This one is for all of you Steam users out there...
Don't Starve
For some reason beyond my understanding, this game has invaded my life and refuses to leave. If I were asked to describe this game using one sentence or less, that sentence would sound something like this:
Don't Starve is a little nugget of genius filled with equal parts frustration and satisfaction coated in a healthy dose of the macabre.
That being said, I'm going to dive right into this review.
The Plot:
Right off the bat, you'll quickly discover that the plot is fairly straight forward - survive. But there is a bit more to it than that.
After waking up in a strange world without any recollection of how you arrived, you are contacted by a demon named Maxwell who advises you to find some food before nightfall. This is literally his only advice before he vanishes, leaving you to your own devices. Thus begins your arduous struggle for survival.
As you progress through the game and boldly venture out into the world, you start to uncover doorways to other realms. These doorways, conveniently called "Maxwell's Doors", are your only hope of escape. However, traveling through these doors comes at a price as you are not allowed to keep any of the items/materials/weapons/tools that you have accumulated throughout your travels. It takes some serious commitment (and some nerves of steel) to travel through Maxwell's Doors into other realms.
Granted, I have not been so brave as to venture through one of Maxwell's Doors yet. I'm just barely surviving in the realm I'm in now with what I have, let alone being forced to start from scratch again. But I have been assured by some friends who also play this game that there is a way to escape Maxwell's world and claim victory.
Bearing this in mind, the plot moves only as quickly as your willingness to press on. Couple this with an exceptionally steep price for dying (Game Over, no continues, no re-do's, no mulligans) and it is easy to get stuck in a rut just trying to survive in one area for an extended period of time.
However, the game does offer you something of a reprieve in the form of Touchstones. Once you find one of these things, it acts as a one-time use checkpoint of sorts, allowing you to respawn at that location should you die. Be wary though, if you die, you respawn with limited health and none of your equipment. You will need to back track to where you last died to collect your things again.
That being said, it is fairly easy to lose the general sense of direction in the story and more often than not you will find yourself hanging out in one spot for days at a time just trying to scrape out a living.
Plot rating: 2/5
Gameplay:
This is the game's heart and soul. And easily its most addictive aspect. Don't Starve is an unashamed wilderness survival game through and through, forcing you to make due with whatever you can find. Throughout the game, you will have to keep track of three key stats: Health, Hunger and Sanity.
Health remains unchanged unless you do something to hurt yourself (ie.e - getting attacked by an animal or eating bad food). If you get hurt, you need to create salves or cook food to restore it. Salves are the most effective, but require you to kill spiders as the salve needs spider eggs to create.
Hunger depletes over time but can be restored by eating things like berries, carrots and animals. Cooked food is more effective at restoring your hunger level, while eating rotten or stale food will actually hurt you.
Sanity also depletes as you survive successive days in the wilderness. It also has the most adverse side-effects of any other stat. As your character's sanity degrades, you will begin to hallucinate. Strange shadowy creatures will appear at random and stalk you. And that is just the beginning. At night, the effects are more noticeable as hands will crawl out of the darkness to steal your campfire.
As your sanity begins to bottom out, you begin to fight creatures that don't exist and the world will start to appear in doubles. The only cure for insanity is to pick flowers. Yes, flowers. Gathering a dozen flowers and making them into a garland to wear on your head is also a good way to regain your sanity.
Combat in Don't Starve is basic. It is also highly inadvisable at first.
As you start the game with literally nothing but the clothes on your back, you are entirely defenseless against the world's more vicious creatures. My advice for beginners would be to gather the following resources in bulk where you can find them:
Grass
Flint
Logs
Twigs
Those items will form the backbone of your survival gear to start with. Combining twigs and grass together will allow you to craft a backpack to help you carry more stuff, while combining flint and twigs allows you to create an axe for chopping wood to build campfires.
On that subject... campfires are your friend. NEVER venture far during the twilight hours without enough supplies to build a campfire. If you get caught in the dark without a light source, horrible things will happen.
Once you have mastered the art of building campfires and generally surviving through the night, you will need to begin foraging for better supplies and food. Food is easy enough to come by. Things like berry bushes, carrots, and rabbits provide the easiest sources to start. Building a fire to cook these things is also useful as it increases their effects slightly.
Beyond campfires and axes, you will also need to go out of your way to gather materials that will allow you to create things like a Science Machine, and an Alchemy Machine, just to name a few. Each new item you manage to create gives you access to more advanced tools/weapons which in turn allow you to survive longer or kill more challenging creatures to get better resources to create more advanced items, etc, etc...
There is also an XP component to the game. By building things, refining resources and killing tougher creatures, you gain experience that is put towards unlocking extra characters. There are a total of 12 characters in all, each with their own perks that help them survive in their own special way.
One of my personal favorites is Wilson - a mad scientist who can grow a beard.
What purpose does the beard serve, you ask? Well, he can shave his beard to create something called a Meat Effigy. Essentially, this effigy is a copy of Wilson that allows him to resurrect himself if he should die. The materials needed to create the effigy are fairly common, but as the other characters it is rare to just find beard hair lying around, making Wilson one of your best bets for long term survival.
Another favorite character of mine is Wendy - a bereaved little girl who is visited at night by her dead sister, Abigail. Wendy's special ability lies in her resistance to insanity. Given that she already talks to her dead sister, her mental state declines at a much slower rate than any other character in the game.
Other characters like Wolfgang and Willow offer their own benefits like fire resistance in the case of Willow (the firebug) and extra health in the case of Wolfgang (the strongman).
The only drawback to the gameplay thus far is repetitiveness. Building campfires, cooking food, chopping down trees and repairing your existing equipment can get tedious unless you are brave enough to travel off the beaten path and risk certain death to find new places and better resources/items.
That being said, the game is still evolving, with continual updates being made to include new things for you to build and experiment with. And since it is a Steam game, all updates and upgrades to the game are absolutely free of charge. You only need to pay the initial $10.00 charge to purchase it and that's it, you're done.
There is no multiplayer aspect to the game. When pressed for answers as to why this is, the developers expressed that multiplayer would detract from the single player experience that they felt made the game what it is.
And I tend to agree with them.
While Don't Starve seems to be made for multiplayer, having more than one person would actually make the game less challenging. It shines as a single player game, and, frankly, multiplayer would be a tacky addition in my humble opinion.
Gameplay rating: 4.5/5
Graphics:
The animation style and graphics are simplistic yet fitting, portrayed in a vaguely sepia tone color pallet that echoes hints of the Gashleycrumb Tinies illustrated by Edward Gorey. The art style plays brilliantly into the game's macabre sense of humor that can only be described as Alice in Wonderland meets The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Strange creatures like the Deerclops and Tallbird, groves of twisted gnarly trees that look like they sprang from the mind of Tim Burton, communities of sentient pigs and even the odd sing-songy tone of your character's voice all pay homage to the mediums that have so obviously inspired this game.
The graphics definitely won't be winning any awards for being glossy or fancy, but they work with the game. Anything more and it would actually be a disservice to the game.
Graphics rating: 5/5
Lasting Appeal:
Overall, Don't Starve isn't for everyone. It can feel mundane at times, but it can be rewarding if you are adventurous enough to strike out beyond your comfort zone into the world. Being a fairly new game, it is still in the growing stages and we have yet to see what the developers have planned for the future.
Overall rating: 4.5/5
