Survival Games You Can Play for 100+ Hours

Many survival games these days are incredibly challenging, requiring hundreds of hours to make significant progress. This slow pace is intentional, designed to keep players engaged for weeks or even months. Typically, these games place you in a harsh and dangerous world where you’ll face threats like wild creatures, starvation, thirst, and hostile enemies – and they don’t care about your level of readiness.

These games aren’t just about fighting to stay alive; players also need to deal with things like harsh weather. If you enjoy exploring and immersing yourself in a game world, even with dangers around, you’ll likely really enjoy these survival games.

The completion times listed here come from HowLongToBeat, so your actual playtime may vary.

Conan Exiles

Completionist Time: 129 Hours

Brutal fantasy land where players build shelters, tame thralls, and survive harsh climates.
Exploration, crafting, and combat drive long playtime.

In Conan Exiles, players face a challenging survival experience in a dangerous world. You start as an exile, freed by Conan, with almost nothing. To stay alive, you’ll need to collect materials, defend yourself from enemies, and build shelter, clothing, and tools to cope with the elements and your basic needs like hunger and thirst.

Okay, so in Conan Exiles, you really have to watch your basic needs – you’re constantly dealing with hunger, thirst, and the weather, and they all impact how well you do. But the coolest thing is the freedom – you can basically play how you want. I can spend hours building a huge base, exploring the dangerous world, learning all the crafting recipes, or just fighting really tough enemies. If you want to really see everything the Exiled Lands has to offer and survive, be prepared to put in some serious time – I’m talking around 129 hours, at least!

7 Days to Die

Completionist Time: 326 Hours

A zombie survival sandbox focused on scavenging, crafting, and surviving increasingly deadly hordes.
Large map with deep progression systems and base building.

7 Days to Die is a game focused on surviving a zombie apocalypse through crafting, gathering resources, exploring the world, and fighting off the undead. Simply killing zombies isn’t enough – you also need to find food, water, tools, and weapons to stay alive. A key feature of the game is the Blood Moon, which happens roughly every seven days. During a Blood Moon, massive hordes of zombies attack, forcing players to build strong bases or create smart defenses. If you’re not ready, these nights can be incredibly difficult.

In 7 Days to Die, getting stronger involves exploring the world, gaining experience, and learning new skills. You improve by finding magazines and books – either by looting or trading – which unlock better crafting recipes and allow you to create higher-quality items. While basic items are available early on, making advanced weapons, vehicles, and top-tier gear requires finding specific magazines and spending points on skill upgrades.

Rust

Completionist Time: 65 – 188 Hours

A multiplayer survival game where other players are the biggest threat, not the environment.
Finishing everything requires mastering complex systems.

Rust is a challenging multiplayer survival game where players set their own objectives. You can focus on staying alive, building a base, crafting items, or engaging in player-versus-player combat. Unlike many games, Rust doesn’t have a set ending or a defined way to ‘win,’ so how long you play depends entirely on your goals. However, most players will likely spend around 200 hours, or even more, mastering this demanding open-world experience.

Okay, so this game drops you right in – totally unprepared! You start on a beach with literally nothing but a rock and a torch. From there, it’s all about scrambling to find wood, stone, and everything else you need to craft better tools and build a base. Honestly, the real danger isn’t the environment, it’s other players. Combat and raiding are a huge part of the game, so you always have to be on your guard.

ARK: Survival Evolved

Completionist Time: 246 – 301 Hours

Island full of dinosaurs that players can tame, ride, and use for battle or resource gathering.
Completionists must travel across different maps to defeat powerful bosses and unlock the Ascension.

ARK: Survival Evolved is well-known for its detailed dinosaur taming system, which can take a significant amount of time. To tame a dinosaur, players usually have to first knock it out, then repeatedly feed it its favorite foods until it becomes friendly. Taming bigger or more unusual dinosaurs takes even longer, requiring a considerable time commitment.

The game features numerous caves filled with rare and valuable artifacts. You’ll need to collect specific artifacts to summon powerful bosses at special locations called obelisks – massive structures that act as gateways to boss battles. Between exploring, taming dinosaurs, and engaging in lengthy fights, completing ARK: Survival Evolved can take upwards of 300 hours.

Valheim

Completionist Time: 145 Hours

Norse-inspired survival game focused on exploration, crafting, and boss-driven progression.
Vast procedural worlds and dangerous biomes slow progress and reward careful planning.

Valheim doesn’t have a typical ending or set storyline, which explains why players spend different amounts of time playing. Instead of following a campaign, you progress by defeating bosses that are unique to each area of the game. Each boss fight requires careful planning, exploring the world, and creating better equipment. Just finding the items needed to summon a boss can take a long time, as they’re often hidden in challenging dungeons or scattered throughout the vast, randomly generated world.

