[PLAYTHRU REVIEW] Don’t Starve

The GameSparked Team

Joe teaches Myles the first rule of wilderness survival: Don’t Starve.

[REVIEW] Don’t Starve

Blaine Arcade
(PC [REVIEWED])

Don’t Starve is a game that tasks you with doing just that, and in the process of filling your stomach, you will find a whole host of other ‘don’t’ goals to occupy your time: don’t go near that fanged growling thing by the rocks, don’t consume that evil-looking blossom, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, don’t defile that grave, don’t go mad, don’t try and steal the bee’s honey, and don’t even approach the cute little frogs.  It is a game full of bad ideas, but luckily, most of them are presented as opportunities and not gameplay issues.

Personally, most of the praise I give this game is because of the quirky art style.  Looking something like the flip-book doodles from Edgar Allen Poe’s diary, or perhaps the day dreams of a ten-year-old H.P. Lovecraft, Don’t Starve offers a host of disturbing creatures and environments rendered so well that they almost appear to be carved into a wooden mantle over some nineteenth century fireplace.  The merging of cartoonish and spine-chilling is a perfect fit for the silly and dangerous monsters inhabiting the world.  All of this is further enriched by crisp sound design full of whispering footsteps, horrid beastly screeches, and crackling fires.

The game itself combines a number of familiar elements and abilities to aid in your satiating of Wilson, the gentleman scientist you start off with.  A stomach meter measures how hungry you are, while a heart meter and brain meter manage your health and sanity.  Sanity works in much the same way it did in the game Amnesia: the Dark Descent; if your mental health takes too much of a dip you will begin to hallucinate more monsters.  The major difference is that if your sanity goes too low, the hallucinations will gain the ability to physically attack you.  Each meter must be watched closely, as the depletion of any of them is extremely bad news for the pointy-haired Wilson.  Hunger can be fended off, and health restored, by foraging for food in the wilderness.  If you want your food to last longer and be more effective, you can cook it over a campfire.

This is where the game started to get difficult for me.  While I must admit I’m not much for micromanagement games like this, Don’t Starve does seem to suffer from a gap in its progression.  There seems to be two distinct phases of ‘not starving’.  For now, let’s call these phases ‘surviving’ and ‘living’.  The surviving phase sees you running around wildly, uprooting carrots, pulling clothes and armor off skeletons, and searching for enough rocks to build a fire pit.  The living phase has you as a master of the land, growing crops, managing several camps, keeping pets, storing goods, and building a host of interesting machines like thermometers and lightning rods.  The gap between these two phases introduces an awkward period of play time where the player isn’t entirely sure what should be done next.  The only blueprints available may be for science machines that are useless during that season.  For example, I had the ability to build a thermometer before I could construct sleeping mats or a tent.  The game would be greatly aided by a more natural progression that saw Wilson’s technology advancing in much the same way primordial man’s did.

The game prides itself on its difficulty.  If you die, unless you’ve required one of a very few ways to resurrect, your game is over.  You could survive for a thousand in-game days and one errant strike of a spiked frog tongue could end it all.  In this way it may prove a tad harsh for some gamers.  While Dark Souls similarly punished players, it often rewarded them with stunning boss battles and story development where Don’t Starve merely tells you to keep at it or shuffle off the mortal coil.  There’s a distinct lack of accomplishment while playing that may make you stop in the middle of a four hour play session and ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’

It would also benefit from an in-game encyclopedia.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the game to provide the knowledge of what items actually do instead of letting you waste many of them in your efforts to figure them out.  Difficulty can always be added in more meaningful ways, like tougher enemies or more barren landscapes.  Handling confusion as part of your game is a tricky and ill-advised strategy; it’s better to just let Wilson have a little wildlife guide and be done with it.  After all, it’s not like he can eat that, even with some delicious butterfly wings and beard trimmings to top it off.

Ultimately, Don’t Starve delivers what it promises.  If you succeed, you will keep on living.  Its art is something that warrants a few play sessions at the very least, and the simple fun of hunting, gathering, and making fire is present throughout.  Thanks to the random generation of its worlds, each desperate struggle to wrap your jaws around something will offer a different arrangement of land, trees, and supplies.  Even with all this in your favor, I suspect you might find the game has ‘ended’ for you when you’re living comfortably and well-fed in one of your many shelters and, all of a sudden, you just get a craving for a game that’s less like a pile of raw unidentified mushrooms and more like a funnel cake.

[NEWS] Minecraft Breaks XBLA Sales Records

Nate Andrews

Minecraft takes a certain level of creativity and imagination to fully enjoy. My experience with the game has been quite limited due to me not really having what it takes to make something truly awesome in the open world, though apparently a lot of Xbox 360 owners do. A lot. So many, in fact, that Minecraft not only made a profit within an hour of being available but also broke every Xbox LIVE Arcade sales record.

There are over 400,000 players listed on the game’s leaderboards, according to Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of Minecraft, . Microsoft isn’t known to release sales data for Arcade titles, though Xbox LIVE’s Major Nelson did back this up.

