About Hashtag

I fell for The Long Dark and never really recovered. (Not a permadeath joke!) I'd always liked survival stories - Into the Wild, My Side of the Mountain - but The Long Dark hit differently and felt like an actual experience. Or at least as close as I could get to experience it without falling victim to a plane crash. (I know you can solo camp but that’s camping, not survival.) The loneliness, the constant balancing act, the "one wrong move and you're dead" thing. That's what survival actually feels like to me.


Problem is, "survival" as a Steam tag means basically nothing anymore. Slap a hunger bar and some crafting on a game and boom, survival. It’s marketable, I get it. Who wants to be the 438483902 RPG game with some light fantasy or Vikings when you can be the first survival viking game? (Yes, I’m making Valheim jokes, sue me.) But it means the real stuff gets buried next to games that just borrowed the label.
And I mean buried, because there are thousands of games dropping monthly these days.

So I built the Five Pillars to sort and find what actually has friction and consequences. Not because I want to gatekeep anybody's fun - obviously, play whatever the fuck you want - but because if you're here, you probably want someone who's already done the sorting.

This site used to be strictly games. It's not anymore. Survival, the way I think about it now, is bigger than a genre: it's whatever gets you through the actual chaos and shit show of being alive right now. (It’s 2026 as I update this, if you’re wondering.) So you'll get game coverage, sure, but also outdoor stuff, offline life stuff, things other people made that I think are worth your time, and whatever I'm examining that week.

What I don’t want to do: feed you doomscroll garbage, clickbait, or patch notes reworded to look like journalism. If I write something, I want it to be something I grappled with and got dirty over. Often - especially with my schedule and responsibilities!- it can take longer. But that’s fine. It’s not a race.

So, yea. Let's do this.

Over the years, I’ve pieced together my own “5 Pillars of Survival”, the traits that bring friction and consequence to the table and make survival games actually feel like survival.
It’s not a hard rulebook and I've yet to force anyone to use it.

Unicorn Survivalist

I’m Jordan (aka Sifner): bald head, big beard, bigger mouth. I enjoy music, reading, cats, terribly painting miniatures, being subpar at photography, and flying my drone but only into the side of a building ONCE, and it's fine you can't even see the crack in the undercarriage.

Discord: Welcome to my home.