Players begin their journey in the peaceful Meadows and slowly venture into more challenging areas like the Black Forest, Swamps, Mountains, Plains, and Mistlands. Each new area offers different resources and tougher enemies, meaning players need to prepare carefully and equip themselves with the right gear – and it all takes a significant amount of time.

The Long Dark

Completionist Time: 228 Hours

Realistic survival experience set in a frozen wilderness.
Long-term survival depends on managing hunger, cold, wildlife threats, and limited supplies across large regions.

The Long Dark is a peaceful survival game set in the harsh, frozen landscape of Canada. Forget zombies – your biggest threats are the cold and wildlife. Many players wonder why it takes so long to progress, and that’s because simply surviving and exploring the entire world is a lengthy process. In fact, fully mapping every location in the game is required to earn the ‘Faithful Cartographer’ achievement.

Creating maps in The Long Dark is a time-consuming process. Players must physically go outside and draw each location with charcoal. Bad weather adds to the challenge, as blizzards force you to seek shelter and wait it out – sometimes for an entire day. The game emphasizes survival through repetitive, daily tasks like collecting water, mending clothes, and hunting. Ultimately, The Long Dark demands a lot of patience from its players.

Project Zomboid

Completionist Time: 433 Hours

Huge map with permanent death system makes surviving even a few in-game months a major achievement.
Deep zombie survival simulator.

Project Zomboid is a challenging zombie survival game where you’ll need to scavenge for supplies, build things, grow crops, and fight off the undead. The game features a massive map based on real towns in Kentucky, filled with buildings to explore. Managing all the items you find and keeping everything organized can be quite time-consuming.

A major challenge in Project Zomboid is permadeath – if your character dies, that’s it. A scratch can lead to infection, but a bite is instantly fatal. When a character dies, you lose all their progress and have to start over as a brand new survivor. The goal of the game is usually to survive for a long time, ideally seeing all four seasons pass. Winter is especially difficult because farming becomes impossible and fishing is tough. Simply lasting that long without a single deadly mistake is a huge accomplishment.

Core Keeper

Completionist Time: 134 Hours

Large cave networks, crafting progression, and boss encounters encourage long exploration.
A top-down survival game filled with monsters and hidden biomes underground.

Core Keeper is an underground adventure game where you start in a cave and must dig your way to uncover its secrets. It’s a lengthy game – often taking over 100 hours to complete – because it combines mining, building, and combat. You’ll spend a lot of time digging through the environment to discover new areas, such as clay caves and stone ruins.

The game lets you build and automate factories, creating elaborate setups with drills and conveyor belts to mine resources on their own. Setting up these automated systems, along with growing rare crops, can be quite time-consuming. You can also find challenging optional bosses hidden throughout the world, like Azeos the Sky Titan and Omoroth the Sea Titan, but you’ll need to gather specific items to summon and fight them. It’s this mix of intense boss battles, rewarding mining, and building complex factories that keeps players engaged for hours.

RimWorld

Completionist Time: 312 Hours

Instead of one person, players crash-landed survivors trying to build a ship and leave a dangerous planet.
The story is controlled by an AI that creates random events like sickness, pirate raids, or weather disasters that players must overcome.

RimWorld is a sci-fi game where you build and manage a colony of people who have crash-landed on a planet. Your ultimate goal is to build a spaceship and escape, but the game constantly challenges you with unexpected events. An AI called the Storyteller throws problems your way – like pirate attacks, extreme weather, or even aggressive animals – which forces you to deal with crises instead of focusing on building your ship.

Building the ship requires extensive research. Establishing the colony demands significant resources, including steel and various parts. Players will need to trade with other settlements and mine underground to gather everything. It’s also crucial to maintain the colonists’ well-being; unhappy colonists can suffer breakdowns and damage the base.

Kenshi

Completionist Time: 273 Hours

This is a sandbox where players are not heroes and can choose to be a trader, a thief, or a warlord in a giant desert world.
Deal with different factions and harsh weather.

Kenshi is an open-world RPG that doesn’t follow a set storyline, but it’s incredibly engaging – players often spend almost 300 hours playing it. At first, you’ll likely spend a lot of time simply trying to survive, and getting beaten up actually makes your character stronger. It takes a significant amount of time and effort to improve your combat skills enough to even defeat a basic enemy.

In Kenshi, the ultimate goal isn’t just about achieving personal success—it’s about fundamentally changing the game world. Players can establish and grow their own city, assemble a large army, and even take on powerful factions like the Holy Nation or the United Cities in war. Building up a skilled and well-equipped army requires a significant time investment, and because the game offers so much freedom, players can easily spend hundreds of hours managing their characters and exploring the world without feeling like they’re nearing the end.

2025-12-27 11:37