Who wants to play a survival game where you’re a grunting lummox who punches trees for wood when you could be playing a survival game where you’re an olde worlde dandy who picks flowers in a Tim Burton dreamscape? Klei’s Don’t Starve and its multiplayer-focused sequel/spin-off Don’t Starve Together remain some of the best survival games around, as a raft of new players are currently discovering.
Don’t Starve Together is on sale on Steam for 90% off (opens in new tab) until May 4. That makes it $1.50 in freedom eagle money, £1.10 in the King’s shillings, and $2.15 in Australian dollarydoos. What’s more, it comes with a free bonus copy to give to a friend. The original Don’t Starve is on sale for 75% off (opens in new tab) as well.
According to SteamDB’s charts (opens in new tab), a record-setting 96,000 concurrent players took advantage of this opportunity to shave beefalos, curse the darkness, and starve to death in chummy solidarity. For comparison’s sake, when Don’t Starve Together had a free weekend back in 2019 it peaked at 68,000 players, meaning that more people would rather own it for cheap than try it for free.
Back in 2013, Phillippa Warr summed up Don’t Starve by saying, “This is not a kind game. This is the sort of game which tells you ‘don’t starve’ as a helpful basic premise and then seems to delight in revealing the sheer volume of other things you shouldn’t touch, prod, eat, walk near, or forget to build in case of sudden death. In fact it would be more accurate to have called it ‘Don’t Starve And Also Don’t Try To Make Friends With That Tall Bird And Did You Remember To Build A Fire And There Are A Lot More Spiders In That Nest Than You Think And Seriously Please Stop Going Near That Bird’.”