Review: Don’t Starve
Don’t Starve is a beautiful son of a bitch. Unfortunately the emphasis is very heavily on son of a bitch. I promised myself after last week’s review of FTL I would pick a game to review that I actually had a chance in hell of beating and after hearing good things about this isometric survival game I decided to give it a go.
I’ve already said that Don’t Starve is beautiful, this game has, when you first load it up and begin a game, a really gorgeous aesthetic that gives the game an ineffable charm. The audio design has a similar effect, replacing expensive and unnecessary voice work with a collection of instruments to represent each of the main characters.
Oh boy are there characters, eight of them in total though two are “secret” the remaining six are unlocked by an XP system, of all things, though in reality it seems to operate more like a score. Effectively you need this many points to unlock the second character and so on. It’s a system that feel somewhat out of place but is a good way of adding a reward that also adds replayability.
The game is developed by Klei games, creators of n+, shank and last year’s magnificent Mark of the Ninja. They have a knack for making games that represent the peak of their genre and with a difficulty tuned just the right side of challenging. Don’t Starve may very well change that reputation.
One of the trickiest things to master in games is the balance between real risk and perceived risk a good example of this is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the rabbit is perceived as low risk but is actually incredibly deadly, the opposite is played out with the Black Knight who looks intimidating but is ultimately useless. Games tend to err on the side of real risk over perceived risk; after all there are only so many times you can respawn with no negative effects before you realise it really doesn’t matter if your character dies.
The problem with that approach is that as a designer you need to have enough real risk to allow the players to perceive risk where there is none. If you set about trying to kill the player every chance you get it ceases to be fun for the player and they can switch off. Don’t Starve strays too close to adversarial far too often to be a truly enjoyable experience. Once you master regular survival you might find the story mode (emphasis on might) and then you start a new game within a game, all of your progress surviving is saved outside of the story and you are pretty much back to scratch.
It’s an interesting problem Don’t Starve has created for itself, it’s not enough of a sandbox to compete with a game like Minecraft, which you can play indefinitely. But it’s also a survival game, one that ultimately needs to be infinite or have an end goal; I don’t know if the developers realised this late in the development cycle or just delayed and delayed but ultimately the adventure mode feels like an appendage to the game. It speaks volumes that the adventure mode was, at one point, a separate game mode altogether that was only added two months ago and was then forced into the survival game a month later.
Don’t starve is an unusual game, and one of the first games to have been truly influenced by the development cycle of Minecraft. The problem is that it still feels like a game in beta, if this game were due for release in the late Summer, this would be a glowing review of a game four months from completion. Maybe you should give it six months and have a second look.
Don’t Starve isn’t bad by any real means, but it feels incomplete. Like it needed that bit of extra time to refine its ideas into a cohesive whole instead of a disjointed mismatch of two games in one. A bit more time to refine the adversarial nature of the game itself, right now it feels like the game wants to win too badly for it to be truly fun.
At the very least, it’s beaten me.
6/10
