Don't Starve

Klei Entertainment's Don't Starve has one of the most misleadingly simple titles in gaming history. It fails to convey the difficulty of such a seemingly simple task, especially when dealing with giant one-eyed monsters, desolate landscapes, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and angry frogs that rain from the sky. But it's not all pain and suffering, and fortunately the procedurally generated landscapes that you call home are also packed with bushes, trees, rocks, and buried treasure that you can use to... well, to not starve (in a manner of speaking). Don't Starve plops you down in the middle of these 2D lands with nothing but fading daylight and the clothes on your back, leaving the particulars of your short, brutal life up to you. As a metaphor for human existence, it's quite beautiful. As a game, though, it ends up a bit of a disaster, offering limited excitement and little incentive to keep playing.

The premise of "here's nothing, now go find a way to survive" may sound familiar to fans of Mojang's excellent Minecraft. Said fans will then probably also notice that Don't Starve has adopted its rival's disdain for helpful player instruction. In fact, the game's title is the only advice you'll be given over its lengthy running time. Tooltips are essentially nonexistent, and don't even think about having an in-game tutorial to help soften the learning curve. While you should be able to work out the basic mechanics on your own - at least enough to survive for a few days - there's no system in place to introduce you to the finer points of raising crops, building a homestead, and raising an army of obedient pig-soldiers. Instead, expect to become BFF with various internet walkthroughs and wikis that will introduce you to aspects of the game that you probably would have missed otherwise.

Assuming you survive long enough to figure out how to piece together some basic tools, you enter the main gameplay loop of explore, harvest, consume, sleep. The lands are full of trees to chop, rocks to mine, tombs to unearth, monsters to slay and skin, and weird altars and devices to terrify and confuse you, and your main task is to frantically collect everything you need before night falls and it becomes unsafe to travel. Motivating you are three meters, one for hunger, one for sanity, and one for health. Keeping hunger at bay will mean foraging, trapping, hunting, and eventually farming. Staying sane will require wearing fancy clothes, getting some sleep at night, and avoiding traumatic experiences like grave-robbing or falling into wormholes. The constant pressing need for food can lead to some interesting and tough decisions, especially when it comes to choosing whether or not to snack on a handful of toxic mushrooms (which could fill you up for the price of some sanity or health) or whether to risk wading through spider-infested lands in search of fresh berries. For better or worse, getting up to subsistence level farming is, unless the world creator has been kind to you, a long and difficult ordeal, so expect to be spending a lot of time living hand to mouth.

And while you could spend all of that time living in the aimless "Survival Mode", you'll probably want to move onto the objective-based "Adventure Mode," a five-step challenge that sees you trying to get revenge on the evil being who has trapped you in your less-than-posh accommodations. Accessed from a door in the Survival Mode overworld, Adventure Mode requires you to survive five consecutive themed challenges without dying (or yes, starving) while collecting special objects that you can use to advance to the next challenge. It's a brutal and intense affair, as failure will boot you back to the first challenge and wipe your progress, making Diablo's "hardcore" mode look like a game of bumper bowling by comparison. Adventure mode is definitely the way to go, as it gives some much-needed context to your struggles and gives you something to aim for other than just riding out the clock until your grisly death.

Unfortunately, not starving (which I assume is what you call the act of playing Don't Starve) fails to reach a critical mass of excitement and reward, even with the context of Adventure Mode. For starters, there's the underwhelming exploration aspect. While the game's visual design is fantastic in other areas, it falls short when it comes to the landscapes, which all end up feeling samey and visually uninteresting, which makes it hard to get too excited about discovering new frontiers. Then there's the combat, an incredibly mundane clicking affair devoid of any tactics. Without anything fun to do with the products, crafting feels unexciting and cooking is just a way to ensure you live long enough to do more uninteresting things. And there aren't even that many uninteresting things to do, considering the wide open world that you have at your fingertips, because despite the massive worlds and large variety of resources and enemies, you'll only ever perform a very narrow range of activities (especially if you don't pore over the wikis for some of the more obscure and potentially interesting possibilities). After all, the game's title doesn't conjure up a world of possibilities and potential. It's Don't Starve, a direct and mundane label that speaks volumes to the ultimately unrewarding experience that the game offers.

Reposted from my site, www.theschemehatchery.com