The December 2021 Nintendo Indie World Showcase presented a number of already popular games coming soon to the Switch alongside new title reveals such as Pikselnesia's Afterlove EP. For example, Chicory: A Colorful Tale surprise launched on the hybrid console today, and Omori will hit the platform in spring 2022. Another game releasing in spring 2022 is Don't Starve Together.
While the original Don't Starve already released on Switch in April 2018, Don't Starve Together is essentially an entirely different experience. It's a standalone multiplayer component, but one with so many additonal expansions and new mechanics that it's hard to compare the two. Don't Starve Together also allows up to six players at once, making it more robust than the average co-op game. As a result, Together is worth checking out on Switch even if someone has played the original, and its release is just one piece of Don't Starve getting a resurgence it deserves.
What Makes Don't Starve Special
Don't Starve is an isometic roguelike survival game first released in 2013. While this put it a few years behind the mainstream surge of indie game popularity through titles like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and The Binding of Isaac, Don't Starve could arguably fit into this category. Developer Klei Entertainment had made something of a name for itself through titles like Shank and Mark of the Ninja, but Don't Starve was its breakout success - to the extent that Wilson is a mascot for the studio to this day.
What set Don't Starve apart from contemporaries is its art style. Klei essentially made a playable Tim Burton film reminiscent of twisted stop-motion works such as The Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride. Its Victorian aesthetic looks sketched and hand-drawn, and Don't Starve presents a world full of creepy imagery and conjoining forces of both science and magic that players must navigate after they're dropped into the unforgiving wilderness.
Like some of the best survival games out there, Don't Starve asks players to track a lot of information while looking for recurring elements to survive in each randomly generated world. Every playable character has unique skills, such as Wilson growing a beard that insulates him from the cold or Wendy summoning the ghost of her dead sister. They also all have varying stats; players have to track their health, hunger, and sanity; and other potential drawbacks like being afraid of the dark or limiting food options. Don't Starve Together only adds to the chaos with more characters, monsters, and objectives all its own.
Don't Starve's Legacy Lives On
Though the developer has moved on to other projects that also garnered acclaim, like the sci-fi survival game Oxygen Not Included or the deck-building roguelike Griftlands, Don't Starve Together is still receiving updates. The most recent was a surprise collaboration between Don't Starve and Terraria, headlined by the appearance of Eye of Cthulhu (or Eye of Terror) in Don't Starve and Deerclops in Terraria. This "An Eye for An Eye" content released on November 18.
Just a month later, Don't Starve Together is now confirmed to be releasing on Nintendo Switch - following up its single-player equivalent after four years. But that's not all; Nintendo of America also announced that Don't Starve is available as a free trial for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers between December 15 and December 21, 2021. As Don't Starve approaches its 10th anniversary in 2023 and continues to inspire games like Cult of the Lamb, it's great to see Klei Entertainment give it the attention it deserves. Hopefully these extra pushes through partners like Nintendo will keep fans surviving together for a long time to come.
Don't Starve Together is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. It releases for Nintendo Switch in spring 2022.
