Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Try Not To Starve While Playing Don't Starve!

I’m not entirely sure how to classify Don’t Starve using videogame taxonomy.  Is it a survival horror game?  A puzzle game?  A sim-game?  An exploratory game?  An RPG?  A Rogue-a-like?  It has elements of all of these genres to it, but none of them accurately describe it.  At its core there’s a certain madness, a certain lack of concern with genre.  This isn’t a game that’s trying to find a niche audience and exploit it.  It’s a gesture, an attempt to create something new and interesting, something personal that the developers clearly wanted to design not for a particular audience, but for themselves and, along the way, anyone else who might be interested.  It’s a work of art in the purest sense, and there’s something marvelous about it.

Oh, it’s also a hellish engine for frustrating the living balls off me.

The core conceit of Don’t Starve is that you, an anonymous every-gentle-man scientist, wake up in a strange new world populated by strange new creatures.  You have nothing but the hair on your head and the clothes on your back.  From there, the title of the game says it all: you’re tasked simply with surviving.  You also earn experience to unlock new characters with new qualities, like youthful pyromaniacs and slow-witted 1920s era strongmen.  Survive longer to earn more experience points.  Simple enough.  These are the games only rules.  Oh, there’s a bigger quest to “win” by returning to home, but I haven’t come anywhere near completing it yet.  I’ve been way too busy dying.

This is where Don’t Starve gets interesting: surviving, the seemingly simple task, is anything but.  At its core, surviving just means making a fire each night and keeping food in your belly.  But as you continue to play, resources quickly become scarce.  Rapid deforestation can make finding firewood a real chore.  Those berries take a while to grow back, and collecting all of them can take days.  Getting rabbits to run into traps?  No mean feat.  And then there’s stone and gold, the two late-game resources which quickly become important.  Stone is easy enough to find, but gold, necessary for building new pieces of technology that ease survival (and later in the game, are necessary for survival) is scarce.  And until you find some gold, you’re going to have trouble getting much done, between crappy tools that break regularly and limited inventory space.

This slow tech creep is something you have to endure each time you begin a new round of Don’t Starve.  It’s part of the game, part of resolving the punishing system of limited resources, because those technological advances are absolutely critical in allowing you to survive.  Once you’ve got a set of metal tools, you’ll be able to make longer forays out into the world and accomplish more with the world’s limited daylight.  You don’t want to be away from your camp at night.  Once you’ve got a backpack, you can go on longer expeditions without returning to base, carrying more food with you on your way back and more raw materials with you on your way home.  Once you can build walls, you no longer have to live in fear of treepeople following you home during a routine wood-chopping trip and savaging you in your camp come nightfall.  Armor will make fighting those Hounds way easier.  Farms give you a place to put all that manure you’ve been finding near those Beefalo.  Chests let you store all that extra firewood you’ve been chopping.

Eventually the desperate slog for survival can become a tired routine spent farming, checking traps, fertilizing bushes and leaving your compound to collect firewood and chop trees.  But even after you’ve reached this sort of homeostasis, the game will throw you curve balls.  The aforementioned Hounds might come for you one morning.  The Pig Men you’ve been camping near for protection might become were-pigs and begin attacking you.  A lightning strike might burn down the berry bushes you’ve been digging up and replanting inside your protective walls, turning them to worthless ash.

And when these things go wrong, when you’re forced to deal with rapidly changing circumstances, that’s when the game gets interesting.  The night you wander too far from your makeshift camp and have to set up a temporary base in the woods becomes a desperate battle for your life against a horde of spiders you didn’t know were nearby when you set up your camp.  And then you have to make decisions like “Do I take a torch and run into the night in the hope that the spiders give up, do I stand my ground, or do I set fire to the woods and hope that it deals with the spider nest?”

There’s no right answer, and there are upsides and downsides to every plan.  But these are the choices you have to make, usually at a split second.  The longer term decisions, the ones you can mull over, are things like “Do I leap into the maw of that worm-hole and see where it goes?” or “Is digging out that cave and going inside worth the trouble?”  But there’s a wonderful diversity of action, and a wonderful set of things that can go tremendously wrong in the world.  And the learning curve revolves around making mistakes and learning just how each thing can go wrong.  I didn’t know the value of building walls until the Hounds came for me the first time.  They ran me down easily, mercilessly, quickly, left my corpse and all its varied equipment laying around.  I didn’t know about the importance of building a lightning rod until lightning burned down half my camp, robbing me of the bulk of the food-producing bushes that I’d spent the previous two weeks of game time acquiring.  I didn’t realize it was a bad idea to dig up graves until I nearly lost my mind after being chased across the map by a ghost.  Sleeping seemed harmless enough until I woke up nearly starving the next day.

Each death is a learning experience, but it’s not a learning experience in the context of a conventional RPG in that there is no enduring progress (spare that new characters, with new quirks, are unlocked) only an array of experiences to draw off of, to inform my play.  For example, I now know the importance of camping within walking distance of Beefalo, who are almost always near tall grass and are an abundant source of manure, a crucial resource for farming and a ready and effective source of fuel.  I know that the best way to actually get rid of one of the fucking horrifying tree people that will sometimes follow you is to run them into a herd of enemies - in fact, if you run them into a recurring spawn you can use trees to generate a never-ending stream of potentially useful materials and resources that monsters generate.  I accidentally ran an awoken treeperson to a sinkhole I’d opened up, exposing an endless stream of bats to the world.  The treeperson not only stopped chasing me, but began guarding the sinkhole and providing me with a steady supply of bat parts I could use as a food source.

Perhaps Don’t Starve could best be described as an ecosystem simulator.  You’re a disruptive element in this ecosystem, and your goal is to become as harmonious as possible with the ecosystem itself, eventually achieving ultimate harmony by removing yourself from said ecosystem.  You can find ways to exploit this ecosystem to your advantage, but for the most part it’s simply a collection of hazards.  These hazards can produce resources, sure, but if you treat fighting like farming and fishing, you won’t last long in the world of Don’t Starve.  

Come to think of it, you probably won’t last long anyway.  Don’t Starve will murder you with the same aplomb you’d expect from a Rogue-a-like, though without any of the permissive starting conditions that make re-starting in a Rogue-a-like so palatable.  In place of ease of access is narrative: a dynamic narrative that, more often than not, rewards effort with interesting play or, barring that, an interesting death.  I will say that every time I’ve lasted over a week in Don’t Starve, my death has been both edifying and hilarious.  At this point, I’m not sure I want any more of a game.

There’s also quite a bit to be said for the price tag.  Don’t Starve is a paltry fifteen bucks.  Paired with regular updates, proudly telegraphed by a friendly clock in the game’s main menu, Don’t Starve is engaged in a process of constant evolution that is all but unheard of for a game with that modest a price.  Changes to the game so far have varied from caves filled with horrible beasts to new characters to weather.  I’m unsure of what will come next, but given the distinct care which has gone into shaping Don’t Starve to date, I’m sure it will be impressive, whatever it is.  Check it out, if you haven’t yet.  It’s readily downloadable on Steam.