By Santiago Vazquez
Don’t starve by is a rogue-like survival game with a 3/4ths perspective that allows you to rotate the camera angle. This game is meant to be challenging and does not offer a tutorial for the player. Once you inevitably die in this game, the game is over and the cycle begins anew. However, since this game immediately leaves you by yourself to survive, it feels kind of liberating and the thought of few objectives (survive and unlock new characters) allows the player to really explore the game.
The game has paper-cut out art style to and it looks quite majestic. However, the game looks very threatening. Because of its gothic-inspired look, the game is all the more intimidating. Furthermore, a lot of the mobs and characters in this game may look friendly at first glance, but they can turn very creepy. For example, Woodie may look like a normal lumberjack, but make him chop enough wood and he will turn into a were-beaver. You can give a harmless pig four pieces of monster meat and they will become into a were-pig. There are also snow wolves, black wolves, spiders, and other monsters mixed into to make the game even more terrifying.
The gameplay cycle is fairly simple: explore and gather materials during the day, survive and make a fire during the night. Once you find an ideal place (beefalo spawn areas with some trees and berry bushes) you can put a permanent campfire down and start gathering your materials. There are many ways this can go wrong, however… For example, a pack of wolves comes to attack you every 9 days. Furthermore, new DLC (Downloadable Content) added to the game allows for gigantic creatures to come and attack you in some of the seasons (ex: Deerclops, Bearger, etc.) that can destroy most of your structures. During the winter beefalo will start to attack you in order to protect their children. These are a few of the countless ways you can die.
There have been some additions to the game like Don’t Starve: Reign of Giants, Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked, and Don’t Starve Together. Reign of Giants included the addition of giant monsters coming to attack you every season (except for the first season you experience) and Shipwrecked allows the player to travel island to island through different types of boats. However, the best addition to the game is Don’t Starve Together which allows players to create their own servers easily and play it with their friends. This new version allows allows players to revive each other so that when you die, it isn’t over. You are also allowed to ride beefalo.
The new additions to the game really make it better. However, when it first came out it really wasn’t very good. This is because the game was more repetitive as you mostly just needed to survive from wolves and the occasional Tall Bird. The game has really grown over the years into what it is today. I am glad to still play it today because the stakes get higher every day, I will lose more things every day, and I feel more anxiety every day. For example, I played this game many times and died countless times. Once I was on day 30 and died because of a deerclops and another time I just starting out and died because of a wolf on day 9. Each time I died I felt anxiety before I died and felt sort of sad when I did die. This game really makes you feel something every time you lose. However, the only thing you get is the memories of those times.
I think this game really grew from a 7/10 when it first came out to a 9.5/10 now. It is really fun and challenging game. The only problem is that not many people have/know about the game so I can only experience the game by myself.
