Survival Curator Breakdown

Steam’s the biggest game store out there, with thousands of new titles dumped in every year, plenty of them junk or scams. Early Access should be a solid concept, but between Steam’s shitty mismanagement and devs using it as a dumping ground, it’s often where good ideas go to die.

That’s why the Curator’s job is to slice through the mess so you don’t waste your time or cash.

I deal with a metric shit ton of survival game noise every day: Steam updates, dev blogs, Discord chatter, patch notes, Twitter hype, Kickstarter pitches: all of it. I also work directly with developers, whether that’s managing their Discords, helping with closed tests, or just staying plugged in.

To keep it from turning into chaos, I built a system to sort it all and pull out what’s actually useful.
➡️ (Full nerdy walkthrough of how I track everything in this free Patreon post!)

Once something’s on my radar, it gets run through Hashtag's 5 Survival Pillars. This is my lens for whether a game is actually survival, or just wearing the skin of one.

(Love me some Friction. Consequence. Risk. Effort. Scarcity.)
If a game doesn’t deliver on those, I tend to drop it from active tracking on the site or newsletter, though I still keep Curator blurbs up to date.

The Curator has three possible outcomes:

Positive: These usually fall into one of two camps. Either it’s a game I genuinely love (yes, you’ll spot a few non-survival oddballs on there, hi Firewatch), or it’s a survival title that actually holds up against the Pillars and earns your time and money. Positives are rare! I’ve got fewer than 50 out of more than 350 reviews.

Negative: These usually mean one thing: I don’t think you should spend money on it. Sometimes it comes with a timer attached, like “wait for 1.0” or “give it six months.” More often, it’s because the game itself is trash or the developer is: one or the other.

Informational: The grey zone. Also, the bulk of the blurbs, haha. These could be upcoming, current games, dead games, whatever. Basically, they don't fall into the AVOID or BUY categories, so I try to provide whatever notes or thoughts I can.

Short, direct, and updated as often as I can. These days, I add new blurbs weekly and circle back over the full list every couple of months. Individual blurbs get updated whenever something catches my eye, and all of it gets rolled into the newsletter.

A few personal rules of thumb:

Earned friction → Difficulty or grind that makes sense, not busywork.
Consequences that matter → Death penalties, weather systems, hunger that can actually kill you.
No bullshit spin → Fake screenshots, overpromises, or calling something “survival” when it’s really just an RPG with crafting.

If you’ve seen a flood of Positive tags in some other Curator, you’ll notice mine leans the other way- I’d rather be blunt than waste your time. (Or mine!)

That’s the cycle!

Stick around. The good survival games are out there, and I’ll help you find them!