Brent: "So what happened to your clan members?"
Cole: "I can't find out. Every time I get close Francis possess[sic*] an incredibly powerful NPC and kills me. He's not a very good storyteller. Damn!"
Francis: "Whoa! That was close. You almost solved the mystery. I killed you real good that time."
PvP - 2000/06/15 (back when it was still worth reading)
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Here's a screenshot from Sir, You Are Being Hunted:
Most patrons of The Robotic Arms Tavern, Inn and Brothel will remember those damn balloons with some warranted degree of tooth-gnashing. SYABH revolves around putting obstacles between oneself and all the marauding brit-bots, and the balloon's searchlight negates ground cover if it hits you.... and sets every 'bot within earshot onto you. And it might happen upon you when you were already pinned down and waiting for patrols to pass.
However... you have several options for dealing with it. Its appearance does not signal an immediate game over. You can simply avoid its spotlight. You can shoot out its spotlight (or the robot robo-manning it) as I'm preparing to do there. You can set off a distraction far away from your objective so that any nearby robots will be too busy to immediately reach you even if the spotlight hits you. If you're nearly done with your current island anyway, you can throw caution to the wind and make a mad dash for your objective then for the escape boat, alarm calls blaring and shots whizzing around your head. Ah, good times... good times.
SYABH is a survival game. Map out your environment, sneak past most enemies, grab some weapons to kill the few you really need to, and... find some food so you don't starve. So I was hoping for a similarly enjoyable experience from the other, contemporary survival game actually entitled Don't Starve.
In a word: No.
I avoided it for a few years when I saw the moronic chibis. "Cartoonish" can have its uses, but as a rule anything cutesified is almost guaranteed to be dumbed-down garbage passed off under the conceit of being child-friendly. I was right. Even buying it during a hefty sale is a waste of money. Overtly, these two examples would seem almost identical. Both rely on randomized maps and "survival humor" rather than survival horror. Both have a similar health / hunger mechanic and severely restricted inventory space with no pause for sifting through it. Don't Starve's just centered on base-building and permadeath instead of exploration and save points. Given its cheaper, more malleable graphics and lack of physics it also features more content (items, monsters, etc.) than SYABH.
But those charred remains of what used to be my incipient base up there are the result of a single lightning strike. Ten playthroughs and storms I kept building a lightning rod every time I built a base. The one time I didn't... of course Murphy's Law kicks in. And that's it. I've wasted too many resources to make it through the winter. Game over.
Most problems in Don't Starve (aside from basic food and light) present a similarly one-to-one solution - if X happens, equip item Y. Also, somehow it manages to be even more of a point-and-click chore in 2D than if it had boasted FPS mechanics. Items constantly occlude each other (like my skeletons there) and your character gets stuck on trees and rocks even as you try harvesting them - or worse yet, gets burned by fires you yourself set because their hazard proximity radius is smaller than your activation proximity radius. Your inventory slots constantly re-arrange themselves as you swap items in and out of your hands, which you'll need to do in preparation for every single action you undertake - equip axe to chop trees, equip pickaxe to mine, equip razor to shave buffalo... no I'm not joking. And of course each item wears out... leaving an emtpy slot... which will cause the next items you shuffle in and out of your hands to switch places so that you never know where anything is. Most of my deaths occurred while I was indeed properly equipped but my spear or armor or torch or rope had mysteriously disappeared from where I'd put them. Not to mention the aforementioned proximity / hitbox issues cause persistent mis-clicks during combat. To top it all off, I already complained three posts ago about the deliberate lack of in-game information forcing you to endlessly restart through the same exact routine of running around picking berries and flowers and scrambling for flint and gold.
In other words, for all its potential for interconnected resource harvesting and base-building, this is ultimately a game for hyperactive cretins who learn procedures by rote. It's all about mindlessly building search images for your various tools so you can twitch your way through a million item swaps to waste as little time as possible while scrambling to gather and build the same exact base items and getting knocked back to the start every time even a single thing goes wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I love the survival routine. Dwarf Fortress has as many ways to die as it has game elements and I've thoroughly enjoyed trying to build twenty-level glass aquaria in the middle of my base while my dwarves risked life and limb fishing for their dinner on a rocky seashore. I've praised Amnesia: the Dark Descent, where you can't fight at all, and even Miasmata, a game in which you can die by literally tripping and falling! But none of them forced a permadeath mechanic for single events, or deliberately complicated inventory management or obfuscated game mechanics all to feign greater complexity than they offered. Don't Starve is a deliberately obtuse chore with randomized failure states. Whether it's challenging or not is moot. It's like trying to play chess with a third-grader. You stop worrying whether the game is good or not, because you just know at some point the drooling little shithead's going to randomly throw a fit and flip the board over.
Aaaaand - uninstall.
Done.
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* Yes folks, it's still misspelled after 20 years.
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