10 Games That Make Exploration Feel Genuinely Dangerous

The act of exploring has always been an addictively fun activity in a variety of games, from first-person shooters to platformers, with exploring becoming an essential gameplay aspect in dozens of modern survival and open-world titles.

Exploring can be a lot of fun, but it can become just as stress-inducing and extremely frustrating in an instant, with hostile creatures being able to kill players instantly or block people from progressing further through the game until players acquire better skills or equipment.

Here are 10 video games that make exploration feel extremely dangerous due to how easy it is to perish from deadly foes and how difficult it can be to overcome said foes or recover lost items.

10 Minecraft

Traversing Treacherous Tunnels and Landscapes

For Minecraft players who regularly play in Survival Mode, they've likely experienced a moment where, after gathering a ton of loot deep underground or in the Nether, they're instantly blown up by an unsuspecting creeper or knocked off from a high vantage from a Skeleton or Ghast, resulting in all of their loot being lost.

Moments like these can make Minecraft exceptionally frustrating to play at times and, while Mojang has added a plethora of new weapons and armor to better fight off mobs across a list of ever-expanding biomes, exploring has become increasingly dangerous in Minecraft over the years.

For example, one time I went out exploring to try and find the Pale Garden biome in a Survival world only to get jumped by a Stray posse in a Snowy Plains area and get immediately killed by their Arrows of Slowness, losing a ton of good gear as I was really far away from my spawn point, and they kept on killing me everything I made it back to the Plains.

9 Choo-Choo Charles

Siderodromophobes's Worst Nightmare

Many people enjoy taking train rides and many people enjoy visiting and exploring islands, but Two Star Games' survival horror game Choo-Choo Charles turns both of these activities into complete nightmares as players are perpetually hunted by a living, spider-legged locomotive called Charles.

Set on the fictional island of Aranearum, Choo-Choo Charles has players embody a monster-hunting archivist as they set out to explore Aranearum on foot and by machine-gun-mounted train, interacting with NPC residents of the island along the way all while being wary of Charles attacking them at any moment.

Being chased by a man-eating train on foot and on the railroad is already terrifying enough, but there are far more dangers to be found on Aranearum as violent cultists inhabit mines protecting Charles' eggs.

The Perilous Roads of Skyrim

Among all of Bethesda's protagonists, the Dragonborn is arguably the most powerful, especially by the time players reach level 60 in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as they're pretty much invulnerable by then, but early on in the game, the province of Skyrim is full of dangerous threats.

This is particularly shown through the random spawning of massive dragons, which can easily kill low-level characters early on in Skyrim, but dragons aren't the only threat found near Skyrim's roads, as giants can easily hurl players high into the air and trolls and withstand numerous arrows until they get up close and wack people to death.

Even exploring Skyrim's many caves and tombs early on is dangerous, as players can stumble upon a bandit hideout, bears, sabre cats, trolls, vampires, or even ugly hagravens leading covens of witches or groups of deadly Forsworn, making it ideal to actually go exploring Skyrim only after players acquire decent weapons and gear.

7 Metro Exodus

Russia's Irradiated Wasteland

As a first-person shooter first and foremost, the post-apocalyptic Metro series isn't well-known for its exploratory elements despite the Moscow metro tunnels being home to a wide variety of surviving factions or at least this was the case until the debut of Metro Exodus.

Taking place one year after the events of Metro: Last Light, Metro Exodus sees series protagonist Artyom, his wife Anna, and the Spartan Order use a train named the Aurora to travel beyond Moscow to search for other surviving communities and a new safe area to settle.

During Artyom's travels, players can explore several open-world areas which can be heavily irradiated, like parts of the metro, but also be home to several deadly creatures such as massive tsar fish, mutated bears, and zombie-like humanimals alongside surviving factions of cultists, slavers and cannibals.

6 Fallout: New Vegas

Cazadors and Deathclaws and Yao Guai, Oh My!

Skyrim may be the most dangerous game to explore in The Elder Scrolls series, but among all of Bethesda's open-world RPG titles, Fallout: New Vegas is the most dangerous game overall to explore within, simply due to the wide range of hostile wildlife and factions players can encounter.

