Taso

Don't Starve

Don’t Starve is a survival game with unique aesthetics and a world full of strange creatures and obscure items. This obscurity often leads to early demise of the frail player character equipped with insatiable appetite and rapidly declining sanity. Sooner or later, when the world and its mechanisms become more familiar, its appeal starts to diminish as a result of its limited content and vague objectives. The gameplay is repetitive: searching for food and resources, building traps for game and monsters, and making equipment for protection from the elements. The nights, while atmospheric, are mostly loafing around a campfire, because getting surrounded by total darkness is an instant game over.

Don’t Starve is at its best during the first few playthroughs, when everything remains a mystery. After a while its repetitive survival roots start to rear their tedious heads.

Two Point Hospital

Two Point Hospital imitates perfectly the aesthetics of its precursor, resembling the look of British clay and puppet animations such as Wallace & Gromit and Postman Pat. Similarly, its core mechanics are directly borrowed from its predecessor: you place hospital-themed rooms in a Tetris-like manner into a prefabricated building, and fill the rest with waiting room benches, drinking machines, plants, and toilets. As a new feature, the efficiency of all rooms can be improved by decoration.

Unfortunately, in similar to most of the games by Bullfrog, after the initial excitement wears off, the game soon becomes tedious due to its repetitive mechanisms, limited content, and low difficulty. As an additional weakness, the new room decoration mechanism can be easily exploited, leading to messy and cluttered rooms—quite the opposite than intended.

Loyal to its roots, the game has charm and an interesting theme, yet it is only enjoyable for short sessions.