Don’t Starve: Nintendo Switch Edition

Genre: Survival Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Don’t Starve is a Survival Adventure-style game where players take the role of a scientist transported to a hostile wilderness where he must scavenge resources to survive and eventually find a way to escape.

I’ll cut straight to one of the most important things you need to know right now – this is a difficult, unforgiving game, and one that absolutely refuses to hold players’ hands in any way. What do you need to do? Figure it out. How do you do it? Not telling. Aww, did you die again? Tough luck, now start over from the beginning.

For some, this freedom from instruction and high challenge level is invigorating, but for many, it is a recipe for pure frustration, especially in a game that makes it very easy to die in different ways, and boots you back to the beginning of its potentially long play time when you do. Even veterans of the genre find this last bit to be irksome – it’s one thing to have death stalk you at every turn, but another to repeatedly be made to replay through the game’s early progression of building up your tools and technology through repetitive actions, with a wrong step making you potentially lose hours of progress depending on just how far into the game you are.

I found the actual physical act of moving around and acting in the game’s randomized world to be cumbersome and not very fun, in part due to a control scheme that felt, to me, really clunky. It doesn’t help that this game doesn’t support the touchscreen in handheld mode. Not that it would help much – in handheld mode, the game’s interface is noticeably tiny.

In terms of presentation, this game features a hand-drawn, desaturated art style that many have compared to Tim Burton’s films, along with a subdued soundtrack and sounds that have a cacophony of musical notes standing in for the player character’s voice. I admit that the presentation doesn’t really appeal to me, but at the very least it’s distinctive enough to set this game apart.

The Nintendo Switch version of the game includes content from the original game as well as the Shipwrecked and Reign of Giants expansions, for those looking to further explore a wider variety of dangerous worlds.

It’s probably obvious from the tone of this review, but I’m not a fan of Don’t Starve. I know this game has its fans, and for those looking for a challenging game that does absolutely nothing to hold the player’s hand, I can see this game being very appealing. But for the majority of players, this game’s unforgiving nature and lack of instruction will just be a cause for frustration.

tl;dr – Don’t Starve is a Survival Adventure that puts the player in the role of a scientist transported to a hostile wilderness, scrounging for resources to survive. This is a difficult, unforgiving game to the point that most will find it too frustrating. Some may appreciate its lack of hand-holding, but the majority of players will do well to skip this one.

Grade: C-

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