Fallout: New Vegas is famous for its horde of massive Deathclaws in Quarry Junction, blocking off players from quickly reaching the city of New Vegas early on in the game, but the Mojave Wasteland is filled with other hostile forces such as Caesar's Legion, which will send out Legionaires to hunt down those who wronged them.

However, I'd argue that, aside from the unique creatures that can only be found in a few areas like Vault 22's Spore Carriers, the most frustrating and dangerous creature for explorers to encounter in the Mojave Wasteland is the Cazador as these mutated wasps can take a lot of hits to die, fly in swarms, and can quickly kill players with their deadly stings and poison.

5 Sons of the Forest

A Forest Full of Cannibals and Mutants

Endnight Games' The Forest proved to be an indie survival horror hit in 2018 with how it terrified most players into venturing into the mysterious peninsula's forest due to the isolated areas' cannibalistic tribes and cast of disgusting humanoid mutants that would constantly watch players' camps or attack those who dare to explore.

However, The Forest's sequel, Sons of the Forest, managed to make exploring a far more dangerous activity due to the many new types of mutants introduced in the game, such as the quadraped Demons, the massive, passage-blocking Sluggys, and the violent, fused human bodies of the Caterpillar.

Unlike The Forest, Sons of the Forest additionally introduces hostile wildlife that can harm wandering players like moose, sharks, and killer whales, with this game's iteration of cannibals being far more massive and aggressive, making them difficult to defend against within walls, let alone out in the wilderness.

4 The Long Dark

Canada's Deadly Wilderness

Many open-world or survival games typically only have hostile animals, monsters, and factions threaten players, but The Long Dark stands out among other survival games by having the environment be the most dangerous threat in the game.

Set in the northern Canadian wilderness, The Long Dark allows people to play in two ways: either in an episodic story mode following plane crash survivors Will Mackenzie and Astrid Greenwood or in a survival mode where players must simply strive to survive in the frigid climate for as long as possible.

Exploring The Long Dark's 12 regions may be intriguing to do in story or survival mode, but players will need to be careful as they have to constantly regulate their body temperature by crafting warm clothes, fire, and food so as to avoid dying from frostbite or hypothermia whilst additionally avoiding deadly storms and territorial bears, cougars, moose, and wolves.

3 Subnautica 2

Proteus' Aquatic Horrors

Unknown Worlds Entertainment's Subnautica 2 has been out for just over a month now and while it is still only in an ongoing early access state, it's already proven to be a far more dangerous game to explore than the first Subnautica game.

This is due in part to the many new deadly Leviathans patrolling the alien oceans of the moon Proteus, but the main reason why exploring Subnautica 2 is far more dangerous for explorers than its predecessor is because of the removal of weapons and even the ability to kill Leviathans.

This means that if players encounter a Shiver or Collector Leviathan on their travels, their only course of action would be to avoid the alien's attention, running away, or simply being eaten by the massive sea creatures, with the latter always happening to me whenever I stumble upon a Collector Leviathan.

2 The Isle

Dinosaurs' Struggle to Survive

If a lot of the gamers in the world were like me growing up, they'd probably always dreamt of a game that allowed people to live the life of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic reptiles, with a perfect game allowing players to do just that being The Isle.

An early-access open-world survival horror multiplayer game, The Isle allows players to embody 19 dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles from the hatchling stage to adulthood, with players being able to live as docile herbivores like Maiasaurus or hunt other players down as vicious carnivores like Carnotaurus.

Due to this gameplay cycle, players need to be on their toes at all times, as predators can easily eat them while they're still hatchling, especially if they don't have other players acting as parents to protect them and adult dinosaurs can still be easily killed by a herd of predators.

1 Elden Ring

Danger Around Every Corner

The Soulsborne games are famous for being mercilessly difficult, especially for newcomers who have never played a Soulsborne title, and while each of them do have their own exploratory elements, the best one featuring exploration as a core gameplay aspect is undoubtedly the open-world action RPG Elden Ring.

Elden Ring plays fairly similarly to Dark Souls 3 in terms of its core combat and boss fights just with the fights and boss encounters being far more fierce and chaotic, with Elden Ring's open-world nature making surprise boss encounters fairly common.

For instance, when I first played Elden Ring and explored Limgrave, I did not expect to fight the horse-mounted Tree Sentinel boss as the first enemy in the open area, and it took quite a long time and a good couple of dozen deaths to defeat him.