Don't Starve Together
The multiplayer version of the dark cartoonish survival game.
Overview
In Don't Starve Together your goal is to survive as long as possible, perhaps indefinitely. You survive by exploring, crafting, and building. There are a variety of things trying to kill you:
Hunger: Early on, hunger can be a threat. Scavenging yields enough food to keep you going, but as you gather materials and build a base, hunger can be a real problem. Once you are established, hunger is no longer a problem and you can use food more for healing or sanity than hunger.
Wolves: Every so often, wolves attack. Early on this can be a problem if you aren't prepared with weapons and armor. Later on the wolf packs become large and can freeze you or burn your buildings down. There are plenty of tricks to deal with them. A common trick is to keep your base near a beefalo herd and let the wolves aggro on the beefalo.
Giant Bosses: Every season, a giant spawns. They hit hard, drain your sanity, and can destroy your base. These are major challenges for a new player.
Monsters: There are plenty of threats out in the wild but for the most part they can be ignored, kited, or run away from. You should only engage with them when you are prepared, so in that regard they should never present a real problem.
Combat
There is a fair amount of combat in Don't Starve. For the most part, combat is simple and engaging. You have to learn to kite, and that can be annoying. Armor and helmets are a big deal, but micromanaging your clothes is also a little annoying.
Crafting
The crafting in Don't Starve is pretty strong. There is a little bit of a tech tree, but not much. Some items are rare early on so you might make a special trip to hunt down a certain ingredient in a dangerous area.
Building
When playing on public servers some people like to be nomads but playing with friends it is far easier to build a base. For the most part, the base is a few structures and a lot of storage boxes. Nearby you will plant trees and other resources. This aspect of the game is pretty good.
Interface
Overall, the interface isn't bad but it could be a lot better.
Movement and Combat
Movement is a little clunky. For tactical movement you want to use WASD, but to move in a straight line you want to use the mouse. Mouse movement is not very responsive. Kiting requires precise timing but hitting the combat key with the movement keys is awkward.
Crafting
Crafting games are often clunky and this is no exception. When you want to build something you probably have the ingredients scattered in various unlabeled boxes. Once you pick them up you use the clunky crafting menu to build the item. If you haven't built item before you must stand near the technology building to prototype it. If it's a building, you place it. Otherwise it shows up somewhere in your inventory. Then you put back all the ingredients into random boxes.
There are some mods out there that help with this. One mod will highlight chests that contain ingredients for a recipe you are contemplating. Another mod helps you know where you can place buildings.
Inventory
I think the interface for the inventory could be improved. Hotkeys exist to equip items in certain slots, but items often end up scattered randomly in your inventory. It would be nice to designate a slot as "helmet preferred". Maybe designate a key to be "equip torch, I don't care where it is in the inventory", or "equip a weapon". It's annoying that when a monster jumps at me I have to run away just so I can figure out where my weapon and armor is. I used to keep them on hotkeys, but it got annoying.
Multiplayer
I originally played Don't Starve solo. It was a little bit fun, but it didn't engage me for long. There are too many ways to die or get something wrong. When playing with another person, they can bring you back to life and can help when you get in over your head.
Should You Buy It?
I would only recommend the solo version if you are a fan of the genre. I really enjoy crafting games, and this was interesting, but I only played for 12 hours. Two years later I found some friends to play with and we have put in over 200 hours of Don't Starve Together. I've looked at some of the public servers and they don't entice me at all.
