by Sharon Smith
When survival depends on hunting, open-world games suddenly get a lot more interesting. That’s because food isn’t sitting in a loot box; it moves, hides, and sometimes fights back. Players can’t just run around and simply fight enemies. They’ve got to think, stalk, and sometimes make mistakes before they can eat.
In these kinds of games, players have to crouch through grass, listen for footsteps, and pray the wind doesn’t blow their scent the wrong way. It’s a mix of nerves, skill, and a bit of dumb luck. Players who love the feeling of fulfillment that comes from a catch after a hunt will have a great time playing these open-world games.
The Long Dark
A Frozen Wilderness Where Every Calorie Counts
In The Long Dark, players are not out to fight zombies or aliens, just wind, hunger, wild animals, and the endless white of the Canadian wilderness. Players can get food from plants and canned goods, but they won’t last long, so they'll need to track deer, rabbits, and occasionally, wolves for food and resources like hides. The Long Dark is really a game that makes players feel like animals, as they have to hunt when they can, know when to retreat, and preserve what they’ve gotten.
One of the most interesting things about hunting in The Long Dark is that wolves and other animals can track a player’s scent and sound. As such, staying undetected from threats is just as important when hunting, and increases the challenge of survival tenfold.
Green Hell
A Brutal First-Person Survival Experience Set Deep In The Amazon Rainforest
Green Hell takes players to the Amazon Rainforest, where survival depends on finding food, staying healthy, and avoiding everything that’s out to get them. Players will need to hunt down animals for meat, gather hides for crafting, and find bones to make tools. They’ll also need to forage for plants and insects.
When it comes to hunting properly, making a blowpipe, setting snare traps, or baiting a small pathway will often be safer than a head-on attack. Hunting is tightly tied to health systems in Green Hell. Wounds and infections can result from close combat or poor butchery, and raw food can poison or worsen immunity against jungle diseases. What’s even more interesting is that mental health changes with sleep and food intake, so failing to secure food may lead to weaker actions and worse aim. The Hunter Challenge mode shows how focused the game is on hunting with a good strategy by giving clear hunting targets to players, but placing them under time pressure.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Realistic Tracking And Hunting Support Food, Crafting, And Camp Needs
As an outlaw inRed Dead Redemption 2, hunting becomes a large part of how players live and survive. The game’s wildlife system includes over 200 animal species, each with a pelt quality that depends on how cleanly it’s killed. A single, well-placed arrow or rifle shot can turn a perfect pelt into a lucrative money source or rare crafting materials. Poor shots or using the wrong weapon can ruin the pelt entirely.
Arthur can track animals by looking for their footprints, droppings, or disturbed plants using his “Eagle Eye” ability, which basically shows signs of movement and scent trails. Once a kill is made, players can skin it by hand, stow the meat and hide on their horse, and decide whether to cook it, sell it, or donate it to the Van der Linde gang’s camp. This camp is where the player sees hunting’s impact most clearly. Donating meat and pelts keeps the gang fed and allows for upgrades to storage, ammo, and living conditions. Pearson, the camp’s cook and craftsman, uses certain pelts to craft satchels and clothing that expand Arthur’s carrying capacity or offer better protection against the cold. Hunting, in this sense, ties directly into character progression and the group’s survival.
ARK: Survival Evolved
Hunt, Craft, And Tame Dinosaurs to Survive
Most games make players run from dinosaurs, but ARK: Survival Evolved instead pushes players to tame them. The player starts the game nearly naked and must gather resources, hunt, and build. Hunting in ARK expands beyond food; it’s the route to materials, taming, and power. Players have to eat, drink, and manage their body temperature to stay alive, all while contending with dangerous wildlife, environmental hazards, and in multiplayer servers, other players.
Early on in a playthrough, hunting is about pure necessity. Players start with primitive weapons like a stone pick, a spear, or maybe a slingshot, and they learn to take down smaller prey like dodos, lystrosaurs, or dilophosaurs to gather food and materials. But soon, the focus shifts as players realize that killing everything isn’t the only way forward. Some creatures are more useful alive than dead. These dinos have to be tamed so they can become a companion, protector, or workhorse, depending on the player's needs.
Rust
Harsh Multiplayer Survival Where Hunger, Wildlife, And Other Players Can End You
Nothing in Rust really belongs to the player. Not the food in their inventory, not the gun in their hand, not even the walls around their base. Everything they build, hunt, or steal exists on borrowed time. That’s what makes Rust so fascinating. It’s not really a survival game about nature; it’s a survival game about people.
Rust somehow turns hunting into something more complicated than a food-gathering routine. Almost every action in the game has a risk attached to it, and that includes killing animals. Firing a bow or gun echoes across valleys and forests, broadcasting the player's location to nearby players who might be hungry for the same kill or for some free loot. Even after a player has built a stone base and armed themselves with rifles, they still have to hunt down animals. In a way, some players hunt to live while others hunt each other to get whatever they can.
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This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.
