Don’t Starve Together
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Player 1 has Joined
Don’t Starve Together is an exercise in iterative, catastrophic failure. It’s a unstable house of cards built on a poorly balanced washing machine; a delicate Gruyere souffle baking in a steel furnace. It is keeping fifty plates spinning while a roided-up Jack Russell terrier attempts to shave your eyebrows with a miniature jackhammer.
In short: a game where it is extremely easy to fuck up and, my god, will you fuck up. You will burn down the house and it will be your fault. The upside is you will have a ton of fun in the process; welcome solace as you sit in the gently cooling ashes of what was, until recently, your favourite tent / goat / forest.
Don’t Starve Together is an open world survival game. This genre generally involves dropping you into a vast, unfamiliar and hostile world and tasking you with crafting, cooking, and fighting your way to a slightly less early grave than you would otherwise have occupied.
Don’t Starve Together fully embraces this, and adds the joy of shared failure with a friend in split-screen; together with a welcome layer of irreverent humour and colour to the drab and serious offerings of other members of the genre.
The game is presented in isometric 2D. Basic controls have you running around the world, picking up items, and performing basic interactions like “kill”.
The bottom of the screen is your inventory; personal storage that you will immediately fill with stone, rotting meatballs, wood, axes, flower headdresses, and live moles. Some items can be equipped (like hats or watermelons) and give you additional actions or some passive effect (like rain protection or having a watermelon on your head).
The side area is for crafting. Crafting recipes require some amount of materials: an axe needs a twig and piece of flint (just like real life). Basic items usually require things found on the ground; more advanced recipes need items from defeated monsters or other crafted things: a tent requires one rope and six spider webs (just like real life).
Once you have grasped movement, interaction and crafting, the only remaining task is to not die. The game gleefully provides three ways to die:
- Lose all your health (usually from being eaten by dogs or being set on fire)
- Starve to death (usually from not eating the food)
- Go insane (from spending too long in the dark or seeing other players eaten by dogs, set on fire, or starving to death)
Player 2 has Joined
The degree to which Tong adored this game completely blindsided me. Survival games have a well-deserved reputation for being impenetrable. They are exercises in trial and error, where error can put you back ten hours or more. However, Don’t Starve balances failure with enjoyable moment-to-moment gameplay; the cycle of start→gather →build →hope→painful death is not disheartening when you’re having fun the whole time.
The game expertly presents you a new challenge each time you grasp the current one. Starting in daytime in autumn, we died on the first night from night terrors. After mastering fire, we survived just long enough for the food to run out. Once we understood cooking, we barrelled straight through to winter where we promptly froze to death. Crafting warm coats allowed us to keenly observe how our crops stopped growing in winter, reacquainting us with starvation.
The controls came to Tong easily. There is little complex execution required here. The difficulty derives from discovering and remembering things about the world; what ingredients make meatballs, when not to chop down a tree, what that mysterious rumbling means (hint: it means death by crushing). We also had no problem with motion sickness.
Can you share it?
Absolutely. I believe we have put more hours into this game than any other. The shared exploration and experimentation is deeply rewarding. Each new world is randomly generated so you are always unsure what you might find. Even though death comes often, Don’t Starve Together provides co-op specific ways for you to revive your fallen friend; you muddle forward together.
We played the game on PS4. It hints heavily that the paid PS+ subscription is required for multiplayer, but this is not the case for local split-screen. Simply select “Offline” for everything and you can jump straight in.
The urge to play this game with Google at your side is strong; there is so much unknown, and this is fine. However, I would implore you to balance this with chaotic experimentation. Reading a guide gives you efficiency at the cost of fun; failure and bewilderment are integral to the game. Embrace failure fully, and you will find surviving in this hostile and unknown world together an enormously rewarding experience.
Don’t Starve Together is developed by Klei Entertainment and is available on PS4, Xbox One, Windows, OSX and Linux among others.
