The best way I can describe this is from one of my favorite games:S.T.A.L.K.E.R In this game. The wasteland doesnt just feel alive its like it takes on its own character. Like a person!
I won't lie - I googled the game. From my experience, the best way to accomplish this is through the characters' interactions with it. Have you ever watched Mountain Men or any of those shows about people living off of the grid? Notice how they describe nature as a force that is nearly alive. The scene that immediately comes to mind is a hungry person trying to run a dog he shot, The dog bolts into a crumbling, derelict building. The hungry man squeezes his bulk between two bent, rusted I beams despite the warning of his companion. With a sound like popcorn, the I beams give way dropping an entire concrete floor on the him. As the companion watches the wounded dog slip out the other way, he says, "I warned you, the wastes don't like fools." Yes, we can say that the hungry man caused this, but to the companion's view the wastes punish the foolish. If consistently presented throughout the story, the land will become a character in its own right. ~S
I too had to google the game because I don't game (v.). You're accustomed to connecting with that landscape on a literally visual level, and humans are very visual animals. If you want that same feeling to convey via the written word, you need to connect with it on a more emotive level for the reader. You need to let me know how the characters feel about this landscape, more than describing it in details of objects, or lack thereof. When I look at the images I found of that game, what came across to me was a hushed, gelled corruption of a once prosperous past. The bones and rotting teeth of buildings, the slowly decaying flesh of homes where children once played. The ever-present fog, sealing this world in a jealous embrace of death and resentment. There is little hope here. Chaos is upon the land. Silence has returned, not because we're gone, but because everything is gone. I don't know much more about that game than what the images gave me. There may be more to it. My details may be off. That doesn't really matter to my point. Emotive engagement is what I'm talking about. If you want me to feel that landscape - like it was a living thing - that's what I need.
I don't know the game, but in literature I've found the best way is through conflict and motivation. To Build a Fire by Jack London is a great example of this. Nature seems like some dark malevolent force bent on the destruction of one man and his struggle to avoid this. And backing what was said above, moving from a visual medium to a written one means describing the terrain with evocative imagery. Using personifying, anthropomorphic terms seem to help and can set a mood for the environment. Trees can groan, wind can dance, squirrels can chitter concernedly, and ravens can cackle derisively. I know not all of those examples work for a wasteland, but you hopefully get the idea.
The Zone feels alive because it is. It screws with the player and the other S.T.A.L.K.E.Rs, rather than just being a passive setting. This is good advice for description in general, but try having the setting do stuff, rather than simply being. "It was cold" isn't anywhere near as engaging as something along the lines of "The wind sunk its freezing teeth into Strelok".
This game sounds like its based off of the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. Most definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it.
I've read descriptions of setting that give them a life of their own. For example, an author described buildings hidden behind trees as 'peeking over the trees like hiding children'.
I've always found it effective when a writer treats the landscape and environment not just as setting but as having distinct personalities of their own. When describing a scene in stormy weather maybe describe the thunderous sky as angry or vengeful. For your wasteland, maybe describe it as hungry or even ravenous, tying that emoting into the nature of a region that is sparse with life or activity. Additionally, having your characters react to the region as they would a personality can be helpful. An author named David Eddings once used a line in this way that always stuck with me. He described his character standing at a window staring out at a storm "as if it were a vast personal insult." It was a simple, funny line but I found that it drew me right in; I could completely imagine this old man scowling at a violent storm out his window, angry because he was being forced to stay inside and delay his plans.
The key to all of this is that you need to make the environment seem to react to what the people are doing. Not all the time. But sometimes. Sometimes it rains exactly when that is the worst thing that could happen; or animals show up just when they need to hunt something. There needs to be that sense that the environment as a whole (all the non-human parts) are one organism that is able to do whatever it wants sometimes that can benefit the people, sometimes not. Sometimes it'll react directly (in a narrative sense) to what the characters are thinking or doing, and sometimes it'll force them to react to it, but there needs to be a sense of a continued personality there that they can seem some sort of shape to. In STALKER the zone is literally hostile to you; like both in terms of narrative and mechanics. The zone literally reacts to you in small ways, and it also is just a nasty place to be too so that even when it's not doing anything in particular you'll get attacked by a pack of wild dogs when you step off the beaten track. The difference in a book though is that the reader isn't interacting with the world, they won't have a personal relationship with the environment so you need to hang a lantern on that characterization to make it feel real. You need the characters to start talking to their surroundings or acting superstitiously with it, even if not seriously. But just they yell at the sky when it rains on them at really inconvenient moments or make a point not to leave trash around and not to plunder too much from the environment; just the kind of superstitions that people might have when living in a really hostile environment. The best way you can do it, for a STALKER like place, really all you need to do is to have one cynical jerk of a character half-seriously saying "Told you the zone wouldn't let you...". And these kind of comments build up slowly until the main characters start to sort of believe it, or at least wonder if that guy knows something more than they do. After all, he seems to have a feel for what the zone is thinking. And maybe they don't buy it but they start to talk about the zone (or whatever) like it's alive and whether it'll give them something to eat/drink, whether it'll let them get through this valley etc.
I did a bit of research and it turns out that both the film and the game were based off of the same book, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I found a copy of it and am reading through it and it is definitely something you should research to get a kind of living landscape feeling for your own work.
Elements of you wasteland. Does the wind have attitude what about the dust? Will it get in your eyes when you talk smack about said wasteland. Oh, the boulders (if it is part of a mountain range) will chase after you if you piss off the wasteland? What physical features are there to Wasteland? Make use of those features.
A lot of our literary classics are Man vs Nature, Jack London made a career of it. Check out some of his stuff.
Personification. ie. The waves pounded the shore mercilessly. The surf receded between each assault with a harsh, gurgling gasp of determination, and then advanced again - as the spray glinted in the sunshine with vicious glee. Describe it as though it is a character and it will be a character. Give it motivations and attitude.
