I waited a long time before I started playing Don't Starve, and I hadn't read about it much, so I didn't expect much of it when I started the other day. But damn, did it ever blow me away.
Out of all the hostile gameworlds I've been in, Don't Starve is bloodthirsty to the point of... shit, I don't know.
What I do know is that the first thing that killed me wasn't starvation; it was the fact that I was unaware of the dangers of walking about in the dark.
In this world, there is some kind of thing lurking in the darkness, that you never see, but which will eat you whole unless you produce a flame. Once I got the hang of producing no less than three different types of flames, I was about to find out the next most dangerous thing you could encounter in this wicked wilderness; trees.
There is a chance that when you're chopping down trees to your health icon's content, one of them will pull themselves up, by the roots, and start chasing after you. If you let them get to you, you will die. I did so a couple times, until I had learned to be more careful with the chopping.
After that, I had some encounters with tall cycloptic birds, ravenous hounds, territorial spiders, enraged spirits, and a tribe of pigmen.
Some time later, I find myself at my wit's end, followed by a little living chest (an aptly named one, at that), inches away from salvation, when one of my more shadowy hallucinations starts to follow me around, and then kills me in one fell swoop.
However, I had at one point touched an odd stone surrounded by pig heads on pikes, and that was the place where I reappeared, after I thought that "this is the end of me".
I hurried back to the place where I lost all of my belongings, picked them up, and got to a place where I could rest and lick my wounds.
That's about where I am now, prototyping various new materials and devices, and monitoring the surrounding temperature.
At least I'm not starving.
