Don't Starve: Reign of Giants Review

If you interpreted game titles as literally as Don’t Starve does, you’d soon come up with some hilarious results. The Devil May Cry series would be about your journey through a dreary world full of demons on the verge of bawling their eyes out. Perfect Dark would be a shooter where you played as a blind Joanna Dark and the first Final Fantasy would have been the only game to ever bear the name. These could go on forever, but you get the point by now: Don’t Starve is a sandbox world that gives you one simple task - keeping yourself alive by eating anything that looks remotely edible.

A game where you just eat different types of food sounds quite bland though, which is why Klei Entertainment has created a randomly generated sandbox world full of inhabitants that want to eat your tasty flesh and man-eating flora to try and stop you from surviving. They will too; the world of Don’t Starve is as harsh as the dreary worlds of Lordran or Drangleic from the Dark Souls series.

Your first foray into this pretty-but-hostile world will be with Wilson (the first of many characters you’ll unlock through the course of the game), who has found himself placed in the roguelike world by a dapper man going by the name of Maxwell. He’ll make a very astute observation that you look very peckish and then scarper to leave you to your own devices. 

There’s no handholding in Don’t Starve. Once the short intro ends, you’re literally left to figure out everything on your own, and while the huge range of features available may seem daunting on your first playthrough, you’ll soon realise that this is a game that rewards you with progress through trial and error. Make no mistake, you will die very swiftly on your first try (I managed six days of survival before being slaughtered by rabid dogs), but with each failure comes more knowledge on what to expect, and this is what gives Don’t Starve the one-more-go syndrome.

As you grow more familiar with the day/night cycle (you need to make camp and keep a fire going in the night and explore in the day) and venture out further in each randomly generated world, you’ll discover different types of terrain (or biomes) that offer unique materials. Forested areas generally have an abundance of fruit, wood and grass (essential items for early survival), with biomes like swamps and graveyards generally being more dangerous but offering unique, hard to obtain items.

Gather enough tat and you’ll be able to settle down in one place to start placing your own farms and orchards to create a sustainable food source. It’s essential to choose the location of your base wisely though, as hostile creatures will periodically attack you. After falling foul of such events several times, I formed a base around some Beefalo (wildebeest) and used them to defend against any attackers. Everything went swimmingly until summer arrived and my protectors entered mating season, becoming hostile to anything and everything. 

These seasonal-based changes aren’t just confined to the wildlife either, as Reign of Giants greatly expands upon the effects each season has on the world. The arrival of both winter and summer forces you to think differently about how you need to survive the harsh conditions of each. Whereas before, they largely just dictated how much sunlight you had before you retreated to your camp at night, they now bring with them much greater changes. Summer weather can cause sweeping forest fires that decimate your camp and can cause your character to die from heat exhaustion. Endothermic fires and thermal stones are on hand to solve these, but come winter, all of this will be reversed. Not only will you get shorter days - and hence, less daylight - but you’ll also be unable to leave your camp without having fire constantly at hand.

These results of mother nature add a huge layer of difficulty, and when you add some of the titular Giants to the already difficult mix, you have nothing but a recipe for disaster. These guys came in a few different flavours, but they’re all cause for alarm, as they have huge pools of hitpoints and can wipe you out within a matter of seconds. Exclusive crafting items drop from each, so it’s up to you whether you want to tackle them or not.

Fortunately, RoGs can be toggled off or on at the start of each new game, so newer players need not worry about the greater difficulty that the expansion provides. However, the game as a whole still has some niggling issues leftover from the original release. If you die - that’s it, you’re progress is toast. There’s no going back, so if you have a file that has a camp the size of a sovereign city and you perish, wave goodbye to any and all progress.

On one hand, such a feature is a great way to keep you on your toes and value every inch of progress, but on the other, taking it all away if you fail makes your efforts feel completely wasted. There are items that can resurrect you, but they’re rare enough to make any use they have moot.

The other issue is Klei’s handling of the pseudo story mode. By finding Maxwell’s door, you can initiate Adventure Mode within your sandbox world, but finding it by anything other than chance is almost impossible. It wouldn’t hurt the core experience if a separate option was added to the main menu.

Regardless of these issues though, Don’t Starve offers almost unlimited replay value. And if you’re not careful, you can spend the better part of a day trying to survive. The procedurally generated world will help to keep each attempt at living feel unique and fresh, and for just over a tenner for the base game and expansion, you’ll be hard pushed to find better value for money than this gem.