That’s a lot of people. Given the popularity of the game on PC, these numbers probably aren’t all that surprising, and the game seems well on its way to nearing one million sales. Maybe now’s the time to revisit Minecraft if it was previously off-putting to see if any progress can be made in matching the quality of the utterly insane creations that people have conjured up. Either that, or you could just set fire to a friend’s property and chuckle. Whichever works.

[REVIEW] Terraria

Jonathan Tay

(PC [REVIEWED])

Throughout your journeys on the internet, you might have heard that Terraria is basically a 2D version of Minecraft. If you haven’t, let me tell you that Terraria is basically a 2D version of Minecraft. If you know anything about Minecraft, you’ll probably think that this is a very, very good thing. Is it? Read on to find out!

The first thing you’ll probably notice about Terraria is its art style. The game goes for the increasingly-trending 16-bit aesthetic, and manages to pull it off quite superbly. The character and enemy models look like something that you could find if you played a game like Chrono Trigger, while the animations themselves are fluid and silky smooth. The real beauty, however, comes from the environment. Terraria’s graphics are, in a word, reminiscent of other games of its ilk – but that’s as far as it goes. The game evokes an uncanny valley-type effect, but uses that to its advantage. What I mean by this is that the game looks familiar enough to evoke feelings of warm nostalgia, but different enough so that the game possesses a distinct style. This comes at the price of a somewhat long initial world-building time, but believe me, it’s well worth it.

The next thing that might catch your eye – or ear, in this case – is the soundtrack. I don’t know what to say about it other than that it’s…appropriate. Oh, and small. You’ll constantly hear the same handful of songs from the game’s 13-track album, such as the music for the Overworld or underground. The music that plays during the day is filled with whimsy and energy, yet still manages to be laid-back. The track that plays during the night, however, manages to be both calm and suspenseful – and it fits. Looking at the brilliant night sky can be a soothing and exhilarating experience, but the horde of zombies outside your door might be a wee bit troubling. The music for boss fights is appropriately awesome – even if you don’t plan on purchasing the game (shame on you!), you should look it up!

That last sentence might have tipped my hand, so I’ll just cut to the chase and talk about the actual gameplay. When you first start, you’ll be able to create and customize a character. For a 16-bit game, the options are surprisingly deep – the obsessed among us will surely get a kick out of specifying the exact amount of red, green, and blue in almost every aspect of their characters. Next, you’ll have to create a world, which is considerably simpler. You get three options: small, medium, or large, which are pretty self-explanatory.

This fellow probably wants “large”.

After you spend what feels like a year actually loading the world, you’ll finally get to play. Incidentally, save and load times afterwards are much shorter. The controls are really simple, but a bit frustrating to wrestle with in the first few minutes. After you pick them up, though, they’ll become second-nature. Minecraft vets (and I know that there are a lot of you!), you know what to do from here. You begin the game with three items in your inventory: a pickaxe for mining, an axe for cutting wood, and a shortsword for hitting things. Equipping items is easy, and using them involves a simple click.

A big part of the game involves using natural resources, such as wood or iron, to craft items. Crafting in Terraria is relatively simple in comparison to Minecraft. You won’t have to arrange your materials in a certain way – merely having them in your inventory and clicking on what you want to craft in a menu is sufficient. And boy, will you craft a lot. Whether you’re using clay to make bricks for a house or smelting silver ore to make some armour, there’s always something new to create.

Making things isn’t really an optional activity, however – you’ll need to do it in order to survive. Monsters roam around at night, threatening anyone foolish enough to take a causal stroll in the dark. Building a small house is enough to protect you from the majority of Terraria’s hostile denizens… but as you know, it has never been in our nature to stay on the defence. A large bevy of weapons and armour are available to you, ranging from swords that can make stars fall from the sky, to the garments of Hylian hero, Link. You’ll most likely use these on your adventures into the underground, or when facing bosses.

You might even end up using your equipment to fight other players. All that’s needed for Terraria’s multiplayer is for someone to set up a server, and for other people to join. From there, you can set up teams, enable PvP, or just mess around with someone else’s world. It’ll probably get lonely when you only have the games’ (bad) AI to keep you company, after all.

A typical multiplayer game of Terraria.

At this point you might be wondering, “What is the point of Terraria? What is my goal? What am I supposed to do?” Well, depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a variety of different answers. One of my friends told me that all she wanted to do was get the best equipment and beat all of the bosses in the game. When a friend and I were playing, our goal was to build a stairway to heaven – and we did! Too bad we didn’t see any Led Zeppelins up there. *gets ready for tomato throwing .gifs*

From these small anecdotes, you might see the main draw of Terraria: it’s the game that YOU want it to be. It’s a hybrid of platformer, action-adventure, and RPG, all wrapped up in a box of LEGO. Satisfying your creativity is your main objective. You can build castles in the sky, cities underground, buff up your character, fight in gang wars with and against your friends, bury AIs alive…whatever! It is this aspect of the game that will hook you and keep you playing for hours and hours. The canvas is set up; the paint is ready. All you need to do is let your imagination run loose.

…

But for the love of God, please don’t kill the bunnies.