Don't Starve
BANGER · Roguelike · 2013
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 28h
- Value
- $0.36/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: Radeon HD5450 or better; 256 MB or higher, 502 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Don’t Starve is an uncompromising wilderness survival game full of science and magic. Enter a strange and unexplored world full of strange creatures, dangers, and surprises. Gather resources to craft items and structures that match your survival style.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.49. That was November 2018. 89 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 98 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Satisfactory ($39.99, scores 98) beats it on value, while it beats Terminus: Zombie Survivors ($19.99, scores 81).
Critics scored it 79. Players sit 18 points higher at 97 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 15 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written July 2024 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 355 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 32 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 88 percent of the 7,955 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 28 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 154, 5.5 times as much.
Still 1.5K concurrent players, 13 years in.
Players
1,472 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Kind of random: I love Minecraft but I couldn't find ways to make it difficult enough to be interesting. I also really preferred the early game and tended to get bored once I was basically invincible. This game is what I was looking for. It is very difficult and you never really get invincible. I enjoy the struggle and the constant vigilance it inquires.
It's a very good survival game. I absolutely love the style and music. It is very challenging and cruel at times but figuring things out is rewarding (through trial and error). If you're good with the roguelike trope of dying, losing all progress but gaining ways and information to improve with the next run then I would highly recommend. However, I would recommend getting the DLC's (At the very least Reign of Giants...
Tried the game for the first time, instant fun and very addicting, a great survival game would reccomend, artstyle is also awesome
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Don't Starve scores 92/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/219740/don-t-starveThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.