 If you're looking to make a few hours completely disappear, then check out Don't Starve on Steam. It's a survival adventure game where you're dropped into the middle of a gigantic randomized map with nothing. You explore and uncover more of the map as you go along, picking up materials like grass, sticks, and flints which enable you to create tools like axes and pickaxes so you can cut down trees and mine for gold which enables you to build other stuff and it goes on from there. On the surface Don't Starve sounds like a boring collection quest, but this game has an addictive quality to it that's hard to find elsewhere. The trick with this game is that you have three components to manage, your health, your sanity, and of course your hunger. The latter can easily be taken care of at first since you find berries and carrots just lying on the ground, but the food you hunt or collect has a shelf life, it goes bad after a few days, so you can't just hoard a bunch of it, you have to keep a steady pace or just be lucky enough to find the gears in the graveyard so you can build an ice box. Item management is also a big part of this game since you have a limited amount of space to carry all your stuff, although you can eventually create storage chests and a backpack. Your sanity is a bit trickier to manage, it naturally goes down when day turns to night and you start to hallucinate. When your sanity goes down it's not like ooh cool, it actually is very disorienting. Your mental state also pays a price when you go looking for items digging up graves in the graveyard and by warping around the map using these wormholes. You protect your sanity by picking flowers of course. You can also do things like create a flower hat to protect you. The health meter is pretty self-explanatory, but you are eventually hunted by hounds, pissed off, beefalo, and this ginormous creature called the deer clops. And that brings me to one major aspect that since don't starve apart from other games, it's got a great visual style to it. It's got kind of a Henry-Selik Corleen or Nightmare Before Christmas kind of quality to it. I love how fully realized everything is too. Nothing in this game's universe was done halfway. There's all sorts of different terrains like forests and swamps. You can hunt animals called koalafants, which of course are half koala and half elephant. You build things called science machines in order to create more advanced stuff like weather meters so you know when winter is coming. And that brings me to this game's difficulty. Sure the art style and the simple top-down survival adventure gameplay makes this game approachable, but dear god this game is absolutely brutal and unforgiving. Once you make it past day 20 or so, then winter hits and food stops growing out of the ground, you get attacked by random beasts, and you start to freeze to death unless you've created clothing to protect you. In this instance here, I was on my first winter when a friggin' deer clops shows up and wrecks my camp. I mean, come on! I had no chance to even prepare for an enemy that huge in such a short time span. And when you die, you lose everything. It's game over and you start over from the beginning with nothing. There are respawn areas if you're lucky enough to unlock them, but even then you respawn with nothing and you have to seek out where you died to get all your stuff back, and that's if you don't freeze to death first. The game does at least reward your progress by unlocking other characters that all have their own unique traits. For example, the default character, Wilson, grows a huge beard, which keeps him warm in the winter. There's also Willow, who's immune to fire damage, but when her sanity gets low, she just starts lighting everything around her on fire. Hey, we all know someone like that, don't we? I could go on and on about Don't Starve. There's cooking, crafting, farming, fishing, a day-night cycle, a seasonal cycle, different playable characters, different modes that I haven't even touched. There's a multiplayer mode called Don't Starve Together. Hell, the Don't Starve wiki has over a thousand articles. That's how dense this game is. There's really a lot here to dive into, and I just wanted to make a video to kind of show off a taste of what this game is and what it has to offer. It's really tough, but it's so addictive. It's such a kick in the balls when you die, but you know, I always kept coming back because I knew what not to do the next time around. Don't Starve is available on all sorts of platforms, everything from Steam on Windows, Mac, and Linux, to PS3 and PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, and iOS and Android. So yeah, I highly recommend checking out Don't Starve, but just make sure you're not planning on doing anything else that day because you'll end up playing this for hours.