food, or fighting off enemies – relies on the skills they gain from hunting, such as stealth and tracking. These abilities are essential for staying alive and discovering the story’s secrets.

2025-11-25 08:35