I've put a significant amount of time into Don't Starve on PC over the past five years, so I can speak for the game, but not for its Switch port, at least not firsthand. It's an outstanding, absurdly content-packed game in ways that many players never see because they don't survive long enough to witness it. It's secretly a base-building and resource/economy management game wrapped inside a permadeath survival action game, and there is so much going on in it that you could be 40 to 50 hours deep in a single file and still see something (or learn how to use something) for the very first time. It also has a sizeable roster of playable characters with unique mechanics that takes no time at all to unlock. People always ask about city-builders, base defence games, or RTS on Switch, and I always like to pull this out as a surprise recommendation because it's really not obvious, until you dig in deep, that this is what Don't Starve offers in spades.
The Switch version contains all of the following:
-
Don't Starve (vanilla) — The base game, with two seasons that rotate back and forth. Excellent and addictive in its own right, but once you learn it, it's not hard to survive against all threats, sit on a massive resource surplus, and want to move on to something harder. Worth playing first to learn the basics and unlock/try the alternate characters.
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Reign of Giants — A significant expansion on the base game. Four seasons, tons of new recipes/enemies/events, and a big spike in difficulty due to a few rebalanced mechanics like food spoilage. Content-wise it's immense, and you won't want to go back to vanilla afterwards, but not everyone will like its heavier focus on combat over passive base-building (it's balanced around preparing for end-of-season bosses that try their hardest to wreck your stuff).
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Shipwrecked — A total conversion of the main game with its own rule set, enemies, seasons, and crafting/tech. Generally considered the hardest of the three; it controls like the others but it's otherwise a game you'll learn from scratch. It's a much more migratory adventure where you sail around small islands and have far less room to build everything in one place.
The Switch version does
not include the following:
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Mods. On PC there are a lot of minor QoL/UI enhancements that experienced players crave after a while and take for granted, most of them involving maps and numerical displays. The unmodded game hides a bit too much information sometimes.
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Hamlet (new expansion currently in a very brief Early Access beta before it releases in December, introducing some RPG town mechanics and other things). It's likely to come to Switch in some form, either as a paid expansion or a stand-alone product, but there has been no announcement as yet.
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Don't Starve Together (separate, stand-alone multiplayer product, most similar to RoG but with its own rule set). Easier than the original game because of how it handles death and respawns, but not really as good as the concept sounded, at least back when I tried it.
However, the Switch version has one thing that I really would have loved on PC, a killer feature so important that I would probably go with the Switch if I were a new player:
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Suspend/resume. Since the game is built around permadeath, there is no reloadable manual save and an auto-save that is only triggered every in-game day. On PC that means this creates an incredibly addictive one-more-turn effect as you cascade from day to day, but it also makes the game more of a marathon experience than something you can take in small doses. On the Switch you can take a break when it actually feels natural to do so.
The Switch version had a few notable bugs at launch, including some that crashed the game, but I believe the major ones have all been patched.
The only word of caution I would add is that Don't Starve might not be the best choice for players who truly commit to figuring out everything by themselves by trial-and-error and never looking anything up in the wiki. That's fine for your first few runs and the early game, but the flip side of seeing new content for the first time after dozens of hours into a file is that sometimes, these are novelties that will kill you outright—sometimes quickly, other times slowly and subtly. It's honestly a bit
too much of a "look it up in the wiki" game once you consistently reach a certain stage of advancement, especially in Reign of Giants. You have to plan way ahead to get far in this game, and you can't respond to everything on impulse, so players who prefer to learn from mistakes and don't like looking things up (and I don't, but even I eventually caved) can expect to lose gigantic volumes of progress.
If you would rather have a game that's much more focused on pure survival (hunger, thirst, campfires, and so on) instead of building huge farms and supply lines and networks of fortresses as you run around the map, look into
The Flame in the Flood, a much leaner and focused game that also appears on sale often at 50% off. (I wrote about it in
a previous eShop thread.) Many people who adore Don't Starve don't like TFitF very much because it's so much smaller, but beyond the superficial resemblance to Don't Starve's early game, the two are completely different experiences. Don't Starve is much more like the farms-and-caves element of Stardew Valley (not the social element, not at all), but with permadeath. Lots and lots of death.
