Don't Starve - Get lost, scared, cold, tired, and hungry

The first, and perhaps most important lesson I learned while playing Don't Starve: Pocket Edition is this - don't punch beehives.

I mean, that's a lesson that I learned in real life a couple of years ago, but open-world survive 'em ups are all about pushing against boundaries.

The second lesson I learned is that the darkness can kill you. Literally. My fire went out, I wandered slightly to the left to get some grass and I was consumed. That's a good word. Consumed.

The third lesson that I learned is that not starving is the least of your worries.

The game drops you into a randomly generated world and gives you a single task - survive. How you do that is, ostensibly, up to you.

You need to forage for food and equipment. You'll need twigs and grass to make a torch, lumps of flint to craft axes and pick axes, and much, much more besides.

There's no tutorial, no hand-holding. A creepy looking man appears and tells you you should probably find something to eat before dark, and that's it.

Everything is controlled with taps. You tap to move, tap on items to collect them, and tap on monsters to attack them. Although you probably don't want to be doing that straight away, because you'll die.

The more you explore, the more things you'll find. The more things you find, the more things you can make. The more things you make, the better your chances of living to see the dawn. And the next dawn. And the dawn after that.

It's a beautiful cycle of luck-pushing. You know what you need to make that set of armour, but is it worth trying to finish it before the sun sets, or should you set up camp and wait out the horrors of the dark?

This a brilliant example of a mobile port done well. It's cruel in all the ways the PC game was, without compromising or diluting the experience.

If you want to get lost, scared, cold, tired, and hungry, but you don't actually want to do any of those things, then Don't Starve: Pocket Edition is a must-buy.

Watch out for the bees though.