Review: Don't Starve, and Some Other Stuff

I've played a number of games recently that I just haven't been able to get into, despite their scads of glowing reviews and my relative dearth of meaningful hobbies to get up to between the hours of 11pm and 2am. I didn't actually play most of these (Antichamber, Knock-knock, Monaco) long enough to have a real opinion on them other than "I don't like this." Or, perhaps more correctly, I didn't play long enough to have an informed dislike. My dislike was mostly gut-level dislike:

Antichamber: Bends the rules of 3D games and (virtual) reality in interesting ways, but bends them so far that figuring out what the hell means what seems more like an exercise in trial-and-error than anything that rewards player diligence, intelligence, etc. Frustrating but pretty to look at. A lot like your mom.

YOUR MOM IS SEX

Knock-knock: Similar to Antichamber in the sense that I "get it," but don't really care for it. I get that Ice Pick Lodge is fucking with me, and trying to do it in an artsy and interesting way, but when I make the same mistake seventeen times and receive no useful input any of those times to help me better understand how to succeed in the future, I get frustrated. My real life is already exactly like this. I want to play a game to come to understand a system and master it, typically. Even if that system is sometimes loathe to give up its inner workings, there's an understanding that it eventually will. In the case of Knock-knock, it could care less if I figure it out. And that makes me just want to move on to another game.

No, in this case it really doesn't.

Monaco: Probably missing the real point of this game by not playing in co-op, but in single player it's either just a 2D version of one of the more boring Splinter Cell iterations or Stealth Bastard without the jumping or the neat aesthetic. Bleh.

What's mine is bored.

BUT ANYWAY...I was writing about Don't Starve at some point. Or at least I will be at some point in the future.

This is what my dog looks like in the dark.

So, Don't Starve is a thing. One of those things everyone likes. I get it. I like the aesthetic. I like the idea of the point of a game being just to not starve. Like Minecraft, but more immediate. I like the idea of a survival simulator, especially one as cleverly made and as darkly funny as this one. However, it loses me when it tosses roguelike-ness into the mix.

As I've ranted about at length before, not every single game is actually improved by adding "roguelike elements." In the case of Don't Starve, for instance, the game is really compelling and surprisingly tense and creepy as a survival simulation. The feeling of night encroaching is just as effective, if not more so than it was in Minecraft the first time the creepers came out, and just thinking about the way the light slowly dies as your fire burns down makes me want to go back and play the game more because it captures the feeling of actually being out in the wilderness at night so well it's uncanny.

But I will not go back and play Don't Starve any more because for some reason the developers deemed it necessary to include permadeath, and that, for me, runs absolutely counter to what makes a survival simulation good in the first place.

Permadeath also happens to take the fun out of actual survival.

One of my favorite things about Minecraft when I started playing it, and about Terraria when I started playing that, and so on, was the fact that the game didn't bother to tell you how to survive. It gave you no goals other than to not die, but it didn't even bother to explain to you how to stay alive. And that, at the time, was a new thing in gaming for me. It was exciting to run around in a panic, trying to figure out how to build a shelter, or a stove, or how to make armor, or a better weapon. Sure, you could look these things up online if you wanted, but for me at least, figuring them out on my own was a major part of the game itself, so spoiling crafting recipes would have been breaking the game, in a sense.

The thing that separates those other games from Don't Starve for me is the fact that once you learn how to do something in those games, once you've climbed to a new rung on the survival ladder, as it were, the game mirrors your new knowledge by allowing you to preserve your accomplishments. Don't Starve, on the other hand, forces you to artificially "forget" everything you've learned about survival by starting you at square one after every death. Have a fire pit? Not anymore, you don't! Have a farm? Now it's gone! Know the layout of the land around you? Fuck you, now things are totally different (but really just a slight rearrangement of various trees and stones)!

This is annoying in the sense that you don't have your cool things anymore after you die, but it becomes really goddamn infuriating when you realize the other side of that equation: remember the first time you played and you spent a half hour or two hours or five hours building up to the level you were at just before you died? Yeah, you have to do that again before  you can experience anything new. And you have to do it again by doing the exact same things you did the first time. It's like running out of lives in Super Mario Bros.

Why the game makes you do this is beyond me. I don't see how Don't Starve would be any less challenging, interesting, enjoyable, or creepy if you were allowed to save your progress and reload if you died. Instead, no matter how good, careful, or lucky you are, 80% of your time with this game will be spent doing the exact same few things over and over again, just so you can (maybe) discover a new trick or a different resource five hours into your latest playthrough before getting killed again.

And to me, that's silly. I'm glad there are a lot of people out there who like this game, because in a lot of ways it's extremely clever and at times it was absolutely gripping in its portrayal of bare, desperate survival. But ultimately it was too frustratingly stupid in terms of the permadeath system for me to continue with it.