Videogame collaborations seem to be getting increasingly common and increasingly random. Nicki Minaj in Call Of Duty? Fortnite skins based on Mexican comedy shows from the 1970s? Pentiment characters in mediaeval strategy Inkulinati? Okay, that last one makes sense. But now, a team-up between management game Cult Of The Lamb and co-op survival gem Don’t Starve Together has joined the small club of fun but sensible crossovers. Games about cults and starving stick together, you know, so both games are celebrating each other’s birthdays with free updates.
]]>Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>I hadn’t played Don’t Starve before, despite it being a thing I knew about for quite some time. I just never fancied getting into it as I often get frustrated with survival games I’m not immediately good at (read: all of them).
When some Stardew Valley bug problems ruined some lockdown date nights though, Don’t Starve Together was recommended to me on some internet list as one to try out, and what a recommendation it was.
]]>Klei Entertainment, developers of indie hits Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included have announced today that they've agreed for Tencent, the media conglomerate that's been doing quite a lot of buying, to purchase a majority stake in the company. Klei founders say that they will keep "full autonomy of creative and operations across all aspects of the studio".
]]>What am I thinking? Of course you've played Don't Starve. Some days it feels like the ratio of "people who have played Don't Starve at least once" to "people on planet Earth" is somehow greater than one. So you can imagine my shock when I found out that no one has written a HYP on Don't Starve before now.
]]>There have been a great many games like Minecraft over the past decade. Which is to be expected, because who wouldn't want to capitalise on the runaway mainstream success of the geometric giant, one of the best-selling video games of all time? Minecraft has many interesting facets about it beyond the block bashing mechanics, so we've compiled our list of the best games like it out there right now so you can scratch that familiar mining and crafting itch.
]]>Valve are joining all those great internet thought-leaders and telling you to clean your room, or at the very least to play the games that you've bought on Steam. Running this weekend until May 28th, 6pm GMT, the Steam Spring Cleaning Event provides a front-page checklist of games to try or return to, and rewarding the diligent with goodies to decorate their account page with.
All fluff, really, but as good an excuse as any to dust off something you might have picked up a few sales back. Of course, undermining this push, there's also a bunch of free weekend trials open on discounted games which also count towards your total. The list includes action RPG Grim Dawn, four-on-one competitive horror game Dead By Daylight and stylish 4X sci-fi strategy game Endless Space 2.
]]>Among a very strong stable of games, Don't Starve Together is easily Klei Entertainment's most popular. Turns out that adding friends was the secret spice the cartoon survival sandbox needed. Today, Klei announced their roadmap for supporting the game this year, and they've got a lot planned out. While they're going to be toning down the frequency of wild and wacky special events, they're going to be expanding its world and overhauling older characters, and those upgrades will be free for all. There will be new characters coming in 2019 as paid DLC too.
]]>Just when you thought you'd explored every nook and cranny of Don't Starve's nightmare otherworlds (plural), a new set of porcine problems present themselves. Hamlet, begining a quick spin through early access today, is another expansion for Klei's survival action RPG sandbox. This one takes Wilson and his sketchy pals to a new, far more civilised land. There's a town run by aristocratic pigfolk, trap-laden ruins, the usual bundle of massive new boss monsters to tussle with and the looming threat of a coming Aporkalypse. The launch trailer is hamming it up below.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>I'm not sure if Valve's latest promotional wotsit on Steam knows whether it's coming or going. On one hand, it's nice that the Spring Cleaning Event (running until Monday, 28th May) is nudging players into trying out games they may have bought in sales and never touched, but pairing that with nine simultaneous free weekend events does somewhat undermine the message.
Ah well, it's an excuse to play videogames all weekend. Can't grumble about that. Plus, there's an actual free game giveaway running - take a peek within. Oh, and yesterday's big Steam giveaway is still live until tomorrow, so try that too. Oh dear, there's just too many games.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>If you've got the hang of not starving with your pals in multiplayer survival sandbox Don't Starve Together, it's time for a new challenge: not getting kicked to bits in a gladiatorial arena together. Don't Starve Together has launched the first of its new time-limited events, a trip into a fiery world to fight the Battlemaster's army. Still, maybe you'll get to drink your own spilt blood, eat your own smashed-off limbs, and die sated.
Klei Entertainment are holding a big sale this weekend too, including their own (Invisible Inc, Mark of the Ninja...) as well as those they've published (Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the NecroDancer...). Good video games.
]]>Klei Entertainment have announced Don't Starve: Hamlet, a new expansion for their fiendish survival game. Don't get any silly ideas about Danish princes or William Shakespeare (though an immortal bard would be a fiendish foe), as the expansion will focus on the simple and sensible idea of a town of aristocratic pigmen. A hamlet. It's a pun. Wordplay, you know? Jokes. The singleplayer expansion will add a touch of civility to Don't Starve [official site] with houses, shops, and the most 'civilised' of activities: plundering ancient ruins for treasures to claim as your own.
New creatures and items are coming free to the Shipwrecked expansion, Klei also announced, and the cooperative Don't Starve Together is getting time-limited events.
]]>I was about to boot up Don't Starve Together [official site] to poke at the update A New Reign which went live yesterday. Then I remembered that I am bad at Don't Starve AND any and all of its iterations from vanilla onward. I die to bees a LOT when left to my own devices so Don't Starve Together is likely to be dying to bees in front of at least one other person, right? And A New Reign adds a Queen Bee so... my in-game life is likely to be one long My Girl re-enactment, yes? Yes.
]]>After a journey spanning close to a year and a half, Klei's buddy-boasting survival 'em up Don't Starve Together [official site] has dragged itself from the icy grips of Early Access, and has now crawled into the barren plains of full release. As Klei's longest-dwelling Early Access-er, the co-op standalone ships with the Reign of Giants expansion in tow, as well as a handful of new features - not least the debut of a long-awaited character.
]]>If you had survive 'em up Don't Starve [official site] before yesterday, congratulations! You now have the multiplayer expandalone Don't Starve Together too.
Developers Klei Entertainment had planned to give it free to existing Don't Starve owners once it left Steam Early Access to properly launch, but it seems they've got a little excited as they've now shunted it out to two million people (!) early.
]]>Don't Starve Together [official site] takes the elements of 2D survival game Don't Starve and rebuilds them for co-operative purposes. The game has been in Early Access since late last year, and its most recent free update has just added all the extra monsters, items and features from the game's original expansion, Reign of Giants.
]]>FUN FACT: it's quite difficult for two or more people to starve in close proximity, because inevitably one will begin to eat the other. With that cheeriness in mind, I'm here to tell you that sign-ups are now open for the closed beta of top-down survive-'em-up Don't Starve's to-be-free multiplayer component. You don't even need to own Don't Starve to apply, as those accepted will be given a limited version of the client that only allows for multiplayer. All you need to do is fill in this form and hope fate smiles upon you.
]]>Don't Starve Together is the sort of stern instruction that was once delivered by frowning parents to their newly married offspring as they set out to find a partner for life. The ruddy-faced matron wouldn't tell her son to make sure he wooed a girl who always washed behind the ears, and the cracked lips of an aged farmer would not part to instruct his daughters in the ways of romance and wedlock - instead, mother and father both would have one piece of advice. "When you settle down with a spouse and begin a life of your own, eternal bliss can be yours if you follow this advice - Don't Starve Together." Then they'd slip a withered turnip out of their breeches, pass it across and shut the door of the family home for good.
Don't Starve's upcoming multiplayer mode will allow you to relive the good old days with your own friends and it'll be entering closed beta before September 23rd.
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