When night falls - its arrival heralded by a ticking, colour-coded countdown clock in the corner of the screen - you'd best be sure you've got the material needed to build a fire. You get what you're given - and what you're given often isn't very much.Īt first you'll sustain yourself with berries and seeds, maybe a carrot swiped before a rabbit - one of the few creatures that won't murder you - can scoff it. Don't Starve is a world of washed-out colour that feels like you're watching the action through a veil of black gauze. In Minecraft, the world is your resource, and you get to flex your creative muscles in reshaping it. It's a familiar progression, and one that eases you in relatively gently.ĭon't Starve is much more ruthless and bleak than Mojang's procedural worlds, however. Very quickly you're able to craft an axe, which allows you to fell trees and harvest wood, which lets you craft a pickaxe, enabling you to start mining rock.

Cast as a gentleman scientist, banished to a mysterious and hostile hinterland after striking a deal with a demon for forbidden knowledge, you'll start by gathering twigs, grass and bits of flint from the ground. Don't Be An Idiot would be better, if less marketable, title.Īs with many of the modern crop of survival games, Don't Starve grows from a Minecraft seed, but it flowers into something very different. Not once has it felt like the game has treated me unfairly. That feeling - knowing something is a terrible mistake, yet still feeling compelled to try it anyway - persists throughout Don't Starve and is one of its best features, since it proves that survival really is up to you.

Each has their own strengths and weaknesses. There are two more playable characters, unlocked the longer you survive. It was my hubris that led me to take on a gang of frogs - ****ing frogs - confident that I could do more damage to them, en masse, than they could do to me with their stupid sticky tongues and fat rubbery thighs. It was me who reckoned I could kill a Beefalo with my feeble flint axe and be away with its meat before its family noticed. It was my idiotic notion that I could swipe a Tallbird egg for me tea. And yet I still wandered around its ominous yet charming randomly generated maps, blundering into the paths of creatures and then goading them into deadly action like an inept Bear Grylls. Don't Starve is a game that you prod with sticks, gingerly testing each new thing you discover to see what is dangerous. Thing is, responsibility for each death rested undeniably with me. In my most shameful moment, I was done in by frogs. A later game came to an abrupt and ignoble halt when a herd of Beefalo took it in turns to trample me into the dirt. Next, I was pecked and kicked to death by Tallbirds. My first game ended almost immediately after I was hacked to death by territorial Pig Men. I came close once or twice, but every time my demise came from the local wildlife.

I have died many, many times in Don't Starve, and not once was my cause of death mere starvation. It makes you start the game thinking that your main concern will be acquiring ample food reserves, but that's not the case. That title seems so helpful, pretty much doubling as a minimalist player's guide, but it misleads you, dear reader. Klei Entertainment's survival sim is a tricky one. Klei Entertainment's whimsical survival sim comes to console, with all its punishing intensity intact.

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