I watched Don’t Starve on the PC for quite a while and figured all the tricks of the game out and thought I’d be a great survivor on the Xbox One version, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. My first death came from being too inquisitive and investigating a bee hive, where I got stung to death. The next death came from losing my sanity after picking too many flowers. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a lot to learn in Don’t Starve: Giant Edition.
The Giant Edition adds the Reign of Giants’ expansion pack, which offers new characters, seasons, creatures, biomes and other challenges. You might have guessed it too that one of the creatures is a giant. It’s probably best off for new players to disable this add-on at first, as the core game offers a bit of a learning curve to conquer first.
The first thing you’ll need to learn is about the day and night cycle, as night presents the biggest vulnerability as everything is plunged into darkness and nasty creatures come out to eat you. Stay in the pitch black for too long and you’ll be eaten alive, so you’ll need to set up a camp fire somewhere safe. I often found myself setting up numerous ones throughout the randomly generated world, which very often misled me on my travels. I would definitely recommend setting up a base camp to keep all your operations in one place. That way, if you collect new items you can bring them back and store them in a created wooden chest.
The next element to survival is hunger, as you’ll need to keep your hunger meter filled to avoid starving to death. Once your hunger meter hits zero, you’ll start to lose health – it’s at this point that you need to forage for berries or swipe a passing butterfly and cook it quickly. Once you get into the game more, you’ll be able to hunt down buffalos for their meat and fur, which makes for a nice winter coat when the season changes.
Overall, there’s a lot of preparation required to survive in Don’t Starve. Just make sure you keep an eye on your hunger and health meter and you should make it through the day, as for surviving the night, make sure you stay close to light. It’s definitely a game where you learn as you play and that’s something that has you returning back to play more. If you die you aren’t happy to just give up, you return with an aim to survive longer than you did before.
Also throughout the generated worlds are varying environments, from swamps to forests, you’ll always find a landmark of interest and very often or not find some loot to take back to your camp. There are also caves to explore, as well as worm holes to help with travelling from one side of the map to the other. While I was playing, I was always finding new content in the game.
The crafting system was a little bit fiddly, as you have to use the triggers to select what you want, whether you want to select something in your inventory or create a new pickaxe. Quite often I found myself in trouble and wanted to craft something, but I couldn’t do it quick enough without dying. I never saw the same problem on PC, so this might be a controller scheme issue.
Generally, I would highly recommend buying Don’t Starve: Giant Edition on Xbox One. I haven’t even explored all of the Giant expansion yet, but the core game was the right amount to keep me going alone. In terms of content, there’s so much to learn and explore and if you survive longer, the difficulty increases, so there’s a nice challenge for you to tackle as well.
Pros
- Lots of content
- A nice learning curve
Cons
- Controller scheme for crafting was a little fiddly