Don't Starve Review

Don’t Starve is a triumph of both aesthetics and gameplay. All of the aspects in the game are perfectly tuned for its theme of survival, and its style is undoubtedly influenced by Tim Burton and goth-chic. Overall, it’s an experience that can swallow you up for hours, that pulls you in with its style and keeps you there with the gameplay.

At first, my experience with Don’t Starve was a rather mixed bag. Similar to Minecraft and other ‘survival’ indie games, one of the game’s primary elements is that there is no direction at first. You are literally placed on an island and told ‘Don’t Starve’. At first, the gameplay is an exercise in uncomfortable experimentation, gathering things you’re not sure if you need.

Another reason my first experience with Don’t Starve was rather mixed is because of the style. From the get-go, the game is clearly made to appeal to those who love Tim Burton and all things goth-chic. The creepy-cartoony style is certainly unique, but for some people this could be a turn off. I myself was unsure how to feel about the style, feeling that cartoony-creepy has been overdone for many of the wrong reasons as of late. However, as my hours with the game stacked up, I ended up loving the game for its stand-out themes and aesthetics. The graphics do grow on you and eventually I started to love the game’s hand-crafted, animated feel.

Thanks to the aforementioned initial confusion, when you first start playing the game you will probably die a lot. However, each death in the game feels meaningful, not least thanks to the XP system which awards points on each death, points that reward you with new characters to play and experiment with.  With each death, you can change the game, you are making progress. You definitely feel a process of learning and growth coming along. Thanks to an in-game Morgue, you can see the reasons for your death and how long you lasted, giving you a sense of progress. Some credit should also be offered to the game’s procedural generation, which creates a different island each time for you to play in, which allows for every playthrough of the game to feel new in some way or form. Thanks to the clever use of procedural generation, this game never quite feels stale. It always feels like it could offer something new.

Success in Don’t Starve is determined by experimentation and study. Playing this game is useful with a wiki, to try and understand the ins and outs of the game’s systems, which are surprisingly deep for a game that looks like this. Thanks to the systems, the game feels like it could be mastered, it feels like you can find a better way to survive. However, a tutorial or two, with maybe some quick tips may not have gone amiss, but on the other hand, it can be argued that this goes against the very style of the game.

One of the main positives of this game is the value proposition. Given the right attitude, you could sink hundreds of hours into this game and still find enjoyment. My fiancé plays this game religiously, having herself spent over 200 hours in this game. Thanks to procedural generation, the game doesn’t ever feel old and if you get bored of a world you can easily generate a more interesting one in a matter of seconds.

The game’s style also wins you over in this respect. The graphics are painstakingly well-done to appear hand-crafted and it’s clear that the art style was a labour of love, making the worlds of Don’t Starve a place you want to be.

Gameplay wise, the controls work fine. There is gamepad support, but I prefer keyboard and mouse. Sometimes there can be a few issues, such as when you’re trying to perform an action on a specific object that is obscured by other objects in the game mode, which can lead to a frustrating experience. Still, the controls are solid and work well overall, with no real complaints.  

In terms of sound design, the game shows even more commitment to the Tim Burton aesthetic. Some of Don’t Starve’s style really shows through strongly here; each character is given a different ‘theme instrument’, that plays when they talk in game; text shows up showing what the character is saying, and an instrument plays to give the impression of their voice. The first character, Wilson, is ‘voiced’ by a trumpet, Wolfgang, a strongman character, is ‘voiced’ by a tuba. This works to give interesting personality to the characters without even needing voice work, which was a stroke of stylistic genius on the part of the developer. The music is good and fits in well with the style and the ambient noises are wonderful. At night, you really do feel the terror of unspeakable horrors hiding in the dark thanks to genuinely spooky ambient noises, and the sound effects all work perfectly in the context of the game. Sometimes, the sound design can frustratingly throw you a curveball, however, many times I’ve mistaken an ally in the game for a terrifying enemy thanks to him making a sudden unexplained sound, but this adds to the paranoid and phobic essence of the game; making you distrust your senses.

One negative to the game is that when you’re playing mid-to-late game, things can take a turn for the boring. You can get trapped in a rhythm of doing the same things to keep yourself from starving and you can really feel like you’ve hit a routine that’s gotten boring. The game world stops surprising you and you just hit a kind of purgatory at this moment. However, this is addressed by the fact that you can always regenerate a new, and more interesting world in seconds thanks to the game’s clever procedural generation, at the cost of starting anew without late-game items. Furthermore, there is a certain joy and contentment to be found in having felt like you’ve ‘mastered’ your world, and you certainly feel the achievements that you get in the game.

Another negative is that Don’t Starve is punishingly difficult, sometimes to the point it can cause a definite rage in even the calmest of gamers. There is a lot of frustration in some of the deaths which can feel quite cheap and sudden, and the fact that the game is permadeath, you lose everything including your world and items whenever you die, only makes it more rage inducing on occasion. This is all central to the game’s design, yes, and you can certainly see the attraction that such difficulty has for the theme, but its frustration factor definitely is one of the harder pills to swallow.

One of the biggest positives to this game is that it runs really well. I have a fairly poor laptop for gaming and it runs no problem. There is usually no struggle with performance issues in this game. It loads fairly quickly, runs smoothly and there are no complaints to be had. It’s not an intensive game by any means but the gameplay rewards you can reap make it far, far more than worth its feather-light weight in terms of performance.

There is no argument that if you can enjoy the love-it-or-hate-it Tim Burton style and can get past the occasional frustration, when you buy Don’t Starve, you are buying a game you will be coming back to for hours. The game is a veritable triumph of style and of gameplay, where the different aspects of the game just work well. 

I would recommend this game for those wanting a fun survival game experience, and for those who enjoy the Tim Burton art style. If you are like me and don't have a next-gen computing machine, a game like this makes for a lot of fun that's easy on your computer as well!