Don't Starve

<originally written in April 2014>
Don't Starve is a survival game. Not only do you need to prevent starvation, but you need to maintain health and sanity too. Doing so is not so easy. Graphically, it has a slightly dark and freaky aesthetic; as though Tim Burton was in charge of the art department.

Each day has a day/night cycle, and during the day you need to go hunting for resources and sources of food. When it comes to night, you need to light a fire and wait for the morning. The frustrating thing about Don't Starve is the permadeath combined with the high difficulty; you basically have one chance, and if you die, your save is wiped and you have to start all over again. It isn't very user friendly, because from the beginning you get no assistance and have to learn the game mechanics yourself. Learning usually means dying though. So when night comes and you have no fire, you will die, because unseen monsters attack.

Finding enough food can be a challenge too because eating berries, carrots and flowers won't be enough to sustain you. You may build a few traps and catch a few rabbits but that won't be enough in the long term. You will need the Crock Pot or Drying Rack to create a more substantial food item, but using the Crock Pot requires much experimentation to learn meaningful recipes, and still relies on a high quantity of meat and vegetables.

Even when you do think you have a strategy, the game is constantly throwing curve-balls. Eating rabbits seems a nice way to survive once you have found many rabbit holes and built many traps. However, you run the risk of meeting a powerful monster that spawns after killing a lot of 'innocent' creatures. Chopping lots of trees seems a good idea, since a wood is always needed for your camp-fires and a pre-requisite for building some items. However, you may enrage a giant tree creature, who will then follow you and can smash your base to pieces. However, you can get rid of him (at least temporarily) by planting enough pine-cones to grow more trees. The boomerang appears to be a great item until you realise it hurts you when it comes back to you, unless you catch it; but how are you meant to know to press space-bar as it arrives?

As you survive longer and longer, you will get thrown new challenges. Hounds will begin to attack which you need to prepare some form of attacking weapon such as a spear, some armour like a log suit and any other strategies to give you the advantage (placing traps, using nearby Spiders or Pigs to help attack). Winter will soon come, dying of cold is now an option and food sources are now scarce. You will need to make sure you have warm clothes, food stocked up, and the heat stone will come in handy too which is a portable heat source.

It wouldn't be so bad if learning these things through death didn't involve restarting the entire game, and it is a shame that it wasn't given its own separate mode. It should have been a feature where you can't rank on the leaderboards unless you play in the 'one chance' survival mode.

Another gripe of mine is that its hard to stop and plan ahead since scrolling through the menus doesn't pause the game, and you need to work out which items are beneficial and which are pre-requisites for these items.

In my time playing Don't Starve, the developers have been very busy and added many new features and improvements. New areas like Caves have been implemented, user interface tweaked, controller support added, new characters, new monsters, new items, plus the the ability for the community to mod the game. Luckily I found an infinite re-spawns mod which allowed me to learn a lot about the enemies and items by experimenting, knowing I wasn't going to die and lose everything.

Don't Starve is a great survival game but I'm sure many people will be very annoyed having to start the game pretty much every-time they come across something new. It's a hard enough time planning ahead, looking at the pre-requisites to creating the item you want, going to get them, and maintaining your hunger, health and sanity. It's a constant struggle to survive and you need a lot of knowledge, a cautious mentality and lots of luck to keep alive.

This game actually brings back some memories for me, so when I first got a PS4 there weren't any games which I pretty much expected but I got a 1 month free PS+ subscription for buying the PS4 and this game was the free game for the month so when I went back to college and brought my system to my friends apartment I'd play this and remember seeing how far I could get, I think in one file I survived something like 20 days then it got snowy outside and I was murdered by a group of penguins. I made another file and got to something like 100 days and then just sort of stopped after that. The game is fun for the first few weeks, but once you've explored the entire map, played around with all the characters, and know exactly what you need to survive and how to deal with the Winters as well as harvesting and preserving food and crafting good armor, you are set. Yeah the game does occasionally throw curve balls, like a giant monster occasionally comes that is tough to beat and will destroy you if you don't have multiple armors and of course every 10 or so days monster hounds come to attack you but again are easy if you have good armor and a good weapon. The thing is as long as you are prepared for what you know is coming the game just becomes repetitive and more about item management and making sure you keep a pattern. The game does get more interesting if you play risky and go out explore, face off against the enemies, and of course you can progress through levels in adventure mode, but there really is no end game for the most part and the game is mostly about just surviving which the easiest way to do is just stay in one location and farm the same resources over and over and over infinitely.

But there are good things too. I do like the games style and it reminds me of a Tim Burton movie. There is a ton of variety in enemies and they can be a challenge. Plus I do like the weather effects where it changes to Winter and new enemies appear. Plus there are tons of weapons, items, and objects you can build, I mean there are just so many different things in this game its crazy. And the humor is dark and bizarre. Its a fun game to play for a few weeks and explore, but once the novelty wears off and you learn the secrets of surviving it just gets repetitive and is no better a game than say Minecraft of Terraria.