One Life Left: Don't Starve

You are dropped suddenly into a strange Tim Burton-style world with nothing but empty pockets and one objective: survive. Welcome to Don’t Starve.

Don’t Starve is a survival horror game that was released in 2013 by Klei Entertainment. The goal of the game is given in the title, and also includes avoiding the insanity that slowly creeps on at night and fending off the creatively horrific creatures that hunt you in this new world. The realm of Don’t Starve is a beautifully dark place. Just about the only thing in the game that doesn’t look like it wants to kill you are the Beefalo herds which later serve the player as a source of protection and warmth.

Don’t Starve is a refreshing look at the survival genre because it keeps its initial level of difficulty well into a play through. Getting your character to a spot of relatively comfortable living takes a significant amount of time and is no simple feat to complete before the fall of the first winter. This maintained focus on survival is a nice contrast to other survival games where the goal switches from surviving to flourishing after a relatively short period of time. Even after you establish a sizeable group of farms or animal traps around a base, a lot of your time is focused on maintaining those resources. I also enjoyed that the game allows you to implement multiple modes of survival. For example, you can grow your own food by building small farms. However, these are of no use during the harsh winter when everything stops growing. You can also build a system of traps for small animals like rabbits and birds, but these require a lot of maintenance and need to be checked often. The last and probably least efficient way to feed yourself is the way of the hunter-gatherer. This mode requires you to travel the world searching for berries, carrots and smaller monsters that you can easily kill (there are not many of them).

Don’t Starve presents players with plenty of challenge, which is why many people like the game. However, I thought they went a little overboard in some areas. For example, combat is simply unfeasible in most situations you find yourself in during the game. The enemies need only two or three strikes to kill your character and the click-to-swing combat system does not leave you enough mobility to defend yourself from their attacks. This means you often simply have to run to the nearest group of Beefalos to transfer your enemy’s aggression onto another target. There are other ways to get around this difficulty, but they all involve indirect combat and something else fighting your battles for you.

As much as I enjoyed the extended survival phase of Don’t Starve, it runs into the same problem that all other survival games do and that is almost definitive to the genre. This is the problem of what to do once you can survive comfortably. After a while you are just walking around collecting more food for yourself. The sense of urgency is lost because you have growing stockpiles of provisions for yourself. Minecraft and similar games deal with this by offering the player the freedom to build things. Don’t Starve attempts to solve this problem by introducing more complex recipes for magical items that can act as weapons, reduce hunger, etc. However, the raw materials for these items are extremely hard to come by and will most likely result in the end of your game at the hands of a very large nightmarish creature.

This past December, Klei Entertainment released a multiplayer version called Don’t Starve Together. This brought me back to the game because I greatly enjoy playing with other people. I played a lot with friends over the past February break and this collaborative version did not disappoint. It removes a lot of the urgency from the experience because you can do twice the amount of things in the same amount of time. This removes a lot of the anxiety from the first winter, which can be quite daunting in the single player version. It also frees you up to attempt some of the harder feats without fear of bringing your character to an early end.

I really enjoyed Don’t Starve for its fresh look at the survival genre and its high level of difficulty. Its strange world drew me in and challenged me in ways other games did not. Its multiplayer expansion only made the game more fun. Overall, I give Don’t Starve an 8.0 out of 10 and Don’t Starve Together an 8.5 out of 10.