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”.

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It’s no longer the most urgent gold rush in PC games, but survival games continue to be regularly released, and older games continue to be regularly updated. It’s only natural then that we’ve taken some time out from foraging for edible berries to update our list of the best survival games for 2020.

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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.

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‘Building’ is a pretty broad theme. There are a lot of games where you build things, after all, and they can be very different. Helpfully, then, I’ve split this list of the 20 best building games on PC into four sections, each covering a sub-category of this big, messy genre.

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Ever since Minecraft got us hooked on surviving its deadly nights and sinister, snickering foes over a decade ago, there have been wave upon wave of new survival games to scratch our deepest masochistic itches. Attempting to tackle them all at once, however, would probably lead to an early grave, so we’ve put together this list of the very best survival games on PC to help satisfy those cravings for Darwinian supremacy. Whether you love punching trees, surviving against the elements or simply stuffing your belly with as much grub as you can manage, there’s a survival game with your name on it.

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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 decade, and the best-selling video game of all time? There are many things that are very special about Minecraft, and remain more or less unmatched even ten years later; but we’ve done our very best to condense all that specialness down into a simple list of six criteria, and from there, we’ve compiled our list of the 16 best games like Minecraft out there right now.

Some of these games you might look at and think, “But Ollie, my dear fellow! You must be crazy! This game looks nothing like Minecraft!>” Bear with me, and I’ll explain exactly why each game on this list has earned its place there. Each of these games are well worth a try if you enjoy Minecraft for whatever reason. And who knows? You might find your new favourite game within this very list…

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After years of surviving in the wilds and on islands, Don’t Starve has returned to civilisation and… oh god, no one told me living in a city would be a struggle too. Klei Entertainment last night launched Hamlet, the third expansion for their survive ’em up, after six months in early access. It sees our motley cr e of survivors stumbling into a city of posh pigpeople in the heart of a tropical jungle, who live in actual proper houses and get their food from actual shops with actual fridges. Civilisation! Why is it, then, that we’re drawn to explore and plunder the ancient ruins beyond the metrotterlis?

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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.

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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.

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We ve been battered by wave after wave of survival romps since Minecraft popularised the genre, with its deadly nights and groaning zombies, almost a decade ago. In its wake, we’ve been introduced to a cavalcade of punishing, persistent environments intent on putting us in an early grave.

The masochistic impulse to put ourselves through the wringer for entertainment has spread to RPGs, management games, cosmic sandboxes and more than a few horror games, so even if you don t fancy punching rocks and trees while wandering around in the wilderness, you might still find a survival game to tickle your fancy. (more…)