- Survival adventure with friends
- Don't go insane
- Great game design
I was such a big fan of Don't Starve when it first came out on PC. I was convinced that I would be able to survive and create a beautiful world that I could live in! For those who have not played Don't Starve, it's a survival game about spawning into a very hostile land, full of monsters, where you need to try to survive. One of the main things that will kill you is your sanity and the lack of food. You'll need to start gathering items, crafting things to help you survive, and avoiding (or fighting!) monsters that appear. Don't Starve Together allows you to play with others, so that you all have a better chance of being alive.
In Don't Starve Together, you can set up your own server easily, picking some of the different options like how challenging the difficulty is, whether there are caves, etc. You can then select your character. There are a bunch of different characters with different stats for their health, hunger and sanity. Some even start with specific items that can make things a bit easier on you, depending on how you play.
You then end up in the procedurally generated map, which does have a day and night cycle, in the summertime. Your goal is to start making moves to keep yourself alive. There are plenty of strange monsters, from giant eye-monsters to dark figures that only appear when your sanity is too low. You'll be followed by monsters during the day and night.
I spend a lot of my time in Don't Starve collecting items. I am not very good at fighting, so I look around for a pig village or a herd of beefalo, so that I can then use them to keep myself safe by using them to fight off any monsters that I need. You can craft this bell that bonds you with a beefalo, which is one of my favourite things to do.
I then start crafting! Once you have a science machine up, you can start crafting items in Don't Starve Together that can make things easier - gardening objects so that you can create a farm for food, the ability to set traps in bunny biomes, and a sleeping bag so you can get back some of your sanity. There's a big focus on managing your inventory, your chests, and yourself as you explore around and try to make it back to your base before it's far too dark.
When you play Don't Starve Together with a friend, there are two of you to feed, but at the same time, there are two of you to gather items, explore around the area, and use the limited time that is there to try and keep you alive. If you have more friends, even more of you can team up, which is ideal for defeating bigger monsters. I always thought that if I had a second person, I would be able to survive longer, especially as you get closer to wintertime, when you need to keep yourself warm, fed and alive.
Don't Starve Together works fine on mobile - the placement of the UI is very good, and I do like that to craft something, if there are individual items that need crafting before the main item, you can just tap on the individual items in the main item area and then craft the main item. It's just very well designed, which is ideal when it comes to such a challenging adventure. I will say that I did play this before it was public (so there wasn't a good choice of servers), but there was some buffering that often happened alongside the movements that I took, which did hurt the gameplay.
Don't Starve Together review - "Survive with friends!"
Don't Starve Together is a fun adventure to play with friends. I do love how easy it is to host your servers and how challenging it is to actually survive throughout the winter.
Jupiter Hadley
Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, and judges many jams and events. You can find her on Twitter as @Jupiter_Hadley