Rust

Rust is the least forgiving game on this site and the most talked-about for it. You spawn with nothing on a server of up to several hundred people, and everything you gather can be taken. Bases are built to be raided and raids are solved with explosives, which means every wall you place is a calculation about how much someone else will spend to get through it.

The monthly forced wipe is the design decision that keeps it working, no server calcifies around an entrenched clan for long, and a new player joining on wipe day starts level with everyone else. Facepunch has kept it updated for over a decade. It is hostile, it is time-expensive, and there is nothing else quite like the tension of hearing footsteps outside a base you spent six hours building.