Don't Starve - Wilderness Survival Game

**KazuhLLL** · 12-12-2012, 09:56 PM

Has anyone else played this?

You play as Wilson, an intrepid Gentleman Scientist who has been trapped by a demon and transported to a mysterious wilderness world. Wilson must learn to exploit his environment and its inhabitants if he ever hopes to escape and find his way back home.

It's currently in Beta, but new updates are being pushed every two weeks or less. As the name suggests, the whole purpose is to avoid starving for as long as possible, and despite possibly looking Minecraft-esqu (crafting, axe, pick, shovel, etc.) it's quite different in many ways. It's a single-player survival game, so you're expected to die eventually--it's just a matter of when. Unlike Minecraft, you cannot build a shelter of any kind without using very unconventional methods, and you cannot sleep through the night without a one-time-use item that's pretty resource-heavy to make. You have two meters--health and hunger (although a sanity meter is probably going to be release in the next update or two). Hunger constantly drains and health doesn't regenerate without eating something. There are also monsters--spiders, hellhounds, Krampus, swamp tentacles, and a few others--that you can either avoid entirely or go through the trouble of killing in order to get craftable items.

Those are the basics. If you want to know more you can go to their official website here or you can visit their forums here.

The official game isn't set to release until "late March 2013" and the developers have promised post-launch updates for at least six months afterwards, so this game has a long way to go. Having an extremely low-end laptop, I don't get the chance to play as many games as I'd like, and this is one of the few that mine can run. Between the art style and lack of achievable goals, it's definitely not for everyone, but I'd suggest at least giving the demo a try (you can play 2-3 in-game days). It's currently on sale on Steam $11.99 for two copies of the game.