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Curated playlist

Survival video games

  • The Last of Us (video game)The Last of Us, a 2013 action-adventure game from Naughty Dog, ends with a man swearing to a girl that his story is true. It is not. Joel gives the oath because Ellie insists on it. Everything before that moment is a long walk toward it.…
  • Tomb Raider (2013 video game)In November 2010, Square Enix filed a trademark for a slogan, "A Survivor is Born," to promote a new Tomb Raider game. That game arrived in 2013 from the developer Crystal Dynamics, and it did not simply continue Lara Croft's story. It…
  • Shadow of the Tomb RaiderShadow of the Tomb Raider, the 2018 adventure game from Eidos-Montréal, begins with its hero doing something she was clearly told not to do. On the island of Cozumel in Mexico, Lara Croft finds a temple whose painted walls warn of a Mayan…
  • The Last of Us Part IIThe Last of Us Part II is a 2020 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It unfolds in a post-apocalyptic United States, four years after the studio's The Last of Us of 2013. Two…
  • The Last of Us Part IThe Last of Us Part I, released in 2022, rebuilt almost everything about a famous game and left its story completely alone. Naughty Dog developed it, and Sony Interactive Entertainment published it. It remakes a 2013 game in which the…
  • PUBG: BattlegroundsPUBG: Battlegrounds, a battle royale video game from 2017, once had 2,279,084 people playing it on Steam at the same moment. It reached that peak while still officially unfinished, listed as an early access title. The game began as a…
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake EaterMetal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater sends the player up an extremely tall ladder for roughly three minutes, with a vocal theme song as the only company. Fans and critics singled out the climb as one of the series' most memorable moments. Some…
  • MinecraftMinecraft, the 2011 sandbox game from the Swedish company Mojang Studios, tells its only story through a poem of roughly 1,500 words. The End Poem was written by the Irish novelist Julian Gough. It scrolls past in about nine minutes when a…
  • Among UsAmong Us, an online deduction game from the American studio Innersloth, arrived in June 2018 to an audience of roughly 30 to 50 players online at any one time. In late September 2020, the same game peaked at 3.8 million concurrent players.…
  • TerrariaTerraria sold more than 50,000 copies on its first day in 2011, and 432,000 in its first month. By May 2026 the total had passed 70 million, placing it among the best-selling video games of all time. The game itself looks modest. It is a…
  • No Man's SkyWithin a day of its launch, players of No Man's Sky had registered more than 10 million distinct species. That beat the roughly 8.7 million species identified on Earth so far. Those creatures were produced by algorithms, not placed one at…
  • Rise of the Tomb RaiderRise of the Tomb Raider, a 2015 action-adventure game from Crystal Dynamics, opens a year after Lara Croft's ordeal on Yamatai. She is an archaeologist who cannot explain the supernatural events she lived through there, and she is…
  • Days GoneIn Days Gone, a horde of the game's infected can number anywhere from 50 to 500. Every one of them is chasing a single man on a motorcycle. That man is Deacon St. John, a former outlaw biker in post-apocalyptic Oregon. He has just learned…

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