Don’t starve is a simple concept. Eat and you will survive. Easier said than done when you are thrust into an unknown world, by a machine you were tricked into making. It’s enough to drive anyone nuts, so any questions? What am I doing here? How did I get here? What am I going to eat… A constant race against the clock as night time approaches, as things go bump in the night, danger snarls and lurks in the dark.
And so as you wander the vast forests and open planes encountering all sorts of strange and wonderful sights along the journey, you wonder if you will ever escape this nightmare. All these questions from just half an hours’ worth of gameplay from Don’t starve, the latest indie game which has been covered on PC and was a big hit on steam, but will Xbox members thrive in the wilderness or simply fade into the darkness?
Don’t starve is an open world survival game, you find yourself with little help from the developers as the game thrusts you into the thick of it straight away, with the simply message of “You have to eat!” What follows next is a test, a rather harsh test in a depressing environment. The game is set up for you to survive the longest and with not much hope of seeing an end to the game I wasn’t sure of the point of it all.
Obviously the point is to survive and explore but Don’t Starve is rather unrelenting with the fact that it doesn’t give anything away at all, I’m not sure what the final purpose of it all really is? Of course you want to find out what put you there in the first place and why but as you score the landscape for resources the game offer little to no encouragement for you to seek answers into this mystery. I found myself simply wanting to get through the night, find resources and begin the battle again against the demons and myself.
And that’s part of the challenge of Don’t Starve, the external demons are one thing to contend with, but when you start losing your own mind things become a lot harder. The game uses 3 easy indicators to keep you alive, Health, Sanity and Stomach. Health is simple enough, don’t get hurt, easy it goes, similar to stomach, as I said earlier eat and you shall survive, but Sanity is an interesting one, how can you cope on your own.
As you progress further and further into the nights the better the rewards you get, easier to build things as you go along, the intrigue of it all keeps you hooked. The landscape is huge and the simple menu and construction tools are perfect for this style of game, you can pick it up and go as you please without having to stick to one home base camp. Resources at your disposal include, trees for fire logs as well as building shelter later in the game, pigs for food as well as berries and mushrooms as other delicacies available for you to tuck into. The game opens up offers more interesting things as it moves on but I won’t spoil that for you!
Once you get so far into it though the game starts to become a bit of a drag, the landscape hardly changes, the odd hole into another area appears but time in there is short lived as you are driven away but the monsters which lay there. Aside from the opening credits not much in the way of story supplies itself, which will appease some and disappoint others. In terms of game modes its essentially survival and that’s your lot to be honest you can move the settings around in terms of seasons and other sparse the resources are to make it more/less of a challenge but to be honest it’s a bit thin on the ground in terms of features.
The sheer fact the game offers zero to slim help is a negative for me, it’s a shame as the concept is rather solid, but Don’t starve is simply too bleak and relative to keep me fighting on to see if there is any end in sight. It’s all rather depressing, whether the developers intended for this to happen or not is another thing, but the game seemingly offers little reward after the first few nights of survival.
Don’t Starve offers up some interesting concepts on survival as the character struggles to cope as the time wears on, accompanied by some pretty dire circumstances it’s hard to imagine how anyone survived really. But this game will appeal to some who will enjoy the challenge, as you get your teeth into it, don’t starve opens up some possibilities and some interesting experiences but for the pick up and play gamer this won’t be for you.
In my opinion the sheer bleakness of the game put me off slightly, not the fact the landscape is dark and grey all the time but the lack of achievement in succeeding in areas where other games would probably reward you, surviving the night seems to be the best you can hope for at the start, and I’ve never been a huge fan of games where there are no checkpoints.
Overall there is some solid gameplay here and an interesting challenge for you to take on, but the lack of features, seemingly no end in sight and the respective reward for attempting to advance is off putting to say the least. From what i've seen on the steam side of things (This game was released in 2013 over there) people who spend some real time into s in getting to triple figure survival days on the game, get great rewards from farming etc but getting to that sort of time spent will be a slog. It’s worth trying but I don’t think you’ll be coming back to try and survive again once you have had a few goes at it, it's all too similar almost after every death.
