If you haven’t heard of Don’t Starve, you need to look at this game immediately. Don’t starve is a permadeath survival game with a dark color palette and a very nice art style, it has a smooth and non-irritating crafting system (Finally!), and a variety of interesting creatures that all want to kill you except for maybe rabbits and birds, and we can never forget the amazing koalefant; koalefants never try to kill you.
The Koalefant is one of my favorite creatures in this game because its one of the few things that are rare, and will not kill you.
The art style in this game is insanely unique and well done, it has nice shading and a very gloomy color palette consisting of dark shades of green, brown, and yellow. The color palette can get boring because of its darkness but generally it keeps you going with the great gameplay, new characters, and more things to craft.
When you first start to play Don’t Starve, you will notice that its gameplay is a sort of reverse 2.5D style. Instead of being on a 2D plane with 3D graphics, this game switches it and uses 2D sprites, and then moves them around on a 3D plane. It’s very easy to control, you can even play the entire game using only your mouse, you can walk around, interact, inspect, and that’s about it. Altogether the controls are extremely easy to pick up and use without trouble.
The basic gist of the game is to survive as long as possible all while crafting newer and better items. There are multiple types of items such as walls, magic items, blowguns and blow darts, armor, and these weird things that you pick up, such as the extremely mysterious “Metal Potato Thing”. Items in this game are very easy to craft because it requires nothing more than some machines and the basic materials. The more materials you get the more machines you can make so that you can make more things to make more machines, it sounds confusing but it’s essentially a cycle of making more things to unlock new crafting recipes. I have to give this game props because it is one of the very few games that has a crafting system that doesn’t make you want to toss your monitor out the window. I would say that altogether, the crafting system is extremely easy to use, but makes it just interesting enough to not get boring, I think most players will love this aspect of the game and will get the hang of it extremely fast and easily. This is undoubtedly one of the strongest points in gameplay.
Now it’s time to talk about one of the coolest parts in this game – the plethora of creatures. The creatures in this game are very much centered around fantasy with things ranging from just rabbits, to giant one-eyed birds that chase after you.
This does not look like it’s going to end well.
The many creatures you will encounter in this game are things like gigantic cyclops-deer things known as deerclops, human sized pig villagers, batilisks (which are bats mixed with the mythical basilisk), and birds. There are many creatures to go over that all have different abilities and attacks. Oh yeah, there all also the most irritating hounds in the history of gaming, almost as bad as the hellhounds in Call of Duty if not worse.
You do not know true stress until you encounter a pack of these things.
This game is also a permadeath game, meaning if anything in this game kills you, it’s game over and you have to start over with a new character. This is also a perfect time to mention the big amount of characters in this game. The characters have many abilities such as Wilson the scientist who is able to grow a marvelous beard, The lumberjack who turns into a beaver in the full moon and drops his entire inventory forcing you to cut down trees or die, he also has an amazing axe to start out with. My personal favorite character in this game is Willow, she has the ability to start out with a lighter and she takes no fire damage whatsoever, meaning you can burn down a forest and take out all the hounds following you with the fire, but come out without a single scratch, you can also use the lighter as a light so that you can survive the night without even needing a campfire. Altogether there are about 9 different characters who will either make the game easier or harder depending on what you choose. I think that everyone will love the different characters as they are all very interesting and have different personalities which determine what they say about different items and creatures.
Altogether, Don’t Starve brings a very new experience to the table including interesting creatures, a great crafting system, and a variety of characters, and I am sure that anyone who likes great art style and a good survival game will love to play Don’t Starve.