Don't Starve

Publisher: Sony
Formats: PS4, PC

Reviewed by Jamie Ross
Format Reviewed on; PC

Don’t Starve, and its DLC Reign of Giants, is an open world, top-down survival game set in an alternative, steampunk reality. Players help a number of characters, from Victorian ladies to gentleman scientists survive, after being whisked away to a terrifying landscape by a well-dressed demon. I am a big fan of survival games, and Don’t Stave looked right up my street, so I didn’t hesitate to dive right in.

A common theme for games such as this, players wake up in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but their bare hands and their wits to survive. Basic tools have to be crafted from materials picked up as you make your way through the creepy forests and windswept plains of the map. No instructions or tutorial is provided, but I soon worked out how to fashion myself a crude axe from twigs and rocks, and set about making a fire. The crafting menu is divided up into basic categories such as tools and armour. When you start out, only a few recipes are available, but addition, more advanced items such as traps and hardier weapons can be researched using a zany science machine.

The game cycles through a full day and night in about ten minutes. In this time you need to set yourself up with food and a source of light. Once the darkness closes in, it is impossible to see beyond the slowly dwindling light of your campfire. The pitch black is patrolled by nameless terrors, which will kill the foolish explorer who ventures too far from the safety of their flickering fire. In my first few attempts, I didn’t manage to gather enough logs to last the night, and was instantly killed by a growling beast.

The world contains a rich variety of biomes to explore, with each offering a different range of resources to be harvested. Swamps provide frogs, for example, who can be killed for their legs, but use their sticky tongues to steal items from your inventory. As I stumbled across a sort of prairie area, I set a few traps to attempt to catch myself a rabbit, without success. Food is not too hard to come by, which is just as well given the rate that exploring and surviving burn through calories. Even after gathering what I felt was a pretty wide variety of tasty treats, I was just managing to keep my stomach full. Although I imagine that frog’s legs and flower petals are not the most nutritious foodstuffs that this colourful landscape has to offer.

Beyond stuff your face and keeping the nightly terrors away, as I explored, I found myself occasionally encountering some of the other denizens of this strange place. I foolishly attempted to slay a strange worm-horse, only for a number of its friends (or maybe herd) to show up and give me a sound beating. Pig men and fish men can sometimes be seen battling one another. I made sure to keep my distance each time a saw this. Even seemingly small creatures can be deadly in large numbers, as I found when attempting to raid a bee hive.

One of the most interesting features of the game is that alongside the standard food and health bars, sits a sanity monitor. Just existing in the games twisted world slowing damages a characters mental state, and being out after dark or spending too much time around monsters drains the sanity bar more quickly. If it drops too low, strange events start to occur. At one point, I noticed I was being followed by s strange shadowy jellyfish. I couldn’t attack it, or interact with it in anyway, but its constant presence soon became unsettling. As sanity decreases further, these shadow apparitions gain physical form, and can kill an insane explorer. The loss of sanity can be offset by eating a hearty meal, or by wearing jaunty outfits.

In terms of its style, Don’t Starve really stands out from the other survival games I have played recently. Gone is the harsh reality of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The graphics are in a cartoon style, with 2D characters interacting with a 3D environment. If Tim Burton had made a survival game, this would be it. The animation is refreshing simple. It was hard not to smile as my skinny explorer dashed away from a lumbering pig man, or to wince as a worm-horse flopped its bulk down on me. The basic graphics do not detract from the game play at all, in fact without them it would be hard to pick this game out from the huge crowd of other survival games out there.

So, as the sun sets on this review, and I huddle around my dying campfire, I have only good things to say about this game. In my time so far, I have barely scratched the surface of what Don’t Starve has to offer. I didn’t last long enough to build a base, or encounter the majority of twisted beasts that populate the games world. And with multiplayer just around the corner, I can see myself investing many more hours in what I hope will be a wondrous, if slightly terrifying adventure.

Game Rating

5/5

Game purchased by Reviewer
Images courtesy of SCEE

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