Don't Starve: Cheap Tricks and Fake Difficulty

Set in a fantasy world in which you must survive as long as possible, Don't Starve by Klei Entertainment is something of a rarity. It's a game with some interesting concepts that's actually really enjoyable in chunks. But then as you continue playing and more and more content is added, somehow the whole experience put together is as much fun as nailing your ball sack to a wooden plank and hanging off of it like a sleeping bat.

"Oh come on, it's not that bad."

Well, okay. I'll concede that I enjoy the core survival mechanics. The early game in particular starts you in Spring or Autumn, both relatively mild seasons, and tasks you with simple objectives such as collecting grass, twigs and berries to last you for the first few nights.

We're introduced to the first crazy supernatural element at night: if you don't have a fire going, you basically die instantly. Death is permanent, and you must start again ("Roguelike", an expression about as tired and overused as "Gate" being added to the end of any remotely scandalous occurrence).

It's harsh but reasonable, and provides an early incentive to huddle round the fire at night rather than brazenly treating it like any other time of day.

Your character possesses health and hunger levels, which spell death if they hit 0 (obviously). In addition to that there is the more opaque Sanity meter, which at 0 doesn't immediately kill you but does spawn monsters that will almost certainly guarantee that you'll die soon.

"This sounds pretty cool."

Thank you, mysterious voice. It is. These mechanics are all pretty logical, and the idea of gathering grass and sticks makes just as much sense as it would in real life.

You assemble a little camp of tents, drying racks and stoves and you start feeling like you're doing pretty well. But actually in all likelihood you're not, you just don't realise that you've already lost at this point.

The problem comes when the game starts trying to increase the difficulty, and does so in the lamest ways possible.

The first major spike is experienced at the onset of Winter. Your character must contend with the cold sapping your energy if you stray too far from the fire without good clothing. Again, while a little irritating that it slows the gameplay down, this makes sense and is reasonable.

Then we have the arrival of Deerclops, and the horse apple fake difficulty alarm begins to sound. You see, Deerclops is a gigantic monster who randomly turns up during Winter. He will walk straight towards your camp, knowing where it is no matter where he spawns. He then proceeds to prioritise smashing your buildings up over smashing you, meaning unless you already knew he was coming and magically prepared with copious weapons and armour, your entire camp will be annihilated.

Even if you did prepare for him, having already learned about him through death trial-and-error or just through sheer luck, it's very likely you'll only be able to kill him after he's trashed most of your camp. If you take him down, you get a measly couple of lumps of meat.

At this point you might be around 10 hours into the game, and you've just watched everything you built get deleted for...pretty much no reason. Fun, right?

Then we have the Hounds. On random nights, a bunch of dog-monsters will spawn and attack you. On their own this feels like annoying harassment of the player (and later in the game is sometimes deadly on its own). But have the bad luck to time their arrival with a Deerclops attack and you're basically screwed. Combine it with the instant death night-time when you're limited to just standing next to your camp fire and you're just hog-tied, bent over and...well, you get the idea. You did nothing wrong but that's game over for you, chump.

Later in the game the hounds can set fire to everything around them when you kill them, burning your whole base to the ground in seconds. Why? Because f*** you, that's why.

Not only do the enemies get obnoxious in their design and intent, but the seasons do too. Sensible design ("Gather grass to make rope") gives way to bizarre bonkers nonsense mechanics that it's very hard to plan for or even understand ("Craft an Ice-Fling-O-Matic using loot from rare chess pieces to stop fires.").

Summer arrives. That should be a time where food is plentiful and life is easier? Well no, because the game's increasing departure from logic and reason means that Summer is basically Hot Winter. Heat is so dramatic that you burn to death if you stray too long from sources of cold.

How do you keep cold? What a silly question! You build an endothermic fire that cools everything down, of course! You mean you didn't build an endothermic fire when you were surviving in the Australian outback in real life?! You dummy!

Remember how annoying the Fire Hounds were, burning your whole camp down? Well, in Summer things just catch fire at random. Because that's such a fun game mechanic. Why add it in? Because f*** you, that's why.

In fact, "Because f*** you, that's why." was probably the mission statement in Klei's design brief.

Instead of adding fun new challenges that make life interesting for the player or expand on the core gameplay, every new addition seems to have been a case of them studying the player base, realising some strategies are viable and then basically adding a new creature or mechanic designed to just mess that up completely.

The game encourages you to centralise and build a big camp to save hours collecting twigs all over the map. Then it unleashes Deerclops on you and totally ruins your life.

So next time you spread out, because the game has encouraged you to do that. You survive Deerclops this time, but instead you get murdered by the Hounds because you're too far from the area of the map that gives you some protection against them.

So next time you combine both strategies, but the new boss creature they've just added arrives in Autumn and kills you instantly because you forgot to craft a cucumber you could only grow in Summer with two bits of gold to make a Cucumber Amulet to ward it off.

I made that last one up but that's the kind of stupid nonsense the game throws at you. And I've not even mentioned all the meaningless little events that can end your game. Like getting shot from off-screen by a blow dart you're not expecting, or killed by a passive creature that somehow got aggro'd without you knowing, or killed by frogs raining from the sky.

So I don't know what I'm trying to get at in summary with this rant. I guess I'm just fed upwith how such poor design has let down such a good concept. Other developers take note: Don't Starve is not how you do difficulty.